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Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
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Sep 16, 2019 • 3 tweets • 1 min read
This is incredible:

1. North Carolina GOP Sen. Alexander walks into the redistricting room and discovers that his district has been made competitive.
2. He quietly slices up the district to cut out Democratic voters.
3. He gets caught.
4. He announces his retirement.
So many of these politicians simply cannot win elections without diluting votes for their opponents. The North Carolina litigation has provided a fascinating glimpse into the business of election-rigging.
Incidentally, North Carolina Republicans drew remedial maps that retain partisan bias and dilute black representation. Expect the court to reject them. election.princeton.edu/2019/09/15/the…

election.princeton.edu/2019/09/14/nor…

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More from @mjs_DC

Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
Feb 22
BREAKING: The Supreme Court will decide whether LGBTQ non-discrimination laws that "compel an artist to speak or stay silent" violate the First Amendment. supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor… Image
The Supreme Court ducked this question in Masterpiece Cakeshop, but will now address it with a 6–3 conservative supermajority.

It is very likely that the court will cut back LGBTQ non-discrimination laws' application to "artists," especially in the context of same-sex weddings.
Note, however, that this cases reaches far beyond LGBTQ non-discrimination laws, threatening ALL civil rights laws that, as SCOTUS put it, "compel an artist to speak or stay silent." It is a direct threat to government's ability to bar discrimination in public accommodations.
Read 5 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
Feb 18
🚨Rejecting decades of precedent, Trump Judge Lee Rudofsky holds Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has NO private right of action—meaning nobody except the U.S. Attorney General can bring a VRA lawsuit.

This would render the law largely unenforceable. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
A majority of the Supreme Court has previously found a private right of action in Section 2 of the VRA, but Rudofsky rejects that reasoning and instead agrees with Gorsuch and Thomas, who suggested that no right exists.

This could tee up a death blow to what remains of the VRA.
If SCOTUS agrees with Rudofsky, then ONLY the attorney general can bring lawsuits against racial gerrymanders and voter suppression under the Voting Rights Act.

The AG has limited resources, and for decades private plaintiffs have filed VRA lawsuits. Rudofsky wants to end that.
Read 6 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
Feb 16
Ben Shapiro continues to lie about Florida's new anti-gay bill. On his podcast today, he claimed that the bill prohibits exclusively (1) the teaching of homosexuality or gender identity to (2) children in grades K-3. Both are lies, as anyone who simply reads the bill can see.
The bill does not merely ban "teaching" about homosexuality or gender identity; it bars teachers from "encourag[ing] classroom discussion" of the topic—an intentionally vague and over-broad rule that could prohibit a teacher from simply mentioning their same-sex spouse.
Moreover, the bill does not apply solely to grades K-3, as Shapiro insists.

For grades K-3, it imposes an absolute ban.

For grades 4-12, it bars teachers from discussing LGBTQ people or issues in a manner that is "not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate."
Read 7 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
Feb 15
Great @Timodc piece on Florida Republicans' horrific effort to force gay teachers into the closet—and punish children of same-sex parents by gagging them from talking about their families at school. The GOP assault on gay equality never actually stopped. thebulwark.com/desantis-shapi…
If Florida's Don't Say Gay bill passes, a public school teacher could be sued for merely mentioning their same-sex spouse in the classroom. This legislation is a degrading attack on the dignity of gay Floridians and their kids. It's genuinely frightening.
slate.com/news-and-polit…
It has been fascinating to watch Republicans attempt to brand DeSantis as a lover of liberty when he continually supports sweeping censorship of free speech and association. Cruelly punishing gay teachers and children of same-sex couples does not sound like liberty to me.
Read 6 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
Feb 12
Republicans passed these laws for the sole purpose of suppressing votes, and they succeeded: Up to 40% of voters in some Texas counties have had their ballots rejected.

Yet the GOP and conservative media had a full-scale meltdown when anyone called them “voter suppression laws.”
Like literacy tests, today’s voter suppression laws are neutral on their face.

Like literacy tests, they are defended as minor burdens to safeguard “election integrity.”

Like literacy tests, their purpose and effect is to suppress votes. And they are often quite successful.
New voting restrictions in Texas and Georgia exemplify the “second-generation barriers” that RBG warned about: pointless administrative burdens that confuse and deter voters without *openly* discriminating on the basis of race or political association. slate.com/news-and-polit…
Read 4 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
Feb 10
This is nuts. Anti-vaxxers shopped their case to TWELVE different district courts before they found one corrupt enough to stop the president from issuing a mandate for *his own workforce.* Now the 5th Circuit rewards them again. Depraved and lawless stuff. slate.com/news-and-polit…
It was, of course, a Trump judge who looked at the previous 12 court orders refusing to block Biden’s vaccine mandate for his own workforce and said, “actually, they were all wrong, and I’m right.” And of course he issued a nationwide injunction. It’s just unbelievably corrupt.
If this Trump judge is right (he isn’t) then a huge number of regulations governing employees of the executive branch are illegal—including a ban on heroin use outside of the office and ethics rules barring former employees from lobbying their old bosses. slate.com/news-and-polit…
Read 4 tweets

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