This Recent Supreme Court's ruling is correct.
On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court finally tossed out the antiquated formula that brought a number of states and counties, including four here in California, under the federal Voting Rights Act. The outcry from the usual suspects has been ferocious, that the Court decimated minority voting rights by finding that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is so outdated as to be unconstitutional. Count on hysterical editorials from our state’s leading liberal newspapers as well as the gaggle of law school professors who follow this stuff.
But in fact the coverage formula should never have been renewed by the Congress in 2006, and in 2009 the Supreme Court warned them that it was probably unconstitutional. Now it is.
The Voting Rights Act has had huge bipartisan support because minority Democrats love it as it forces creation of “majority minority” legislative and congressional districts, and Republicans love it for exactly the same reason, it ghettoizes minority votes into a handful of heavily Democratic districts, thereby wasting millions of Democratic votes. Democrats were chagrined to see in 2012 that they won a plurality of votes for Congress but Republicans won control of the House of Representatives. How did that happen? Republican gerrymandering in several states helped but the biggest factor was concentration of minority Democrats into Voting Rights Act districts. For all the Democratic wailing about the obstructionist GOP House, that’s the reason why.
In California, the Voting Rights Act had a somewhat different impact; it helped to destroy effective representation in a number of districts, primarily in the Central Valley. The now unconstitutional coverage formula brought the counties of Kings, Merced, Monterey and Yuba under the Act. These counties had nothing to do with minority voting rights, but all four had large military bases during the Vietnam War and the formula caused them to be covered. It was an absurdity when it occurred and was compounded over the decades until finally the Supreme County threw out the formula yesterday.
In 2011, the Citizens Redistricting Commission interpreted the Voting Rights Act that it had to draw districts in these counties with exactly the same minority percentages as the old gerrymandered 2001 plan it was replacing, and that in itself was an absurdity. The old 16th Senate district, which is undergoing a special election right now, consists of part of the city of Fresno and part of the city of Bakersfield, connected through long hooks and fingers to unite minority population in both cities. But the two cities are miles apart, have different media markets and little in common.
However, the Commission interpreted the Voting Rights Act to require hacking up Fresno and Bakersfield on racial lines such that neither city is wholly contained in single Assembly, Senate or Congressional district. This was forced on the Commission, so it claimed, by the fact that Kings County, a VRA covered county, was situated between the two cities.
Link: http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2013/0 ... ights-act/ I also think that part of the reason why the Democrats received the majority of votes this last General election is because of several Congressional districts in California that had Democrat vs. Democrat in them as a result of
Proposition 14 there.
Proposition 14 was passed in California in 2010, and it requires that candidates run in a single primary open to all registered voters, with the top two vote-getters running against each other in the General election.
"And I've said it before, you want to know what Joseph Smith looked like in Nauvoo, just look at Trump." - Fence Sitter