Tangle - The Supreme Court's ruling on racial gerrymandering.

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

South Carolina's congressional map. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that South Carolina could use a congressional map that a lower court had deemed unconstitutional. The court��s conservative majority found that the federal district court had erred when it determined the map unconstitutionally sorted voters primarily based on their race (also known as racial gerrymandering). The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, supports the state’s map as drawn, secures Republicans' 6-1 advantage in the state's congressional delegation, and creates a high bar for plaintiffs to prove racial gerrymandering in the future.You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.YouTube comments are usually a place to find complaints, anger, and division. But on our latest video — my interview with Haviv Gur — I’ve been humbled to find overwhelmingly positive feedback. If you haven’t gotten the chance to watch, click the link and see what everyone is talking about, and leave some of your thoughts too.In episode 3 of our podcast series, The Undecideds, our focus shifts from Donald Trump toward President Joe Biden. Our undecided voters share their observations on the current commander in chief and how his decisions on the world stage affect their decision in the voting booth. You can listen to Episode 3 ⁠⁠here.⁠⁠Today’s clickables: Isaac on the Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman (0:53), Quick hits (1:56), Today’s story (3:58), Right’s take (7:16), Left’s take (11:27), Interview with Joshua Douglas (14:05), Isaac’s take (25:37), Listener question (31:30), Under the Radar (31:30), Numbers (32:20), Have a nice day (33:37)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: What do you think of the court’s decision? Let us know!Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to

your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the Supreme Court's ruling

about South Carolina's congressional map. Pretty interesting case. I've got some conflicted feelings about it, so I'm excited to discuss. We have a guest coming on today, Joshua A. Douglas, who published something in the Washington Monthly that we're going to talk about. I'm excited for you to hear from him as well. Before we jump in today, I do want to give a quick heads up that last week I got to go on one of the biggest science podcasts in the world to discuss the work we do at Tangle, how it has impacted my brain, and the value of wrestling with conflicting ideas. I want to give a big thanks to David Eagleman, the show's host, for bringing me on, and a hearty welcome to all the Inner Cosmos

listeners who joined Tangle after the episode aired and are probably listening to this podcast. Now, you can watch or listen to the episode with a link in today's episode description, or you can just go to Inner Cosmos, look them up in your podcast app, and you'll find the latest episode. It was really fun. It was a great interview. David asked some super thoughtful questions, and I wanted to be sure to share it and point you guys in their direction.

All right, with that out of the way, I'm going to pass it off to John for the quick hits in today's main topic, and I'll be back for my take. Thank you, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, a New York jury will begin deliberating today on whether former President Donald Trump falsified business records to cover up an alleged sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels. Number two, Israeli tanks entered the center of Gaza's southern city, Rafah, yesterday, for the first time since the war began. Separately, Israel's national security advisor said that he expected military operations in Gaza to continue through the end of the year, and a U.S.-built pier to deliver aid to Gaza was

damaged by rough seas. Number three, storms continued to batter Texas yesterday, with reports of baseball-sized hail that left over 800,000 homes and businesses in the Dallas and Fort Worth areas without power. Number four, Harvard announced that it will refrain from taking official positions on controversial public policy issues after months of controversy surrounding its public comments about the Israel-Hamas war. And number five, Hong Kong police arrested six people for allegedly publishing seditious social media posts. The first arrests under a new security law. We are following breaking news out of the Supreme Court.

Justices have sided with South Carolina Republicans upholding a redistricting map of a congressional district. It comes after a lower court ruled that the state's GOP led legislature deliberately discriminated against black voters. The sixth ruling fell along ideological lines with the conservative majority, concluding that those civil rights groups did not do enough to show that Republicans in South Carolina were racially motivated to redraw the district lines. Today, a challenge to the first congressional district, it's the swing district around Charleston, Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, which was redrawn after the 2020 census, was not a racial gerrymander. This was a 6-3 decision. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that South Carolina could use a congressional map that a lower court had deemed unconstitutional. The court's conservative

majority found that the federal district court had erred when it determined the map unconstitutionally sorted voters primarily based on their race, also known as racial gerrymandering. The majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito supports the state's map as drawn, secures Republicans a 6-1 advantage in the state's congressional delegation, and creates a high bar for plaintiffs to prove racial gerrymandering in the future. For context, the case Alexander v. South Carolina centered on South Carolina's Republican legislature's decision to divide Charleston County into different districts during the 2021 redistricting process. The new map moved nearly two-thirds of the Black voters in Charleston County out of District 1 and into District 6.

