David Daley

The Redistricting Apocalypse: How Chief Justice Roberts Let All the Evil Spirits out of American Democracy, by @ajkeen open.substack.com/pub/keenon… @davedaley3 Who is to blame for the redistricting farce that many fear is breaking American democracy? There’s Trump, of course, and his gang of MAGA crazies. But according to David Daley, the author of Antidemocratic, Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, the real culprit is anything but crazy. It’s John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In a devastating 2019 decision, Daley argued in a powerful New York Times essay this week, Roberts closed federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims just as judges from both parties were successfully policing redistricting abuses. "It's like that moment in Ghostbusters where they turn off the containment packs," Daley explains. "All the evil spirits spill out." The result? Today, 398 of 435 House districts are non-competitive, and we're witnessing what Daley calls a "redistricting apocalypse" with no end in sight. And those evil spirits aren’t just on the far right, with Democratic hacks also benefitting from this out-of-control gerrymandering. What gets lost in all this, of course, is the bipartisan political center in both parties - thereby creating a political system increasingly out of touch with the kind of non-ideological voters (ie: most American citizens) whose interests John Roberts’ Supreme Court is supposed to protect.