After a purely partisan 5-4 Republican Supreme Court opinion guarantees states the power to commit ‘extreme partisan gerrymandering,’ who does the official Board of The Washington Post go after? Democrats, of course. Republicans on the Court said gerrymandering may continue, so WaPo says Democrats must stop.

TL;DR: Republicans have made gerrymandering the law of the land, so Democrats shouldn’t do it.

The article is called “After a Supreme Court punt, Maryland’s extreme gerrymandering still needs fixing.” The Board calls the 5-4 opinion a “punt.” It is hard to see how the long-awaited final resolution of the issue after years of litigation is a “punt,” but that takes some edge off of the dramatic dereliction of Constitutional duty off the Republicans. From the article:

Citizens tired of politicians choosing their voters, rather than the other way around, cannot look to federal courts for help ending even extreme gerrymandering. And in Maryland, the district maps are truly extreme.

Actually, in Maryland, there is one seat out of seven that would likely go to a Republican rather than a Democrat if not for gerrymandering. That’s one seat out of 435 nationally, or 0.22 percent of the House. Meanwhile, in the rest of America, Republicans hold plenty of seats through gerrymandering that are “truly extreme” — for example, in North Carolina, Republicans have successfully kept an 11 Republican to three Democratic seat advantage for an entire decade even though the state’s voters are near evenly split. That’s an extra four seats right there.

If the Board wanted to know more about Republican gerrymandering, they could have looked at WaPo itself where this article covers the fact that Republicans do the most of it. Back to the current article:

The state’s congressional map was one of two recently litigated up to the high court on the theory — wrong, it turned out — that it was such an affront to basic democratic principles that the justices could not sit by and pronounce the lines unreviewable.

The WaPo Board unmasks its intent here, by declaring that the five Republicans are inherently correct on their opinion, as any theory against their majority-of-one is “wrong, it turned out.”

I understand that the Supreme Court gets to say “what the law is,” but that doesn’t make it naturally correct. This is a difference that the Board should recognize, as cases are overturned quite frequently. The Board might want to re-read the four Democrats in the dissent: “The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights.”

At a simpler level, conservatives like the WaPo Board will respect the Supreme Court and pretend the Court is above politics for one reason and one reason only: the majority is Republican. Should that ever change, credibility questions will proliferate the media within about two minutes.

The WaPo Board official position also discusses gerrymandering in the Maryland state legislature, but fails to note again where the bulk of state gerrymandering occurs — you guessed it — in Republican-controlled states.

Featured picture from this article shows how gerrymandering is manipulated to favor one party over the other.