District 1 is currently represented by Republican Representative Nancy Mace, while District 6 is represented by Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn. Black Charleston County voter Tyjuan Scott and the NAACP challenged the redistricting, and in 2023, a lower court ruled that the map was unconstitutionally drawn to reduce the political power of Black voters. Central to the Supreme Court case was the question of how courts should distinguish between unconstitutional redistricting motivated by race versus legal redistricting motivated by party affiliation when there are strong correlations between the two. So what happened? In his opinion, Justice Alito rejected the federal court's conclusion that the Republican legislature had relied primarily on race. Alito concluded that plaintiffs were required to produce extraordinary evidence of racial bias violating the Constitution's equal protection guarantee in places where race and party preference are closely linked.

We start with the presumption that the legislature acted in good faith, Alito said, adding that a ruling against South Carolina would signal to litigants that any partisan districting could feasibly be called racial. Further, Alito said, the court has repeatedly emphasized that federal courts must exercise extraordinary caution in adjudicating gerrymandering claims to ensure federal courts do not intrude on vital state functions. Finally, Alito suggested one way plaintiffs could meet this standard is by providing their own map to achieve the same political goals without relying on race,

which plaintiffs in this case did not do. Justice Elena Kagan dissented from the court's decision, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Katonji Brown-Jackson. Kagan argued that the decision turned the legal standard for redistricting upside down and told legislators who wanted to rely on race as a proxy to achieve partisan ends that they were allowed to do so. She suggested litigators and mapmakers could now simply say they relied on factors other than race in order to evade scrutiny from the courts. In a similar case last year, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs who challenged an Alabama map for racial gerrymandering and ordered the state to create a second majority Black district. That case was brought under the

Voting Rights Act, while this ruling relied on the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Today, we're going to examine some arguments from the right and the left about this case, and then Isaac's take. Alright, first up, here's what the right is saying. The right supports the decision and the boundaries it sets around future claims of racial gerrymandering. Some say the plaintiffs had a weak case and were unprepared to defend their central argument. Others explore whether Thomas's concurrence foreshadows a more significant ruling to come. In National Review, Dan McLaughlin said, the Supreme Court gets slightly less nonsensical about race and redistricting.

Alexander was not a Voting Rights Act case, and that meant that the court was not deciding whether South Carolina did enough to be race-conscious, but rather whether it did too much. But it did so with no actual evidence that the legislature actually considered race in drawing the map, McLaughlin wrote. There are two ways to determine whether race predominated. Direct evidence of intent to consider race, which typically comes out of discussions of VRA compliance, and circumstantial inferences. Alito observed that the latter is, and should be, extremely hard to prove. The court added another safeguard against endless litigation of redistricting

by ruling that if plaintiffs intend to show that race, not partisanship, must have been the only explanation for a map, they have to offer their own map that would achieve the same legislature's partisan ends without reference to race. That, of course, is a requirement that the almost invariable Democratic plaintiffs in these cases hate because the whole point of their motivation in bringing the suits is to obtain a more favorable map for their party. Requiring a Democratic plaintiff to submit a map that is just as good for Republicans is a massive disincentive to bring these cases in the first place. In the Carolina Journal, Dallas Woodhouse and Andy Jackson praised the court for returning power back to the elected legislatures where it belongs. Plaintiffs must prove that race, not political geography or

partisan politics, was a predominant factor in the defendants' map drawing. They could have done that in Alexander by showing evidence that the South Carolina General Assembly considered race above all other factors when drawing maps. However, they failed to consider factors other than race adequately in their analysis and so were unprepared to account for those factors when examining the districts the legislature drew, Woodhouse and Jackson wrote. Indeed, the court admonished the plaintiff's four expert witnesses for ignoring traditional districting criteria, such as geographical constraints and the legislature's partisan interests. This is the same court that found for the plaintiffs in a recent racial gerrymandering case from Alabama and refused to state a lower court decision that overturned

state legislative districts drawn by Michigan's redistricting commission for being racial gerrymanderers. Plaintiffs can still successfully make racial gerrymandering claims. They just have to prove that their claims are really about race, Woodhouse and Jackson said. Two outcomes endure as we view the political landscape. Partisan gerrymandering is legal, and proving racial gerrymandering just became much harder. In reason, Joshua Blackman suggested, Justice Thomas is setting up to find that the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, at least with regard to redistricting. First, Justice Thomas explains that there are no judicially manageable standards to resolve such racial gerrymandering claims. Second, Justice Thomas wrote that the Constitution contemplates no role for the federal courts in the districting process.

