No, from Super PACS (they were the Citizens United in _Citizens United_) to gerrymandering the Republicans do it first and worst. It's not even close. It's nice to think "both sides" but it's misinformed.
You may have misread "first and worst". Democrats eventually follow suit, but the cherry picked example of CA doesn't account for the partisan overrepresention of Republicans in gerrymandrered congressional districts. It's not even close on a national level.
For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore.
Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.
This is a thread about “the first time Democrats used a loophole”. That’s clearly wrong and for some reason you’re comparing them to republicans as if ratios change absolutes.
California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population.
> overrepresention of Republicans
That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs.
And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote.
> this is from Citizens United
That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.
Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media.
Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.
> [Citizens United] was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.
Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people would disagree with as "pretty clearly correct" and stating an alternative as if it is the only alternative, that is not what many people think the alternative would be, is only going to raise hackles. It's not going to spur any new thought or interesting dicussion.
Unfortunately, many knowledgeable and intelligent people have failed to look into CU from any angle other than the one it is usually presented from: that is is about corporate spending on elections.
Which it is, but as the GP described, it's about a lot more than that.
I happen to think it was incorrectly decided - SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending. It would have left the door open to not-for-profit corporations still being free to spend money on e.g. publishing a book about a candidate within some date of an election, which is precisely what we want not-for-profit civic organizations (which are, you may recall, also corporations).
However, it really is "pretty clearly correct" that had SCOTUS simply ruled that "no corporation can <X>" (for various values of X), we would be an extremely different and probably much worse situation than we were before CU. Whether it would be worse than the one we're in post-CU is hard to say.
> SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending.
It's not obvious how that would have made any difference when a for-profit corporation could just give the money it wants to spend to an aligned non-profit to spend it in the same way. Unless you mean to prevent them from donating money to the non-profit, but then where is a non-profit supposed to derive funding? "All political speech can be funded only by government grants" has a pretty clear conflict of interest, and you would then somehow have to deal with for-profit entities that inherently engage in political speech like newspapers and cable news networks. Why should Comcast/MSNBC or Fox be able to dedicate unlimited airtime to political advocacy but not Intel or Ford?
"Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania alone — the three states with the worst gerrymanders in the last redistricting cycle — accounted for 7 to 10 extra Republican seats in the House."
Re: Citizens... I don't even know where to start. Read about the McCain-Feingold Act. It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).
Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad - in fact, they have to offer them a slightly _below commercial market rate_! Weirdly, though, they are responsible for the _factual content_ of any ad they run. Election law is really interesting.
> "Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade."
The Brennan Center is a left-wing think tank. They're basically describing the thing I already mentioned in partisan terms:
> "Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party."
> "Because of residential segregation, it is much easier for map drawers to pack or crack communities of color to achieve maximum political advantage."
In other words, if the geography is such that there are areas where one party is highly dominant (i.e. urban areas) and other areas where the other party is slightly dominant (suburbs) then if you draw districts in a natural way the second party gets proportionally more seats because they win a larger number of districts by a smaller margin. They're essentially complaining that those states didn't gerrymander the districts to favor the Democrats to offset the natural advantage of Republicans in the existing geographic population distribution.
But Congress isn't intended to use proportional representation and gerrymandering to force the number of party seats to match the popular vote is just disenfranchising people in a different way by ignoring the effect that has on the behavior of individual representatives. For example, what they're proposing would be a de facto ban on majority-black districts because one district which is 60% black and votes 65% for Democrats and another that votes 55% for Republicans would result in fewer seats for Democrats than two districts that are 30% black and both vote 55% for Democrats. And both of the Democrats in the latter districts would have to move to the right because they'd otherwise both be at risk of a Republican picking off enough moderates to flip the district.
> It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering.
It required them to spend the money in different ways, which mostly lock out smaller companies, meanwhile conglomerates buying news networks has been a thing the whole time.
> (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).
Political ads are ~1% of all ad spending and much of even that money goes to the likes of Google and Facebook. Meanwhile it means non-media companies that want to air a political message can do it directly instead of having to do so indirectly by allocating more of the other 99% of ad spending to traditional media companies to curry favor and provide leverage to get favorable coverage.
It also dilutes the power of media companies, because the media company is not going to air coverage contrary to their own political interests no matter how much you run non-political ads with them, whereas someone who has a contrary interest can now run ads on social media.
> Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad
But it prohibited most entities that wanted to run those ads from doing it.
Suppose Comcast and AT&T don't like network neutrality and Amazon does. So Comcast buys MSNBC and AT&T buys CNN, gears them even more to viewers in the party that had been advocating it, but suppresses advocacy of the issue they're on the other side of to shut off support. Should Amazon now buy their own network? Is that better than letting them run Facebook ads? What if the EFF or some non-teracorp like Digital Ocean support network neutrality, but can't afford to buy a major network?
