Early Returns - Law and Politics with Jan Baran
Early Returns - Law and Politics with Jan Baran
Inside the New Redistricting Wars with Richard Pildes and Jason Torchinsky
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Congressional maps are being redrawn in the middle of the decade, the Supreme Court has sharply narrowed a core piece of the Voting Rights Act, and both parties are racing to squeeze out every seat they can before 2028. On this episode of Early Returns, host Jan Baran sorts through what is actually happening with two lawyers who have argued these cases: Richard Pildes, professor of law at NYU and former legal advisor to the Obama and Biden campaigns, and Jason Torchinsky, partner at Holtzman Vogel and counsel in the recent Louisiana case before the Court.
The conversation explains how redistricting got here — from the one-person, one-vote rule to the Voting Rights Act and the limits the Supreme Court placed on the use of race in drawing districts — and what the Louisiana decision in Callais changes going forward. Pildes and Torchinsky discuss the role of partisan motivation in map-drawing, the population shifts expected to move 10 to 15 House seats from blue states to red after the 2030 census, and where the redistricting fights head next. Pildes also reflects on his work for President Biden's commission on the Supreme Court.
About Richard Pildes
Richard Pildes is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and a specialist in legal issues concerning democracy. A former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and has also received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. President Biden appointed him to the President’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. In dozens of articles and his acclaimed casebook, The Law of Democracy, he has helped create an entirely new field of study in the law schools. His work in this field systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the structure of voting systems, the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions, and similar issues. He has written on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the transformation of the presidential nominations process, the Voting Rights Act (including editing a book titled The Future of the Voting Rights Act), the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, and the powers of the American President and Congress. In addition to his scholarship in these areas, he has written on national-security law, the design of the regulatory state, and American constitutional history and theory. As a lawyer, Pildes has successfully argued voting-rights and election-law cases before the United States Supreme Court and the courts of appeals, and as a well-known public commentator, he writes frequently for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and was part of the Emmy-nominated NBC breaking-news team for coverage of the 2000 Bush v. Gore contest.
Pildes received his A.B. in physical chemistry summa cum laude from Princeton, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard, where he served as Supreme Court Note Editor on the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing law in Boston, he began his academic career at the University of Michigan Law School, before joining the NYU School of Law in 2001.
About Jason Torchinsky
Jason Torchinsky is a partner at Holtzman Vogel, specializing in campaign finance, government ethics laws, election law, lobbying disclosure and issue advocacy groups. In addition to his practice counseling clients on political law compliance, Jason has served as lead counsel in a number of litigation matters dealing with First Amendment freedoms, antisemitism and anti-terrorism, election law and redistricting issues. He is also recognized by Chambers USA and Washingtonian Magazine as one of the top “Political Law” attorneys in the country.
Torchinsky has filed numerous cert petitions, jurisdictional statements, and amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court. At the Supreme Court, he won a summary reversal from a redistricting case out of Michigan, and was counsel in a rarely granted petition for cert before judgment in another redistricting matter. His amicus briefs on behalf of the NRSC and NRCC was cited in the Court’s opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. Jason has also represented candidates across the country during post-election canvass and recount processes.
Following the events of October 7, Torchinsky lead the creation of Holtzman Vogel’s antisemitism practice.
Prior to joining Holtzman Vogel, Torchinsky was counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice, Deputy General Counsel to Bush-Cheney ’04, and Deputy General Counsel to the 2005 Presidential Inaugural Committee.
Torchinsky received his law degree and undergraduate degrees from William and Mary where he is currently an adjunct professor.
Welcome to Early Returns, hosted by Jan Barron, a partner of Glitzman Vogel. This podcast examines law and politics and seeks insights from political players in elections, lobbying, media, and the law. Now, let's join our host, Jan Barron.