Third, Justice Thomas observes that the 14th and 15th Amendments do not provide a textual basis for judicial resolution of districting claims, Blackman wrote. If the text of the 14th and 15th Amendments do not provide any sort of textual authority over redistricting, then those provisions cannot be the jurisdictional hook for the Voting Rights Act. If Thomas is right about the 14th and 15th Amendments, then the Voting Rights Act could not be constitutionally applied to redistricting. The federal courts absolutely could not redraw maps. This would be a gargantuan shift in the law, Blackmun said. Thomas wrote for the unanimous

court in DeVillier v. Texas, constitutional rights are generally invoked defensively in cases arising under other sources of law or asserted offensively pursuant to an independent cause of action designed for that purpose. It may have been on Thomas' mind in Alexander. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left disagrees with the decision, arguing it'll give priority to politicians over voters. Some say the court's conservatives have openly embraced gerrymandering in all forms. Others say the court appears split over the meaning of racism. In Vox, Ian Millhiser called the ruling a love letter to gerrymandering. Alito's opinion is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps

even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color, Millheiser said. Along the way, Alito's opinion gives the courts explicit blessing to maps that are drawn for the very purpose of maximizing one political party's power. In the very first paragraph of his Alexander opinion, Alito states that, as far as the federal constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting. This is a significant statement as it endorses a practice, partisan gerrymandering, that the court has previously treated as unseemly. The court's most significant previous opinion on partisan gerrymandering, Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, held that federal courts lack jurisdiction to hear cases

challenging partisan maps, but it stops short of saying that such maps are actually permissible under the Constitution, Millhiser wrote. Alexander is a very significant loss for proponents of fair legislative maps. The case is likely to cause

partisan gerrymandering to proliferate in the United States even more than it already has. In Bloomberg, Noah Feldman said, the Supreme Court doesn't agree on what racism is. Alito and the conservatives think that the Constitution should only protect Black people from the most virulent bigotry, the kind that led South Carolina to embrace slavery until it lost the Civil War

and segregation until the Civil Rights Movement produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Feldman wrote. More than that, they believe that such explicit racism has now effectively disappeared. The judicial presumption of good faith is implicitly based on the notion that the white South Carolina Republicans who gerrymandered the district just want Republicans to be elected to Congress and wouldn't care if those Republicans happened to be Black. At a legal level, you could see the Supreme Court's split in this case as a consequence of its refusal to find partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional. The conservatives are following the logical

implications of their acceptance of partisan gerrymandering, Feldman added. At a more fundamental level, the divide on the court reflects a divide in the country about race and racism. In that respect, this case is similar to last year's major decision on affirmative action in college admissions. We can expect more of the same in the years to come. Another person critical of the ruling is Joshua Douglas. Isaac got a chance to talk with Joshua today, and here's that interview. Josh Douglas, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.

So I love this piece that you wrote. I thought it was, you know, one of the more compelling arguments, you know, kind of in opposition to where the court landed here. And I'm struggling with this case myself. I'm wondering if maybe we could start if you just give us kind of a two minute summary of some of what you're seeing in this ruling and what's kind of bothered you about it? Sure. So I think this decision is part of a broader trend, which has concerned me with respect to the way the court has treated the constitutional right to vote, what most people think of as the most fundamental right in our democracy. It's something I've referred to as undue deference to states or to state politicians,

where essentially the court is saying, look, we're not going to intervene in thinking about or analyzing or scrutinizing how states are running their elections, we're going to essentially defer to the state politicians. So, you know, in the 1960s, the court used to look very carefully at state voting rules, would require states to provide a strong justification for its laws, and prove that the laws were really necessary to run the election as it needed to be. And the court would question the state, would require the state to provide a strong justification for its voting rules, or otherwise the law would be struck down. But in a series of cases in the 1980s, 1990s, and then leading up to the current Roberts court, the court has deferred more and more to

state politicians. So now when politicians say, you know, we want to run the election as we want to and don't bother us, essentially, the court's majority has agreed with that sentiment. And so in a series of cases has refused to scrutinize state voting rules. And I think this decision out of South Carolina is just another one of those where the court says, look, we're going to stay out of it. We're going to let the politicians run elections. The problem to me is that doing so, you know, trust the very people we should trust the least. These are the most self-interested people when it comes to election rules. So if there's any area that we should not defer to politicians, it's an election law.

