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I feel like a
broken record with this newsletter, but the real-time changes at the margins
of the US democracy are an incredible thing to see.
There is
obviously the ongoing redistricting war — in which Republicans appear to
be gaining the upper hand,
at least for this year.
The breaking
news Monday is that the US Supreme Court's conservative ruling bloc will
allow Alabama to eliminate a congressional district held by a Black Democrat.
CNN's John Fritze is tracking the development.
Separately on
Monday, Virginia Democrats appealed
to the Supreme Court to overturn the state Supreme Court's rejection of
voter-approved maps that could have greatly reduced the number of Republican
members of Congress in the state.
It'll be a case
that hits home for some of the justices. Three members of the conservative
bloc — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett — live in
Virginia.
Meanwhile,
Republican-led states in the South are still moving to gerrymander out of
existence districts held by Democrats under maps that were previously drawn
to protect Black representation.
The coming
midterm elections much more racially charged as mostly White Republicans,
suddenly with new power from the Supreme Court, do everything they can to erase
districts held by Black Democrats in the South.
But there are
other tweaks in the works.
CNN's Gabe Cohen
and Jeremy Herb explore how an executive order Trump signed in March would
deputize the US Postal Service to police mail-in ballots. Trump has never
trusted them even though he frequently votes by mail.
Cohen and Herb
write:
After years of
baselessly casting vote by mail as a fraud magnet, Trump in March issued an executive order that
would push USPS far beyond delivering ballots — and into the business of
deciding who gets one.
That order has
raised alarms inside the Postal Service over whether it can or should take on
such a complicated and controversial role, sources told CNN, especially when
it may need help from Trump and Republicans to steady its finances.
Under the order,
the Postal Service would work with states to determine who can vote by mail
and enforce that eligibility, flagging or rejecting ballots tied to people not
on those lists. Voting-rights groups and some Democratic-led states say
that’s an unconstitutional power grab: The Constitution gives states — not
the president or USPS — control over election administration.
Their full report is
for subscribers.
Th executive
order is also the subject of lawsuits, so it's not clear what will happen by
Election Day. But recall the Supreme Court's conservatives already expressed
skepticism of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day in oral
arguments for a separate case earlier this year.
Still, no amount
of tinkering may protect the slim Republican majority in the House — or even
the Senate — from a potential Democratic wave.
If Democrats
gain either chamber of Congress in November's election, it would continue an
unprecedented streak of power changing hands with each US election in recent
decades. I've looked at this in the past — CNN's Annette Choi did the visuals
for our December story "Every election is a
change election now."
CNN's Ronald
Brownstein on Sunday looked at why exactly that's the case. He found multiple
interconnected reasons:
- Partisanship
has calcified and feels immovable, so a small set of voters are
determining who wins each election.
- In
an era of more ideological politics, much of the country can't imagine
being happy if their political opponents are in charge.
- No
party has been able to win a significant governing majority in recent
decades, which makes it harder to achieve much with legislation.
- Both
parties, rather than work together, are using moves like budget reconciliation
to keep the out-of-power party from getting a say. (Tax cuts, Obamacare
and the supercharging of ICE were all enacted in this one-party way.)
- Presidents
are seizing more and more power from Congress — and overreaching when
they do.
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