SPEAKER_00Welcome back to Early Returns, a podcast about law and politics. I'm your host, Jan Barron. Our producer is Jody Mayer Piazza. Today's topic is redistricting. That's the apportionment by population of districts for the U.S. House of Representatives. There are 435 House districts, which is the number of representatives in the House. All but six districts are subject to redistricting. The six that are spared are states in which the population is so small that there's only one district. Those six states, by the way, are Vermont, Delaware, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Alaska. All the other states have at least two congressional districts, and the most districts are in California, which is the most populous state. Redistricting is supposed to be a once-a-decade exercise by state legislatures. Until the 1960s, the Supreme Court stayed away from redistricting because the court did not want to get involved in what it called the political thicket. Gerrymandering was left to the political process, not the courts. Well, that all changed. And the Supreme Court started to review redistricting plans to determine what and where and whether they were constitutional. Another change is that redistricting now occurs more than once per decade as several states decided to revise their district lines. So why is this happening? What's going on with redistricting? To discuss and answer those questions, I have two redistricting legal experts. One is Richard Pildis. He's professor of law at the New York University School of Law, NYU. Rick has handled several redistricting cases, including before the Supreme Court. He was the legal advisor to the Obama and Biden election campaigns, as well as a member of President Biden's commission on the Supreme Court. My other guest is my law partner, Jason Torchinski of the Holtzman Vogel Law Firm. Jason, like Rick, has litigated redistricting cases, and most recently was a counsel in a Supreme Court case involving the Louisiana redistricting plan. Rick and Jason, thank you both for joining the show. Thanks very much.
SPEAKER_03Very happy to be here.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's get the ball started here. I'd like to provide a little background as I just did, but uh flesh it out a little more and then get into what's going on today. So uh let's start with what Coach Lombardi used to call the football to explain football. Redistricting, where did that come from? Isn't isn't that from the Constitution, Rick? And you know, what's that all about?
SPEAKER_03Well, the Constitution requires a census every decade, and Congress then has to decide, based on the census, how many representatives to Congress each state gets. States had a lot of discretion about how they would elect those representatives for a long time. Then in 1842, Congress passed a statute requiring all states to use single-member districts to elect their representatives. Then the question arises: who designs these districts? How often are they designed, or how often are they changed?
SPEAKER_00Yes, uh, let me ask this. I didn't know this. So before the 1840s, you had states that the legislatures would say, okay, uh Joe Smith and Jack Johnson are the representatives from our district. We entitled it to?
SPEAKER_03No, what happened before 1842? It's it's actually, I think it's a very fun and interesting story. The Constitution doesn't say anything about how states uh elect their members of Congress. So some states would use what are called at-large systems in which all the representatives would be elected on a statewide basis so the same majority could control all those seats. Some states would use individual districts. So states that were larger and more heterogeneous, like Pennsylvania, wanted to use individual districts so that different constituencies and different communities could be represented. Smaller states might elect everybody at large, but this was a really inherently unstable structure because it meant small states, if they all elected people from one party, would have much more influence than a large state, which might be five to four party-wise from the individual districts. So the dynamic was kind of driving states to use at-large elections even when they didn't want to. So when Congress stepped in and created a uniform rule in 1842 that all states must use single-member districts, then that's when we got the system that we still use today.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And what did states do or other people do in challenging any of the redistricting results until the 1960s? Were there court cases before then?
SPEAKER_03Well, so part of what happened is that as we had the great migration of voters to cities, both with World War I and then with World War II, these existing districts often became very unbalanced in population terms. So districts that were centered on urban areas got larger and larger and larger in terms of the number of people. Rural areas didn't increase nearly as much. And most of these state legislatures were designed in a way that gave extra representation to rural areas if you just used an equal population kind of figure. And then as this pattern developed in the 20th century, a lot of states just simply did not redistrict after a new census. And that's partly because you know the existing legislators are enacted, are elected under the existing structure, and they were favored by the existing system. And they weren't about to change that system to reflect the realities of how dramatically these urban centers were increasing in population, whether it's Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, or other cities. So there were efforts made in federal court and state court to get the courts involved to require these states to redistrict. In many of these cases, state constitutions required them to redistrict every 10 years, but they didn't do it anyway. And in the 1940s, the first case that went to the Supreme Court challenging the great population disparities that had arisen in Illinois between Chicago and downstate rural areas, a case called Colgro versus Green. Colgrove was actually a political science professor who brought the case mid-1940s, right after World War II. The Supreme Court, I think it was a 4-3-1 decision, said this is not something the federal court should get involved in. Justice Frankfurter, very famously in this opinion, talked about the way in which getting involved for the courts would compromise the perception of their impartiality, that they would inevitably be embroiled in partisan political conflicts, that the court should reserve its capital for cases more kind of appropriate for the courts to address. And so the federal courts were close to these claims throughout the 20th century, up until the 1960s. And many state courts followed this Colgrove versus Green decision from the Supreme Court in the 1940s and also said state courts shouldn't get involved in this. So you had this system that, you know, over time in the 20th century became more and more and more imbalanced in population differences to the point that there were incredibly extreme differences. So at the state legislative level, in a place like Nevada, you had one Senate district that would have 568 people and another one that would have 127,000 people. And they each had equal representation.
