Tag Archives: Senate

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds One Man One Vote

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In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge by two Texas citizens that would have upended the doctrine of One Man, One Vote.  The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, was masterminded by highly successful Supreme Court lawyer Ed Blum and his erroneously named Project for Fair Representation.  Blum and the plaintiffs claimed that Texas State Senate districts were unconstitutional because they were drawn on the basis of total population instead of the number of eligible voters.  The argument was a clever ploy to redirect political power from more liberal urban areas to more conservative rural areas who have higher numbers of eligible voters as a percentage of total population.   Although the U.S. Constitution mandates that congressional districts be drawn on the basis of population, there is no such mandate for state legislative districts.  Alas, the ploy failed and the Court held that Texas could legally apportion its legislative districts on the basis of total population.

Adopting voter-eligible apportionment as constitutional command would upset a well-functioning approach to districting that all 50 States and countless local jurisdictions have followed for decades, even centuries . . . Appellants have shown no reason for the Court to disturb this longstanding use of total population.

Unfortunately, the Court left open the question of whether a state could use some other basis to draw its districts.  Expect another run at this naked attempt for the Republicans to maintain their stranglehold on Texas politics.    Right now, the population difference between the largest and smallest districts in Texas is about 8 percent. If the State were to change and instead use the number of eligible voters in each district for apportionment, there would be about a 40 percent difference between the largest and the smallest districts.  That would be a remarkable shift of power back to more conservative rural areas and result in unbelievable redistricting battles.

Ted Cruz on How to Lose Friends and Fail to Influence People

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Salon has the complete breakdown on Sen. Ted Cruz’s (TP-Texas) implosion on the Senate floor.  In the aftermath of calling Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Droopy Dawg – Kentucky) a liar, things proceeded to get ugly – or more accurately uglier.  Cruz’s support in the Senate is apparently down to 3 other true believers.

All Ted Cruz wanted to do was abuse his position in the Senate to grandstand on issues that would help bolster his faltering bid for the White House, but his decision to call Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a “flat-out” liar on Friday had dire consequences for the Texas senator, whose Republican colleagues turned their back on him when he tried to perform a simple roll call on Sunday.

As Politico’s Manu Raju and Burgess Everett report, McConnell’s decision to move ahead with an effort to extend the Export-Import bank’s charter by attaching it to a highway bill infuriated Cruz, who characterized the procedural move as a “flat-out lie” in direct contradiction with how McConnell assured Republican senators the bank would be handled.

That he said that isn’t the issue — that he said it on the Senate floor, which has rules governing how senators address each other, is. “I think it was a violation of the rules,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said. “It’s not how you treat a colleague regardless of how you feel.”

Maine’s Susan Collins (R) agreed, saying that “I know emotions run high on issues in the Senate, and those are the times when I think we have to take special care to abide by the rules of the Senate, particularly Rule 19, which is very clear that no senator is to impugn the integrity of another senator.”

As you might imagine, Cruz did not agree, claiming that his anger was justified because “in the entire course of this debate neither the majority leader nor any other senator has denied that he looked me in the eye and he looked every other Republican senator in the eye, and he flat-out said [there was] no deal on the Export-Import bank.”

Cruz, his Republican colleagues said Friday, was wrong on that account too. Fellow GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Lindsey Graham took what could be considered a cheap shot, saying that “unless you have been completely missing in action, you’d know this day was coming. I did a press release and floor statement. I think he’s going down a road very few senators go.”

His decision to do led him to a place where very few senators end up — standing on the Senate floor Sunday looking for the 16 senators required to hold a roll-call vote and only finding three supporters. Raju and Everett report that as this simple procedural vote failed, McConnell craned his neck and stared the junior senator from Texas down.

Or, as Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander (R) put it, “you learn that in kindergarten — you learn to work well together and play by the rules. Another thing you learn in kindergarten is to respect one another.”