I'm curious about the actual merits of the ruling here. One of the things I guess I'm struggling with is, and you sort of just touched on it in that summary is. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease.

Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection

is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. It seems like the court's ruling, the majority's opinion here makes sense if they're referring to the precedent of the last 20 or 30 years. But there's a really good argument that what was happening before that and how the court was handling these cases before the last 20 or 30 years was the better way to be handling this. So how do we understand, you know, when the court should maybe break from recent precedent and go back to thinking about these cases in the ways like the 60s, 70s and 80s? Because on the surface, it seems like there's perfectly good justification for them to land where they landed based on the court cases we've had in these last two or three decades, though, I think I'm much more partial to your opinion because of my views on gerrymandering

generally. Yeah, well, there's a couple of things to unpack there with what you just said. The first is that even this decision from South Carolina is a break from recent precedent. You know, the court had issued a decision out of North Carolina called Cooper versus Harris. That case was just a few years ago in which the court struck down a racial gerrymander, looked at what North Carolina had done and said, you know, the court, North Carolina had tried to justify its law saying, well, we're concerned about politics, not race. And the court's majority said, well, you know, when you have a state like North Carolina, where those two things are so closely aligned, you can't easily separate them. So you can't rest on a justification of, well, we're just trying to achieve partisan gerrymandering,

which the course court has essentially blessed. So this was even a break from that precedent. And Justice Alito was in dissent in that case. And now he's in the majority. And he basically writes his prior dissent into the majority now without explicitly overruling that prior case, Cooper versus Harris from 2017. 2017. So you sort of have a silent pseudo overruling of precedent, even in this case. But your broader point is that, yes, the court has unduly deferred to the states in the last 20 or 30 years. You know, I have a new book out called The Court Versus the Voters, the troubling story of how the Supreme Court has undermined voting rights, which tells this story. It's a book for a popular press, you know, everyday Americans, that discusses the ways in which the court has been anti-voter, in my view. So your question, you know, the broader question is, when should the court go back to how it was in the 1960s in closely scrutinizing election rules? Well,

I think that goes back to the fundamental question of a constitution in a democracy. You know, the Declaration of Independence says that a government is legitimate based on the consent of the governed, the consent of the governed. So shouldn't that include all of us, regardless of partisanship? And, you know, we should let everyone vote easily and let the chips fall where they may. So to me, the court needs to scrutinize state voting rules, because again, the politicians are so self-interested, you know, that they, one, the one main goal of someone who gets elected is to win reelection. And what better way to do that than to create voting rules to help keep themselves in power?

And so, you know, in this South Carolina case, Justice Alito says, well, you're allowed to partisan gerrymander. We're not going to question that. And, you know, if you say you're trying to achieve a partisan result, even if doing so requires you to draw the lines based on race, well, you said politics, and that's legitimate. And so again, you know, the old saying of we're letting the politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around, that's happening again and again here. And so to me, we need to go back to an era in which the court very carefully looks at voting rules to protect voters who are the lifeblood of our democracy. One of the big things that seemed to come out of this ruling that certainly caught my eye was, I don't know if

it's a new precedent or something that was kind of a vague old precedent that's now been revived, and I'm curious to hear you speak about this, is Alito's contention that the plaintiffs need to present a map that, you know, shows that they can achieve their partisan ends without the kind of racial gerrymandering in order to prove that this is racial gerrymandering and it's not just political gerrymandering, which as you just said, the court's now permitting. I'm curious about, you know, because I saw him say it and say, you know, this is something the court suggested could be done a quarter century ago. And then Justice Lana Kagan responded by saying that this is basically an invented new precedent where now plaintiffs are going to have to bring forward this map to show that, you know, they can build a map without doing the racial

gerrymandering, but accomplish the same partisan ends. How do you think this kind of, first of all, is this a new precedent? And second of all, how do you think that might impact future voting rights cases? Because this seems like a pretty big wrinkle that kind of came out of this ruling, at least to me with my kind of amateur eye on it. Yeah, well, so first, it's new precedent in that this very argument was rejected in that 2017 North Carolina case, that Cooper versus Harris case, where Justice Alito, in dissent, faulted the plaintiffs in that case for not bringing an alternative map. And the majority in that case said, no, you know, if you have a map, that's helpful evidence, but it's not a requirement. And we have no areas of the law really where there's an evidentiary burden that is your