SPEAKER_00And that's at the state legislative level, right?
SPEAKER_03Right. But the same thing was going on with Congress. I don't think we have an example quite that extreme. But you had population disparities on the order of 45 to 1 across districts, each one electing a person to Congress.
SPEAKER_00So the Supreme Court finally decided it was going to ignore Justice Frankfurter and enter the political thicket on the basis of the Constitution, fundamentally, because I assume of the Equal Protection Clause requires that these districts at least have equal numbers of voters or people, so that you would have what's called the one-person, one vote principle that was established. Am I correct on that?
SPEAKER_03Yes. So it's very interesting. When the Supreme Court finally decided it needed to address this issue, it initially just simply said, yes, the federal courts are open to hearing these claims, that disparities can violate the equal protection clause. And it wasn't clear what the standard would be for what a state had to do to have districts that met the constitutional requirements of equal protection. And there were real differences among the court, but fairly quickly, the court gravitated to the view, or at least the majority of the court, that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment required essentially equal population for congressional districts. So that's when we get the one vote, one person idea. And actually, that is really the most radical decision the Supreme Court ever decided, or the decision that was the most disruptive of the status quo. Most people think, you know, Brown versus the Board of Education was the most dramatic decision of the court. But I think it's quite plausible to argue that these reapportionment decisions were actually much more disruptive or much more radical because what they meant was that every state legislature in the United States had to be restructured. And it meant that state legislatures couldn't have a state senate that was modeled on the U.S. Senate, where representation was based on geographical units like counties, as opposed to persons. And it so it really required every state legislature in the United States to restructure itself and it dramatically changed the way congressional districts were structured. And this goes to your opening question. Once the court established that the constitution required equal population in these districts, every time we have a new census, it reveals that the districts are no longer in compliance with that principle because over the decade people have moved in and out. So redistricting is now constitutionally required every decade after the census.
SPEAKER_00And this applies not just to state legislatures, but also to congressional districts. Am I correct?
SPEAKER_03And the city council districts. Oh, everybody. Everybody. Every elected representative of the United States.
SPEAKER_00But the only election law cases that existed when I was in law school were redistricting cases, Baker versus Carr, which was kind of a seminal case. Actually came out of Tennessee where I was at Vanderbilt Law School at the time. So this whole topic is really kind of the beginning of many aspects of what we today call election law or political law. And we've now established what the fundamental basis is that required one man, one vote, and equal protection. But everything seems to have gotten even more complicated just a few years later. A handful of years later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And Jason, what did that do to redistricting?
SPEAKER_02Made it very different. So switching directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its impact on redistricting, there were really two portions of the Voting Rights Act that affected redistricting. The first was Section 5, and it's really actually Section 4 and Section 5. Section 5 is a provision that says basically if you're covered by Section 5 and you want to make any change in your voting practices or procedures, you need to come to the federal government for pre-approval. And that is either a three-judge federal court sitting in DC or the Attorney General of the United States. There were from 1965 forward until about 2015, there were all or part of 17 states that were covered under Section 5. And basically, this was a reaction to the civil rights era where a court would say, okay, you can't do A, and the state would say, Well, you know, we've changed it. So now we're not quite doing A, but still what the judge intended to say you couldn't do was really being done. It was an attempt to stop those sort of tweaks around the edges to get around specific court injunctions in these states.
