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Chief justice: Pay no attention to the rigged election behind the curtain

Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press Columnist         October 8, 2017

SCOTUS is lined up to hear cases on topics like labor relations, gerrymandering and voters’ rights. Video available by Newsy Newslook

(Photo: Olivier Douliery, Getty Images)

For 12 years, Chief Justice John Roberts has worked overtime peddling the dubious conceit that he and his life-tenured colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court are above politics and determined to remain so.

Yet Roberts himself is a consummate politician — a strategist who worries about appearances and harbors a ward heeler’s contempt for the intelligence of the average voter. And his cynicism was on full display last week when justices took up the politically fraught problem of gerrymandering.

Plaintiffs in a case known as Gill v. Whitford want the Supreme Court to rule that Wisconsin legislators violated the U.S. Constitution when they drew district boundaries that systematically diluted the electoral clout of their state’s Democratic voters.

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A lower court ordered Wisconsin to draw a fairer map after concluding that evidence and voting data submitted by the plaintiffs proved Republicans had configured districts  designed to preserve their party’s legislative majority even when Democrats win a majority of the popular vote.

Roberts, who knows a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs will jeopardize Republican gerrymanders in more than a dozen other states, wants his colleagues to stay out of a partisan process even simpatico conservatives like Justice Samuel Alito concede is “distasteful.” The chief justice says the public will lose respect for the courts if he and his colleagues stick their noses into all that distastefulness.

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says voters would think the high court was throwing elections for Democrats if tried to put a stop to gerrymandering. (Photo: Mike Thompson/Detroit Free Press)

But what if a majority party uses its mapmaking prowess to effectively disenfranchise the opposing party’s voters? And what if those aggrieved voters can use the same technological advances their opponents exploited to prove an election was rigged, and even to quantify the advantage its rivals gained by manipulating a state’s political boundaries?

That’s exactly what has happened in the Wisconsin case, as one of the country’s premier scientists explained in a remarkable friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Mapping chromosomes and rigged elections

It’s rare for disinterested third parties to play a decisive role in landmark Supreme Court cases. But the arguments filed by Eric Lander, a geneticist and mathematician who oversees the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, may prove an exception.

Lander was one of the principal leaders of the decade-long effort to map the human genome, and he has advised the White House and the Pentagon on innovative uses of technology for national defense. In a brief that several justices cited during Tuesday’s oral arguments, Lander says the sort of data-crunching the federal government uses to assess whether a nuclear weapon will detonate properly or whether Miami is safely outside the path of a hurricane can be used to prove when political boundaries have been manipulated to guarantee one party the largest possible electoral advantage.

Lander’s argument is a crucial one, because lawsuits challenging the fairness of gerrymandered political districts have foundered on the high court’s doubts that challengers could propose an objective standard for evaluating partisan bias.

Lander says technological advances that allow mapmakers to project likely electoral outcomes in thousands of different scenarios mean that a party that controls the redistricting process can pick the map that yields the most extreme partisan advantage. But he adds that the same analytical methods allow courts to discover when district lines have been manipulated to produce the maximum distortion of the electorate’s will, whether by amplifying the impact of one party’s voters or minimizing its opponents’ ability to muster an electoral majority in most districts.

By comparing the district lines a state has adopted with all the other possible configurations that comply with state and federal law, courts can determine not only whether a given map handicaps one party’s voters, but also how much. Using these reliable analytical tools, Lander says, deciding which of several possible maps yields electoral outcomes most consistent with the majority’s druthers becomes “a mathematical question to which there is a right answer” — exactly the sort of objective test judges worried about the corrosive effects of gerrymandering have been seeking.

Gobbledygook?

Chief Justice Roberts, of course, doesn’t see it that way. During oral arguments last week, he dismissed the evidence Lander and other mathematical analysts have submitted as proof Wisconsin’s legislative elections are rigged as “sociological gobbledygook.”

In another exchange with the plaintiffs’ attorneys, the chief justice appeared to concede that the evidence he disparaged might be persuasive after all, once you took the time to digest it, but hinted that few voters had the patience or smarts to do so.

“The intelligent man on the street is going to say that’s a bunch of baloney,” Roberts insisted. If justices blow the whistle on Republican cheating, he believes, the public will inevitably conclude that they’re simply shilling for Democrats — “And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and the integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country.”

Roberts’ argument amounts to a rejection of rational inquiry itself: If the evidence that Wisconsin has violated its citizens’ constitutional rights is too sophisticated for laymen to grasp at first glance, he says, the court would be better off to ignore it.

This is the same cynically anti-intellectual rationale cheerleaders for the fossil fuel industry have marshaled to discredit the evidence of climate change. Until “the intelligent man on the street” has a keener understanding of the role greenhouse gases play in global warming, why should elected officials kowtow to experts who do?