whole case, right? Because you could prove that map drawers were drawing maps on an illegitimate basis based on other evidence. This is, you know, an alternative map is evidence if you can have it, but it shouldn't necessarily be, you know, the entire case if you have other evidence that there was improper motive, that there was, you know, drawing maps based on race. So again, here, Justice Alito is able to turn his dissent, in which he argued this should be the threshold question, did the plaintiffs bring an alternative map, into a majority opinion now without expressly saying that he's overruling that prior case. And the court, I think this is another story of the court, which I talk about in my new book, how the court pretends to be incremental, right? The court

doesn't necessarily want to, at least in voting rights, doesn't want to say it's explicitly overturning precedent, but you chip away a little here and a little there. And when you look back, you see that there's, you know, big changes. In terms of the burden this is going to create for plaintiffs, well, the problem is the court is now leaning even more into this idea that that drawing maps based on politics is perfectly fine. You know, in the 2019 Rucho case, the court said, well, you know, we don't know that drawing politics or drawing maps based on politics is permissible, but the court should stay out of it. Now, in the opening lines, Justice Alito says it's perfectly legitimate to use politics as your motivation. And so it's hard for a plaintiff to draw a map that achieves the same exact partisan ends when race and party are so closely aligned. That is,

you have a state where, you know, a racial minority tends to all vote for or mostly vote disproportionately for one political party. How do you draw a map that still achieves that extreme partisanship that when race and party are aligned? And so if plaintiffs have other evidence of, again, evidence of a racial motive, why should the map be the thing that makes or breaks their case? Got it. Joshua Douglas, I appreciate the time. Joshua is a law professor at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. He's also the author of a new book, The Court vs. the Voters, The Troubling Story of How the

Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights. Joshua, if people want to keep up with your work, where's the best place to do it? Yeah, I've got a website, joshuadouglas.com. It's got links to my books. I'm on the Twitter X, whatever they call it these days. And so not hard to find me online. Thanks so much, Joshua. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So when the Supreme Court ruled last year that Alabama needed to redraw a map that violated the Voting Rights Act, they did so by consulting this three-part test that had been established in a previous case. I wrote at the time that I was happy about the practical outcome, but thought the minority's dissenting opinion was simpler, easier to follow, and in many ways more compelling.

In this case, I think the reverse is true. I'm deeply concerned about the practical outcome of this case, but I actually find the majority's opinion simpler, easier to follow, and in many ways more compelling. The practical outcome argument is simple. Gerrymandering is a bipartisan crisis, and it is a scourge on our democracy. This ruling is going to make it easier for lawmakers all over the country to gerrymander in ways that protect their majorities. Gerrymandering creates non-competitive congressional districts, which builds incentives for politicians to win over the most partisan and extreme members of their voting bloc, which gets us more extreme, more polarized, and less willing to do the work politicians.

Hence, Congress today. Consider the outcome in this case. District 1 was a longtime Republican stronghold. In 2018, a Democrat won the district. In 2020, Representative Nancy Mace, the Republican from South Carolina, defeated him by less than 1%. The next race was going to be very tight. So Mace was going to have to do, God forbid, the difficult work of winning over swing voters, moderating her politics to match her constituents or convincing them of her views, and finding a way to appeal to the most voters in her district. Instead, Republicans decided to change her district. They split it up along new

lines, moving all the Democrats they could out, effectively guaranteeing her victory in the next election before it even happens. How could anyone defend this process as a way to elect members of Congress? In the most simple terms possible, voters are no longer choosing their politicians. Politicians are choosing their voters. And to reiterate, that's not a problem with just Republicans. Democrats are gerrymandering in the same ways for the same reasons all over the country. Despite that, I think the decision in this case makes perfect sense on its legal merits. That conclusion says more about the current state of voting rights and

the failures of current legislation and practice on this issue than it does about the merits of gerrymandering, but I can separate my loathing of gerrymandering as a practice from what the law says. Alito is right. The precedent we have from the last few decades of cases indicates that federal courts should only interfere in the mapmaking process in the most extraordinary circumstances. That means plaintiffs need to provide very compelling evidence, and in this case, the NAACP did not. Since the law allows mapmakers to gerrymander districts for political benefits, and since South Carolina's voters' political preferences so strongly track with race, it is very hard to prove that the state's motivations were racial and not political. The test that Alito proposed, draw me a map that achieves similar political