SPEAKER_00So racial discrimination was important here, wasn't it? Yeah. And the tweaking and so forth was prohibited because it was perceived as uh discriminating against races, uh, black Americans in particular. So they had to have pre-approval before a state or or jurisdiction that was uh changing its districts would have to get pre-approval if they were a state covered under the Voting Rights Act. Not all states were covered.
SPEAKER_02And this is where it became an issue. Section five affected everything from literally I want to move the polling place from the elementary school to the fire station across the street to redistricting to annexations to changing the size of your city council or your county commission, uh, all the way up to and including, you know, redistricting of your congressional districts. Section five was heavily litigated from 1965 to 2015 when the Supreme Court invalidated, it actually didn't invalidate section five, it invalidated the coverage formula that was found in section four. The coverage formula uses a formula based on census data from the 1960s to determine which states were covered and which states were not covered. And the Supreme Court said, you know, relying on that same formula 65 years later or 55 years later is no good. And so, Congress, you have an opportunity to go back and create a new coverage formula. And Congress has not yet, in the decade plus since Shelby County was decided, the court has not gone back and actually redone, or Congress has not gone back and redone a coverage formula. So section five still exists. There is a provision in section five that allows courts to order jurisdictions under section five preclearance. Happens very rarely, but section five still does exist, and there can be court orders to order jurisdictions back under section five. So right now, section five is not a thing, but here's where it impacted redistricting over the years. In the 1980s and into the early 1990s, there was essentially an alliance of sorts between minority advocates and Republicans to try to create as many majority minority districts around the country as they could. And the reason was when you created a new majority-minority district, what you found was the district tended to be surrounded by Republican districts, to the point where in the early 1990s, the Bush 41 administration's Justice Department pursued what they what came to be referred to as the black max strategy. So if you submitted a districting plan and the Justice Department could draw an additional majority minority district that you, the jurisdiction, didn't draw, they would reject your map until you go back and try again to try to maximize the number of majority minority districts. The Supreme Court eventually struck that down in the late 90s and basically said, you can't do that. Um, because what it resulted in were districts that looked utterly ridiculous and had ridiculous shapes on the basis of race.
SPEAKER_00So well, does the shape of a district matter constitutionally? I mean, why why is that significant?
SPEAKER_02So the shape mattered because these bizarre shapes could be an indication to the court that it was drawn on the basis of race, which was prohibited. So think about the classic one is this North Carolina district that stretched literally down like the median of an interstate highway to connect two black neighborhoods or two black areas of a district. And the court was like, you know, the district basically looked like a barbell. It literally went down the median of an interstate highway, and the court said, no, no, no, you can't do that. So that's what we had with section five. Section two, on the other hand, had some litigation and some legislative changes, but it basically by the early 80s, the Supreme Court decided a case called Thornburg versus Jingles. And in Thornburg versus jingles, the Supreme Court set out a three-part test for when you when section two, which required, which essentially prohibits discrimination in sort of voting, when section two would require you to draw an additional majority minority district. And the pieces of it were basically one, you had to show that you could draw a majority minority district, you had to show that there was racially polarized voting, and essentially you had to show that there was sort of the totality of the circumstances, and there were lots of debates about what that meant, essentially required you to draw this additional majority minority district. So here's where legislators until this summer with with Cala or this spring with Cal A had was essentially you had section two, which told you when you had to told you when you had to draw an additional majority minority district. And then you had the 14th Amendment back from kind of the section five days, where if you were sort of too race conscious, you violated the 14th Amendment. So legislators for many years under the Voting Rights Act had to sort of, you know, kind of take a bowling analogy. They had to bowl a strike right down the middle because if they veered too far one way, Section 2 dinged them and told them they had to draw an additional majority minority district. And if they drew too many majority minority districts that resulted in ridiculous shapes and were on the basis of race without a section two justification, then they hit the other side of the bowling aisle and they were told that they violated the 14th Amendment. So for a very long time, the Voting Rights Act had legislators dealing with section five, section two, and the 14th Amendment, all trying to figure out how they were supposed to draw districts under these basically three sets of rules.
