At the Center for Responsive Politics, Jennifer Piper writes—State redistricting a target for ‘dark money’ after Supreme Court ruling:
Redistricting for the next decade will be up to the states after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal courts do not have the power to rule on partisan gerrymandering, the practice by which lawmakers draw maps that flagrantly benefit their own party.
The decision will make the control of state legislatures a priority for both parties in 2020, as — in the majority of states — the state lawmakers in power draw the maps for congressional districts. The ruling could also increase calls for nonpartisan congressional redistricting commissions, which more than a dozen states have adopted in some form.
But support for nonpartisan redistricting processes often falls along partisan lines. And in recent years, state-level ballot initiatives designed to create more independent redistricting processes have been the target of out-of-state cash, often from groups that do not disclose their donors.
In 2018, five states — Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Utah — passed ballot initiatives to reduce gerrymandering, which will take effect when the next round of redistricting begins in 2021. [...]
Opposing the Michigan ballot initiative were two groups: Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution and Protect My Vote. Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution, which sued to keep the initiative off the ballot but lost, raised nearly $400,000, including $50,000 from Fair Lines America, a conservative dark money group based in Alexandria, Virginia.
Protect My Vote raised $3.3 million, more than 90 percent of which came from the Michigan Freedom Network, a group that received $500,000 from the family of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. [...]
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QUOTATION
“Society … practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression … penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” ~~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2005—Agreement Signed to Build Nuclear Fusion Reactor:
The existing crop of nuclear power plants all rely on fission, a somewhat messy process which yields some rather unpleasant radioactive waste products behind. So it's heartening to see that an international consortium has agreed to try to build a fusion reactor:
Science's quest to find a cheap and inexhaustible way to meet global energy needs took a major step forward on Tuesday when a 30-nation consortium chose France to host the world's first nuclear fusion reactor.
After months of wrangling, France defeated a bid from Japan and signed a deal to site the 10-billion-euroexperimental reactor in Cadarache, near Marseille.
The project will seek to turn seawater into fuel by mimicking the way the sun produces energy. It would be cleaner than current nuclear reactors, would not rely on enriched uranium fuel or produce plutonium.
It may be many, many years before this project yields any positive results, if it ever does. But given the twin problems of fossil fuel shortages and pollution that our current system faces, I think this is the kind of bold experiment we need to undertake.