Voting Rights and Democracy

Justice Roberts called out for pro-GOP gerrymandering ruling: ‘He’s absolutely doing politics’

Addressing a closely-decided Supreme Court decision that allows majority legislatures to gerrymander districts to retain control of statehouses, the head of the Constitutional Accountability Center mocked Chief Justice John Roberts for his purely political deciding vote while acting like he is above politics.

According to Elizabeth Wydra, Roberts has gone to great lengths to make the conservative court appear to be non-partisan but that his authoring of the 5-4 decision was a tip-off that he is still a Republican at heart.

“Elizabeth, we heard a for foreshadowing of this from Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the huge importance of the census decision — which we’ll get to in a few moments to the fight over the travel ban — and talked about the concern over divisions like this, 5-4 divisions … and that’s exactly what happened here,” CNN host Poppy Harlow prodded.

Noting that Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “We have no legal commission to allocate political power and influence,” Wydra scoffed at Robert’s statement.

“Right, and you know, it seems like a division ideologically but also, I think is a division in whoever has their head in the sand and who doesn’t,” the attorney snapped back. “Like we saw last year with the Muslim ban case. The conservative majority went forward as if this was any other presidential administration, that President Trump did not have his tweets saying that the Muslim ban was intended to attack Muslims.”

“And here I think we have, first with this partisan gerrymandering decision, Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts making it seem like he’s not doing politics but in reality — he’s absolutely doing politics,” she charged.

“As a constitutional lawyer, I’m deeply disappointed that the court did not do its job in our constitutional system and apply the Constitution of the law,” she concluded.

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