ends without racial gerrymandering seems reasonable as a point of reference to me. I'm not convinced it should be a requirement. It's very possible that voters could choose their candidates in part for their stances on racial issues, making race and politics basically inseparable. But if plaintiffs could draw such a map, it would provide a good piece of evidence to prove racial gerrymandering. At the same time, the ruling has some really problematic elements. Joshua Douglas, who you just heard from, summed them up best, and he explained them well on the podcast today. Perhaps most obvious is Alito's suggestion that we should just assume good faith from the

politicians drawing these maps. This is, to me, totally backward. We should trust politicians the least in this process because every incentive they have is to bend the election rules to their whim and keep themselves in office. This case is a perfect example of why we should not trust politicians and why we should assume the worst partisan intentions and act accordingly. Douglas also makes the valid point that up until the 1970s, the Supreme Court was actually approaching these cases with a high degree of judicial scrutiny. He wrote an entire book about how the court has become more deferential to state rules since then and how that has harmed everyday voters by allowing practices like

gerrymandering to proliferate. I agree with Douglas that these rulings have harmed voters, and I certainly believe we should have more jurisprudence to rein in gerrymandering to proliferate. I agree with Douglass that these rulings have harmed voters, and I certainly believe we should have more jurisprudence to rein in gerrymandering. Unfortunately, the last few decades of precedent and rulings, along with legislative inaction, have allowed the court to reasonably land where it did in this South Carolina case. Finally, as I alluded to above, if voters of a certain race strongly correlate voting with a certain political party correlate voting with a certain political party, it's now going to be extremely difficult to prove racial gerrymandering. This is a problem because the race of a lot of voters in a lot of areas tracks strongly with certain political preferences. Of course, this is only a problem because the court is

permitting partisan gerrymandering, which it shouldn't do, and now it's saying that once you permit partisan gerrymandering, it becomes very difficult to prove racial gerrymandering, which, obviously. Again, the reasoning is enough to track, but the outcome is frightening. Gerrymandering is already a major issue, and now the court is being more permissive of it than it was even a few years ago. Okay, we're going to actually skip over today's reader question and head straight to our Under the Radar section. Most Americans know about the CIA, but very few have ever heard of the INR. Yet that intelligence agency, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, has a superior record when it comes to predicting major world events, risk assessments, and global strategic outcomes.

The INR was correcting key assessment about wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine when other major agencies got them wrong. What's more, the INR has no satellites, no spies abroad, and isn't bugging anyone's communications. The small staff analyzes the same raw intel everyone else has access to, yet almost nobody has heard of them. Why is that? Vox has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The year South Carolina introduced the first non-contiguous voting district in the U.S. was 1874. The number of years in a redistricting cycle, after which U.S. states redraw their congressional and state legislative maps, is 10. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they had heard nothing about redistricting processes

in their state in 2022 was 41%, according to Pew. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they were dissatisfied with how their state was handling redistricting in 2022 was 24%. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they were satisfied with how their state was handling redistricting in 2022 was 19%. The polling difference in favor of Republicans between the partisan lean of South Carolina's median district and the state as a whole in the state's previous congressional map was plus 4.5, according to FiveThirtyEight. The polling difference in favor of Republicans between the partisan lean of South Carolina's median district and the state as a whole in the state's new congressional map is plus 7.0. And the number of districts in South Carolina whose partisan leanings are between Republicans plus 15 and Democrats plus 15 for both the old congressional

map and the new one is zero. All right, and last but not least, our have a nice day story. Mary Leahy, an 18-year-old violinist in Peterborough, Ontario, broke her wrist just two days before her big solo after falling off a farm cart. But instead of pulling out, she literally got a helping hand from her father, Donald Leahy, who happens to be one of the best fiddle players in Canada. Donald oscillated the bow while Mary, a full-time musician, fingered the strings. I don't know how, but I managed to play with my left hand only, said Mary. His left hand was playing the fingers on my back, which was tickling me, while I had to imagine myself playing the bow with my right hand. Good News Network has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description.

All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work and you haven't done so yet, please head over to retangle.com and sign up for a membership. We'll be right back here tomorrow for Isaac and the rest of the crew. This is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Thank you. We'll see you next time. procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first

cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.