Ground War: Courts, Commissions, and the Fight over Partisan Gerrymanders
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English | March 1st, 2022 | ISBN: 0197626637, 0197626629 | 280 pages | True EPUB | 5.71 MB
Partisan gerrymandering, the drawing of legislative district lines to deliberately favor one political party, has been present and controversial in American politics since before the ratification of our Constitution. Yet in the past couple of decades, parties in power at the state level have developed greater expertise than ever before at redistricting to their own advantage. Since 2010, a series of legislative, electoral, and judicial events have given this issue a prominence it has never before seen, especially as it applies to the United States Congress.
In Ground War, Nicholas Goedert tackles the controversies, litigation, and effects surrounding partisan gerrymandering of Congress. He contends that the appropriate actors to address the fairness of a map are nonpartisan commissions within each state, not the US courts. Goedert illustrates how existing measures and legal standards are too narrow--while they are well-adapted to evaluating maps in swing states in close elections, they fail to properly address states or national electoral environments that favor one party. In turn, Goedert nstrates that the bias and responsiveness of partisan maps is highly sensitive to both the make-up of a state's electorate and the ephemeral election conditions under which individual elections take place. But this does not mean that partisan gerrymandering must be excused as a dilemma without a reasonable remedy.
