In his New York Times biography, it states that “Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine.” Yup, you’re right: that’s pretty much the definition of an American political liberal. Mr Bouie on Friday set out to claim that the Guarantee Clause to the Constitution means that Democrats can fight gerrymandering by Republicans:

Madison Saw Something in the Constitution We Should Open Our Eyes To

by Jamelle Bouie | Friday, November 12, 2021

Not content to simply count on the traditional midterm swing against the president’s party, Republicans are set to gerrymander their way to a House majority next year.

Last week, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled statehouse passed a new map that would, in an evenly divided electorate, give it 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats. To overcome the gerrymander and win a bare majority of seats, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, Democrats would have to win an unattainably large supermajority of votes.

A proposed Republican gerrymander in Ohio would leave Democrats with two seats out of 15 — or around 13 percent of the total — in a state that went 53-45 for Trump in 2020.

It is true that Democrats have pursued their own aggressive gerrymanders in Maryland and Illinois, but it is also true that the Democratic Party is committed, through its voting rights bills, to ending partisan gerrymandering altogether.

Of course, Maryland, in which the Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the state legislature, wants to gerrymander the state’s lone Republican congressman out of office.

The Democrats in Congress are concerned because there are simply more “red” states than blue ones; Joe Biden is President only because the blue states are mostly larger in population than the red ones. The Democrats were perfectly fine with gerrymandering decades ago, when the South was solidly Democratic, and most elections were determined not in November, but in the earlier Democratic primaries.

The larger context of the Republican Party’s attempt to gerrymander itself into a House majority is its successful effort to gerrymander itself into long-term control of state legislatures across the country. In Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other states, Republicans have built legislative majorities sturdy enough to withstand all but the most crushing “blue wave.”

And in those states, Republicans seized control of state legislatures after Republican candidates won under district maps passed by Democrats. In Kentucky, the GOP finally won control of the state House of Representatives in the 2014 elections, in districts drawn by a previously Democrat-controlled state House, and signed into law by Governor Steve Beshear, a Democrat. In districts drawn by Democrats, Kentucky Republicans won 75 out of 100 state House districts in the 2020 elections.

In the 2004 elections, President George W Bush got zero votes in five Philadelphia precincts; John Kerry won twenty congressional districts by greater percentages than Mr Bush’s best district. In 2008, John McCain got zero votes in a whopping 57 city precincts, and four years later, Mitt Romney was blanked in 59 precincts. The Philadelphia Inquirer, of course, could find no evidence of fraud in any of this, but it points out a fact that everyone knows, but the Democrats just don’t want to talk about: Democrats, and Democrat votes, are very heavily concentrated in our major cities. How would you redistrict Philadelphia to not gerrymander the state of Pennsylvania? Remember: it’s the weight of Philadelphia that carries statewide elections for Democrats. President Trump would have easily carried the Keystone State in 2020, which he lost by 80,555 votes, were it not for Joe Biden’s 471,305 margin in Philly. Mr Trump just barely overcame Hillary Clinton’s 475,277 margin in the city to carry the state in 2016. Even President Obama’s 2012 309,840 vote margin in Pennsylvania would have been a loss without his 492,339 vote win in Philadelphia.

The problem for Democrats isn’t that Republican legislatures have gerrymandered the districts; the problem is that the people have gerrymandered themselves with their choices of where to live.

In Article IV, Section 4, the Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

Mr Bouie claims that the Guarantee Clause should mean something other than what it was understood to mean, a government not headed by a King or Prince. Rather, he wants it to mean, citing Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v Ferguson, that Congress should have the right of approval of each state government:

Still, a broad understanding of the Guarantee Clause might be a potent weapon for Congress if a Democratic majority ever worked up the will to go on the offensive against state legislatures that violated basic principles of political equality.

That cuts two ways; Congress is sometimes controlled by Republicans!

But, it seems to me that the wisest way to read, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” given that “Republican” is capitalized in the original document, is that the United States should guarantee to every state that it will be governed by Republicans! 🙂