SPEAKER_03Can I just add one thing to that story? Yes. So 1982, Jason didn't mention this specifically, Congress significantly amended the Voting Rights Act and amended section two of the act, which applies nationwide. And before that, Section 2 had not been all that significant in litigation because it basically just tracked the Constitution. In 1982, that's when Congress amended the act to create what we call the results tests that said that voting practices, including redistricting, that resulted in an unequal opportunity for minority groups to elect their preferred candidates, that that would violate the act, that radically changed redistricting. And so what we see in the 1990s for the first time is the real transformation of the redistricting process under the aegis of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. And so what you get in a lot of Southern states is the creation for the first time of majority Black election districts in the face of racially polarized voting patterns of the South, in which the white majority consistently votes in opposition to the preferences of the Black minority. And so when that minority is concentrated to be a majority in an election district, it has control of the outcome. And what that produced in the 1990s was the election to Congress of Black representatives from the South for the first time since Reconstruction. So it there was a dramatic, dramatic change starting in the 1990s from the amended section two of the Voting Rights Act. And then, as Jason said, the Supreme Court, you know, put certain constraints on that process, but didn't fundamentally kind of change that process. And so that starting in the 1990s, we get the creation of these, we can call them VRA districts or opportunity districts, which initially were majority African-American, but then over time, as it turned out that black voters could elect their preferred candidates with less than a majority of the electorate because of support of white voters, those districts became to be called ability to elect districts. And Section Two of the Voting Rights Act required the creation of these ability to elect districts for minority voters. Eventually, it includes Hispanic and Asian voters, though the paradigm initially is race, in which these ability to elect districts were created throughout the country, mainly as a result of Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, until the most recent Supreme Court case.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. I admit I've always found it very confusing to understand what the heck was going on in redistricting as a lawyer, you know, and specializing election law. I had to go to people like you to explain what the heck does this mean. But your explanation was very interesting to me because it sounds like what Section 2 has modified in 1982 did is it it basically promoted racially required gerrymandering.
SPEAKER_02It did. Now, what's really interesting to me is over time, districts. So the if you think about the congressional black caucus, right now, something like only 25% of the congressional black caucus that's currently sitting in Congress comes from a majority minority district. There was a time where 100% of the congressional black caucus came from majority minority districts. So, you know, voting patterns have changed over time, I think in a good way. And I think the racially polarized voting and the geographic concentrations of minority voters are not what they were in the 1960s. And I think that's that's progress for the country. But again, you know, I think people are sort of under the impression that African American, or some people are under the impression that African American candidates can only win in majority African American districts. That's not. True anymore. It used to be true. It's really not true anymore.
SPEAKER_03It's not true to the same extent. That's right. But a lot of those districts that are not majority African American districts were still created under the compulsion of the Voting Rights Act. So in the absence of Section 2, those districts might not exist, even if they're a 45% black district or 42% black district that has been electing African-American candidates that are the preference of the African-American community. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00So if I understand further, you experts have to explain this to me. But if you have a majority-minority district that wasn't originally required to comply with Section 2, and a state legislature gets a census and has to redistrict, and they, for whatever reason, dilute this majority-minority district, would they then be under the traditional interpretation of Section 2 being violation of Section 2? It depends. I'll give you a great example.
SPEAKER_03Did I hear Rick say yes? Go ahead.
SPEAKER_02I think it depends. For a while, you had both Section 5 and Section 2 to contend with. So I actually represented the Louisiana House of Representatives in 2011, which was the first redistricting post-Catrina. And, you know, we had a situation where something like 350,000 people moved from the Greater Orleans area mostly to elsewhere in the state. So when we were districting, we had districts where, you know, a state house district around Orleans that should have had 42,000 people or so as an ideal population, had 17,000 people. So we were ultimately the legislature, the how the state house in Louisiana was able to draw, actually increase the number of majority minority districts by one, but they were in dramatically different areas of the state. You couldn't maintain the same number of African-American majority districts around Orleans because the population simply wasn't there.
