#reapportionment

The Wisconsin judge who Elon Musk spent $30 million unsuccessfully trying to defeat last spring has taken her place on the state Supreme Court.

Don't say that I never post good news! 😊

Justice Susan Crawford joined the Wisconsin Supreme Court late Friday afternoon, months after she won election to the seat in what amounted to the most expensive judicial race in American history. In remarks at an investiture ceremony at the Wisconsin State Capitol, Crawford pledged to uphold the state and federal constitutions and to rule with “dedication, insight and humanity.” 

The good part...

Crawford, formerly a Dane County judge, was elected to her first 10-year term on the bench in April. Her election likely cemented liberals’ majority on the high court for years to come, as the next scheduled elections involve seats now held by conservative justices. Crawford’s victory came after a campaign cycle that cost at least $115 million and attracted national attention and donations. At stake was the ideological balance of the court. Liberals supported Crawford to maintain their majority, won in 2023 during the then-record breaking election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz.  Crawford’s 10-point victory over Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who was backed by conservatives, means liberals will likely hold that majority through at least 2028, with cases over issues like labor law and congressional redistricting under scrutiny. 

This means that gerrymandering by the current GOP legislature is dead.

In general, we all need to pay more attention to state government and state elections. The people you elect to statewide office and to the legislature have a direct influence on how Congressional districts are drawn in the state. That's just one of many reasons never to miss a state election.

Jen Rice at Democracy Docket:

In a case that could have profound nationwide consequences for elections, the state of Missouri has sued the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Commerce to block the federal government from including undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders in the country’s once-a-decade census count.  If the lawsuit is successful, states with substantial immigrant populations could face a steep decrease in their political representation in the House of Representatives and the electoral college, which could possibly even impact the outcome of presidential elections. 

The office of Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) filed the lawsuit Friday, calling it a “first in the nation” suit aimed at stopping the census from “unconstitutionally allowing illegal aliens to commandeer the path to The White House and compromise our elections.” Two Florida young Republican groups filed a similar lawsuit* in September, arguing the inclusion of undocumented immigrants dilutes the voting power of lawful citizens and demanding changes to the 2030 census count.  Hanaway went even further. Missouri is asking a federal court to order the government to redo the 2020 census report and the 2021 apportionment to remove all undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders from the count and recalculate how many seats in Congress each state is given based on its population. It is also seeking an injunction blocking the Census Bureau from including those groups in the 2030 census count. “Foreign trespassers should not control the direction of this nation,” Hanaway said in a social media post announcing the lawsuit. 

[...] In the new report, Kincaid concluded Missouri would have an additional seat in Congress if the population count included only U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. Missouri went even further in its complaint declaring that the change would give the state an additional electoral vote in presidential elections. Based on Kincaid’s analysis, Missouri’s complaint concluded that limiting the apportionment population to just citizens and lawful permanent residents could ultimately result in the transfer of 11 congressional seats – with states like California, New York, Illinois and Texas losing seats to states including Missouri, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. 

From the April 2, 2025 article:

Amid the chaotic first months of the second Trump Administration, too little attention has been paid to recent debates over seemingly obscure 2030 census-related legislation that aims to subvert how the U.S. House of Representatives (and thereby the Electoral College) is reapportioned.

Last term, the Republican House majority adopted the so-called “Equal Representation” bill of 2024 with little fanfare. It aimed to require the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2030 census. The measure would have also commanded the U.S. Census Bureau and the Commerce Department to employ that data to exclude noncitizens from the population when reallocating states’ seats to the House of Representatives. Though the 2024 bill died in the last Congress, recent hearings indicate that GOP leaders could introduce similar legislation in this Congress.

...

From the December 21, 2023 article:

The Supreme Court will rule that congressional districts no longer have to contain roughly equal populations. State legislatures are free to make them as big or as small as they want, varying by hundreds of thousands of people, which will allow Republicans to create a ton of safe seats with really small rural populations. By packing Democrats into high population districts, they can dilute their voting power.

It’s like how districts used to have to be compact, but the Supreme Court said that gerrymandering is legal now, so they can be as crooked as the legislators want. I assure you this will be the Republican’s next big power grab; they’ll have the Supreme Court create a minimum and maximum size for districts, then create a ton of minimums to give themselves an disproportionate advantage.

btw I agree with this take, that Arizona did not have a pickup was absurd. That Texas only got two and Florida one is also highly conspicuous. Rhode Island was never expected to keep both of their seats in reapportionment.

Reapportionment: Here we go again

(By Michael Schumacher) By JOHN KANELIS / [email protected] The late Teel Bivins was a Republican state senator from Amarillo, Texas, who served in the Legislature from 1989 until 2004, when he got a job as U.S. ambassador to Sweden. Bivins told me once that he hated the task of redrawing congressional and legislative district lines. He then offered a quip that I never thought to ask…

Reapportionment: Here we go again

(By Michael Schumacher) By JOHN KANELIS / [email protected] The late Teel Bivins was a Republican state senator from Amarillo, Texas, who served in the Legislature from 1989 until 2004, when he got a job as U.S. ambassador to Sweden. Bivins told me once that he hated the task of redrawing congressional and legislative district lines. He then offered a quip that I never thought to ask…