Gerrymandering changes blocked by US Supreme Court

Just recently, the ACLU of Ohio won a big victory when a federal Appeals Court ruled that Ohio’s congressional districts were blatantly gerrymandered and should be redrawn by June this year for the 2020 elections. Courts in Michigan had ordered similar redrawing. Both rulings were appealed by Republicans and on Friday, there was a setback when the US Supreme Court blocked both those orders without any reasoning.

The decisions in Michigan and Ohio that were put on hold by the justices were the latest rulings by federal courts determining that electoral maps designed by a state’s majority party unconstitutionally undermined the rights of voters who tend to support the other party.

But the action by the justices was not unexpected as they weigh two other gerrymandering cases – one from North Carolina and the other from Maryland – that could decide definitively whether federal judges have the power to intervene to curb partisan gerrymandering. The rulings in those cases, due by the end of June, are likely to dictate whether the legal challenges against the Ohio and Michigan electoral maps can move forward.

So the fate of these two cases now rests on the outcome of the other two cases, unless the decision is made to consolidate all four cases.

The law must be free for everyone

Nations are, or at least should be, governed by laws and people are expected to follow those laws. That assumes that people have free access to the laws so that they know what is expected of them. But there arose a weird situation in the US where some laws were copyrighted and others who had to follow the laws were expected to pay to find out what the laws were that they were bound by.

How could this happen? It originated in Georgia, a state notorious for its utterly reactionary attitudes. What they did was declare that the annotations to its laws could be copyrighted because they were created by a private party. Cory Doctorow explains what this is all about.
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Satanic Temple recognized by the IRS as a church

In a significant development, the Satanic Temple has been recognized by the IRS as a church. The decision has sparked a debate as to what constitutes a church. For too long, religions have claimed a privileged place in society, without having to really justify why they should be given preferential treatment. The Satanic Temple has been steadily contesting that claim by logical extension, that there is no way to draw a clear line that separates those institutions that are traditionally recognized as religions from other groups that share broadly similar characteristics.
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A new documentary about Satanists and the Satanic Temple

I have written many times before about the Satanic Temple and their efforts to keep the public square secular and open to all beliefs and not have it become the domain of those who favor one religion over other religions or religion in general over non-religion. Their demand that their statue of Baphomet be allowed in any public space that allows religious symbols has proven to be a potent political and legal argument against religious exclusivity but their broader goals are to promote social justice and equality.
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Third federal judge strikes down anti-BDS laws

There have been moves to pass laws in various states that seek to punish people who support the BDS movement by denying them access to government contracts. Glenn Greenwald provides a map that shows the extent of those efforts.

Greenwald writes that a federal judge in Texas has become the third, after judges in Kansas and Arizona, to rule that such state laws punishing people for advocating boycotts of Israel are unconstitutional. The case was brought by five people who were denied contracts with schools and universities in Texas under the law H. B. 89 because they refused to sign contracts that contained anti-BDS clauses.
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End of the road for civil asset forfeiture?

I have written repeatedly about the abuse of the so-called ‘civil asset forfeiture’ provisions in the law that many government authorities use to seize the assets of people simply because of the suspicion that they may have been involved in a crime. The government holds on to these assets even if the person is not even charged with the crime. It should not be surprising that it is mostly low-income people who are at the receiving end. The people whose assets are seized have to sue the government to get them back, a complicated and expensive process, and many of the affected people simply do not have the resources to do so, so they end up losing their homes and their cars, which are often the only assets they have.
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The petty cruelty of the US prison system

I came across this article about Selene Saavedra Roman, a young woman who worked as a flight attendant for the American airline Mesa, who was detained for six weeks upon the return of her flight from Mexico because she is the child of undocumented immigrants. She is one of the many ‘Dreamers’, recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, that the Trump administration is cracking down on.
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What were the crimes committed in the Varsity Blues case?

I became curious about what exactly were the crimes committed by the people who had got their children into the colleges of their choice. I looked up the actual indictment and the people are charged with racketeering conspiracy under Title 18, section 1962(d) of the US penal code. Title 18 is the main criminal code of the federal government in the US and covers all manner of crimes.
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Well, duh! Of course flipping the bird is free speech

A federal appeals court has upheld the complaint of Debra Cruise-Gulyas, who sued a police officer Matthew Minard who had issued her a citation after she gave him the middle finger.

In a ruling filed this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit said: “Any reasonable officer would know that a citizen who raises her middle finger engages in speech protected by the First Amendment.”
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A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit said her gesture did not violate any identified law. Minard, it said, “clearly lacked authority to stop Cruise-Gulyas a second time.”

“Minard should have known better,” the opinion says.

It pointed to a 2013 ruling by another appeals court that said the “ancient gesture of insult” does not give police “a reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation or impending criminal activity.”

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