Of course, the same logic could be marshaled to discount the warnings of hurricane forecasters or military strategists trying to anticipate the likely consequences of a military confrontation in the Middle East or on the Korean peninsula. If we don’t understand their calculations, why should we pay any attention to them?

The answer, of course, is that democratic government, like many other aspects of daily life, requires a reasonable deference to those with superior expertise: the surgeon who does hundreds of bypass operations a year, the repair technician who diagnoses malfunctioning furnaces for a living, or the pilot with 10,000 hours of in-flight service under her belt.

Roberts is right to be worried about the credibility of the judiciary, and its capacity to command the confidence of citizens across the political spectrum. But he should be at least as concerned about the credibility of representative democracy itself.

As Paul Smith, who represents the plaintiffs challenging Wisconsin’s legislative map argues, the stakes in Gill v. Whitford are larger than the public’s perception of Justice Roberts and his colleagues.

“If you let this go, if you say … we’re not going to have a judicial remedy for this problem, in 2020 you’re going to have a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen,” Smith warned Roberts near the end of Tuesday’s oral arguments. “Voters everywhere are going to be like voters in Wisconsin, and (say): No, it really doesn’t matter whether I vote.”

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com

Los Angeles Times  Op ED

Tom Steyer: I’m a billionaire. Please raise my taxes

Tom Steyer, the author of this article, speaks at the California Democratic Convention, in Los Angeles on March 8, 2014. (Los Angeles Times)

Tom Steyer    October 5, 2017

As a billionaire, I would profit substantially from the tax cuts proposed last week by President Trump and the Republican Party. But I am strongly opposed to even one more penny in cuts for rich people and corporations.

My reason is simple: Tax cuts for the rich defund the critical public programs on which American families depend.

Three decades of data prove that tax cuts for the wealthy do not “trickle down” to working people or grow the overall economy. Since the Reagan era, Republicans have prescribed cuts for rich people and corporations as a cure-all. But every time they put their theory into practice, the rich just get richer and everyone else gets left behind. When such cuts drain the government of the revenue it needs to pay for essential services like public education, Medicare and Social Security, Republicans then seize the opportunity to shrink those programs.

Consider Kansas, where Republicans recently had the chance to pursue their tax-cut fantasy with an extreme anti-tax experiment. In 2012, they slashed taxes and promised fantastic growth. Instead, their scheme blew a hole in the state budget. The resulting shortfall in revenue forced severe cuts to public education and other essential programs, hurt working families and drove businesses out of the state.

Let’s raise taxes on the rich and use the money to invest directly in the American people.

Similar experiments at the national level have left the U.S. teetering on the edge of dangerous economic inequality. Today, the top 1% of the population takes more than 20% of the income generated here in a year. That’s more than double the share that rich people took in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the earnings of America’s working families have stagnated.

This degree of inequality is a major crisis, yet Republicans are proposing to exacerbate it by stripping trillions more in government revenue. Indeed, the GOP plan would put the country on a path to permanent economic inequality — and maybe that’s the point.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap. A gang of powerful interests, led by the Koch brothers, launched a campaign to build support for the tax overhaul before it even existed. The coalition of wealthy conservatives spent tens of millions to mislead Americans about tax cuts. They had to: As the president of the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, Tim Phillips, recently said of the “average Americans” whose support would be needed: “If they think it’s just a group of wealthy corporations or powerful special interests battling it out to see who gets the best carve-outs, then it will fail.” If the coalition succeeded in obscuring the truth, in other words, its investments would pay off.

This campaign illustrates why economic inequality poses a grave threat to democracy. In our political system, money is power. The more we allow Republicans to concentrate the lion’s share of wealth in the hands of a few, the more power these wealthy few will have. And they will use this power to continue rewriting the rules of both our economy and our political system in their favor.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to “fix the rigged system.” By “fix,” he apparently meant rigging it to permanently benefit billionaires like himself.

Unrigging the system will require us to acknowledge that the American middle class enjoyed its strongest period of growth from 1950 to 1970 — a time when the effective tax rates for the wealthy were above 40% and the U.S. took unrivaled leadership in the global economy. It will require that we think of investment not as something done solely by the private sector, but as a category that encompasses public spending.

Bullish investment in the American people has arguably been the most important factor in our national success. But out of greed and selfishness, Republicans are intent on fighting such investment at every turn. After accumulating nearly all of the economy’s gains over the last 10 years, billionaires like Trump, and me, can more than afford to pay our fair share.

Let’s raise taxes on the rich and use the money to invest directly in the American people — by improving infrastructure, promoting clean energy, strengthening public education and expanding healthcare. Let’s boost wages to stimulate economic growth and job creation. It’s the only way we will create broad prosperity, rebuild the middle class and give working families a fair shake.

At a time like this, there’s only one reasonable position to take: I’m a billionaire. Please raise my taxes.

Tom Steyer is president of the progressive advocacy organization NextGen America.