Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
I'll admit to being imprecise, but it was a transfer of the pre-existing colonial legal frameworks. 17th-century English common law was the bedrock for the colonies. The legal system of Britain in the 1780s was not grafted onto the new republican form; they were selective.
Indeed, they were selective but the assumption is inheritance. The English Bill of Rights enumerates a "Right to bear Arms" and clearly distinguishes between legitimate restriction under law of that right and illegitimate infringement by a tyrant. The Bill also distinguishes between a military regulated by Parliament and an illegitimate militia raised without Parliamentary consent - a key point here is that the raising of a militia implies the paying of a militia - which requires a Money Bill. Despite this, since 2008 your Supreme Court has taken the view that an "individual right" to bear arms (which is enumerated in the English Bill of Rights) implies that the legislature cannot legitimately restrict that right.

This seems to me unacceptably interventionist.

Federal courts up to now, as Kagan points out, have repeatedly inserted themselves into the redistricting process to evaluate gerrymanders. You would consider this illegitimate? The judges did not apply their own standards of fairness, but the standards of the states in question. Or, besides the federal c ourts, do you believe that state-level courts are incompetent to review redistricting according to constitutional principles? This is not hypothetical, it too has been done numerous times.

If state courts are competent to do this, so are federal ones. A standard is discernible, indeed has been deployed, the majority just lacks an interest in discerning or employing it.

Congress will not pass a bill to resolve the problem because it is not in the interest of the beneficiaries to do so. As Kagan says:
Yes, I know, I read both decisions - but from what I read the Court has, over several decades, refused to adjudicate on cases of partisan gerrymandering. As Roberts points out, even compact, contiguous districts of equal size will be likely to favour one party over another because certain regions tend to favour certain parties. This is a recognised quality in the UK where the urban areas in the North of England routinely vote Labour so that Conservative votes in those areas are wasted. Redrawing of Constinuancies there could be used to "uncrack" some of the Conservative vote and bring the partisan representation of the region more in line with the actual voter makeup.

We don't consider that legitimate, though.

As to Congress not passing a Bill to make voting districts fairer, other Western Democracies routinely do this and have done for a couple of Centuries - starting with the Great Reform Act in the UK in 1832.

This was a central component of Roberts' specious reasoning and I'm sad to see you take it up. The majority offers no serious constitutional argument against court intervention, only handwringing about the theoretical capacity of Congress to act and the non-existent burden of determining a standard. It does not explain why other courts' standards are not discernible or manageable. They agree that constitutional harms exist in gerrymandering. The decision is plainly partisanship.
In my view the dissenting opinion amounts to handwringing about how Congress is hopelessly corrupt. The majority decision is in line with the previous precedent on partisan gerrymandering, both sides seem to agree to that.

Ultimately, to affect change the Supreme Court would need to establish minimum standards for the drawing of districts which would include compactness, respect for existing political and physical boundaries, contiguous territory and an effort to combine areas of similar geography - i.e. to avoid mixing rural and urban areas so that constituents have similar needs and expectations of their representatives.

Constitutionally this looks like judicial over-reach. The core problem here is political, the US Constitution assumes a basic level of human decency clearly lacking in many modern American politicians and because of this the Constitution doesn't provide for a mechanism of redress outside the legislature. In this case Federal and State Legislatures should couterbalance each other, but they're in cahoots.

As ACIN said.