"The bulk of the reason" he pursued the case
by digby
You've heard by now about this latest assault on voting rights with the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case that overturns "one person, one vote." TPM has an informative profile of the guy who's spearheading that effort:
Edward Blum has been trying to take down “one person, one vote” -- a tenet of modern voting rights law -- since 1997. Last week brought him his biggest breakthrough yet, with the Supreme Court surprising many election law experts by taking up a redistricting case that has the potential to redefine "one person, one vote" and fundamentally alter how electoral districts are drawn nationwide.
The case also fits into Blum’s undeniably successful crusade to dismantle longstanding civil rights laws and remove race as a factor in governmental decision-making.
“That’s the bulk of the reason I pursued this,” Blum told TPM last week after the Supreme Court announced it was taking the case. “The effect that this policy has on race is surely one of the reasons I’ve been interested in it and many others have. But also a question of fairness in our democracy drove the filing of the suit.”
The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, is a challenge to Texas’ state Senate redistricting plan, in which two Texas residents are asking the Court to declare unconstitutional the use of total population to draw districts of roughly equal size. They say that because they live in a district with a relatively high ratio of eligible voters, their vote is worth less than districts that have the same total population, but fewer voters, specifically due to the presence of Latino noncitizens.
Experts contend that if Blum's side prevails it will mean redrawing districts to favor older, whiter, more rural voters at the expense of younger, minority, urban ones.
The use of total population to determine "one person, one vote" is a near-universal practice nationwide for local, state and federal elections. Before last this week, the use of total population to define "one person one vote" was considered settled territory and a common practice since a 1964 Supreme Court decision establishing that districts needed to be drawn with roughly the same population. The challengers, however, object to the idea that districts should be drawn by the total number of people living in their boundaries, rather than the number of those registered or eligible to vote.
They really will stop at nothing. They believe that rich white men should run the country and any attempt to update that throwback view is un-American. The fact that the stated motive of this is to stop the government from legislating anything that benefits people other than rich white men is more than just a tip-off. It's everything.
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