The past week has been a good week for both Republicans and open, fair, and honest elections.  It has also been a downright bad and ugly week for the Democrat Party’s consigliere, Marc Elias.  

First, the good: Yesterday, a New York Supreme Court Judge ruled that (like virtually everywhere else in the world) you have to be a citizen to vote in New York City:

Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio also issued a permanent injunction that bars the city Board of Elections from letting around 800,000 non-citizen residents register to vote.

In a 13-page ruling, Porzio said city officials can’t “obviate” restrictions in the state constitution, which “expressly states that only citizens meeting the age and residency requirements are entitled to register and vote in elections.”

“There is no statutory ability for the City of New York to issue inconsistent laws permitting non-citizens to vote and exceed the authority granted to it by the New York State Constitution,” he wrote.

Following the 2020 U.S. Census, Democrats immediately began raising tens of millions of dollars to fuel a redistricting effort they hoped would push the needle in their favor for the next 10 years and help them gain seats in Congress.  But despite the best efforts of Democrat elected officials, PACs, and liberal dark money groups, Republicans are projected to gain anywhere between three to five Congressional seats. 

The Democrat controlled state legislature of New York ignored their Constitution to concoct an outrageous ultra-partisan gerrymander of New York state.  The courts rejected that and state Democrats are now paying a heavy price.  Under the special master's adopted map liberal House Democrat heavyweights are now going to be forced to face off against each other in primaries, foremost among these:

The maps set up an explosive clash between two longtime Democrats who now find themselves drawn into the same district. In statements after the maps were released, Nadler and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D) both said they would run for the same district.

Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Maloney, chair of the House Oversight Committee, both won election to Congress in 1992.

The past week has been a busy one for redistricting. Unsurprisingly, most of the scrutiny has been on Republican-drawn districts. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order reinstating Alabama's congressional map that a lower court struck down.

Alabama's new congressional map is a status quo map based on the previous one precleared by Eric Holder’s Justice Department 10 years ago. The Supreme Court rightly stayed the lower court's egregious misapplication of Section 2. https://t.co/JopP8piI0c

— National Republican Redistricting PAC (@GOPRedistrict) February 7, 2022

Today, the Supreme Court vacated the lower court's decision in Chatfield v. League of Women Voters (League of Women Voters v. Benson below) and remanded for further consideration in light of Rucho v. Common Cause.  There was nothing unexpected or even very newsworthy in this, but what is newsworthy is the hand-wringing among Democrats and in the mainstream media.  The misleading headlines and stories that gave the impression that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Michigan Republicans.

Based on the reactions of prominent Democrats to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, you’d think the end of the United States as we know it was eminent.

The Supreme Court issued two opinions with direct implications for redistricting this morning, on the last day of the October 2018 Term.  In a consolidated opinion for Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, the Court held that "partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts."  In Department of Commerce v. New York, the Court remanded the "census" case to the district court for further proceedings consistent with its rather confusing opinion that held both that it would be permissible for the the Department of Commerce to ask a question regarding citizenship on the census and that the Department did not provide an accurate reason for the question's inclusion.

Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Rucho v. Common Cause, a partisan gerrymandering claim against North Carolina's congressional map, and Lamone v. Benisek, a First Amendment retaliation partisan gerrymandering claim against one Maryland state legislative district.  Both cases were before the Court last term and were sent back to the district courts for further proceedings.  As in the past, today the justices continued to search for a justiciably manageable standard for considering partisan gerrymandering claims:

This morning, the Supreme Court heard oral argument for the second time in a racial gerrymandering challenge to Virginia's 2011 House of Delegates district map in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill.  Back in 2017, the Supreme Court upheld one of the challenged 12 districts and sent the remaining 11 back to the district court for further review after determining that the district court had applied the incorrect standard.  On remand, the district court found that race had been the predominant factor in drawing the 11 districts and threw them out, and the House of Delegates appealed.

On Friday, a North Carolina state court judge struck down North Carolina's voter ID constitutional amendment, which passed in November with over 55% approval by the state's voters.  The judge's rationale was particularly strange and troubling:

A North Carolina judge on Friday voided new state mandates requiring photo identification to vote and also limiting income tax rates. He ruled the GOP-controlled legislature lacked authority to put those constitutional amendments on the ballot because lawmakers had been elected from racially-biased districts two years earlier.

Wake County Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins sided with the state NAACP, which had argued that General Assembly was “illegally constituted” because federal judges had declared the district maps used in the 2016 legislative elections illegal racial gerrymanders.