SPEAKER_00Well, that sounds like an unusual circumstance where you had a dispersal of a population. How about other predominantly African American communities in other southern states which have retained their composition racially or a majority-minority district of black voters? Are they safe? Do they have to remain majority minority?
SPEAKER_03So if you're asking under the traditional view of Section 2 before the Supreme Court decision this spring, the answer would be that if there's racially polarized voting and if the minority community has cohesive political preferences and minority candidates are not being elected to a significant extent, then the state has an obligation to create what we called ability to elect districts. They didn't have to be majority-minority, but they had to give this equal opportunity to elect candidates that the minority community preferred. And maybe this is again too far ahead of the story, but in the 2010 round of redistricting, Republicans, for the first time since Reconstruction, were in control of the process in southern states. And in a number of those states, they took positions that the Voting Rights Act required them to, I would say, pack black voters into districts at rates that were not necessary, actually, to provide the ability to elect. So in a case I argued before the Supreme Court in 2014 out of Alabama, the Alabama legislature had said, well, we think the VRA requires us to keep the black populations at exactly the same levels they had before redistricting. So that meant if a district had become 70% black, they said, well, we have to maintain it at 70% black. But that was way in excess of anything necessary, even in the face of polarized voting, to provide this equal opportunity for the minority voters in Alabama to elect their preferred candidates. So in the in the case I argued, the Supreme Court said the constitution is violated if states pack black voters into districts at levels that are excessive and unjustified, meaning the Voting Rights Act couldn't require this. And one of the things people don't, you don't hear nearly as much about in the press, but the Supreme Court actually struck down redistrict Republican-generated redistricting maps in the 2010 round of redistricting from Alabama, Virginia, and North Carolina, because those legislatures, in the court's view, had used race in excessive ways, way beyond what the Voting Rights Act actually required.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Jason, I'll let you jump in here. But just so I again understand, the Voting Rights Act, as then interpreted by the Supreme Court, was violated when legislatures put in too many African American voters in the same district. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_03Not the Voting Rights Act was violated. The 14th Amendment was violated. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Which is equal protection again?
SPEAKER_03Which is equal protection.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So it was violated because there were too many minority voters in a district.
SPEAKER_03That's right. That's right. So the structure of the doctrine, Jan, just to help clear it up for you, was that if a state is using race as the predominant factor in moving people in and out of districts, it has to meet strict scrutiny. The justification that the court had accepted to meet strict scrutiny, or at least had assumed was a just uh acceptable justification, was complying with the Voting Rights Act. If the Voting Rights Act required this, then you had a defense under strict scrutiny. But if you were packing black voters in at levels that the Voting Rights Act did not sort of plausibly require, then you don't have a defense under strict scrutiny to what you've done, and you violated the 14th Amendment. That was the structure of the law in the 2010 round of redistricting, or that emerged in the 2010 round, starting with the Alabama case that I argued successfully. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00That may be a good point to segue to what happened since that time, after the 2020 redistricting, right? Which brings us to today theoretically. And that issue that you just described seems to have been involved in the recent Louisiana case that involved Jason, not the other Louisiana case, but the current Louisiana case called Calais, right? So what did the Supreme Court change as a result of the Calais case?
SPEAKER_02Let me just step back and give you a little bit of the history of Calais and Louisiana. So in the 1990s, when Louisiana had seven congressional districts, Louisiana tried three tribes to draw a second majority minority district. They had the traditional, as I described, the congressional majority-minority congressional district around Orleans, and they tried three times to draw a second that tried to unify black population that was spread around in other parts of the state. And three times, like I mentioned, when the courts looked at the shapes of the districts, they said these are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. So in 2001, by 2001, the state went by the late 90s, the state had gone back to the traditional single majority minority district around Orleans, kept that in place in 2001. Then you had the population shift in Louisiana in 2007 that I described following Hurricane Katrina. So in order to maintain the majority-minority district they had, and by the way, the state had dropped back to six congressional districts at this point, they basically unified the African-American community in Orleans and in part of Baton Rouge, kind of following the snake-like shape of the Mississippi River, to connect Baton Rouge and Orleans, because there simply wasn't enough population, particularly enough African-American population left in Orleans to make a majority minority district. So that was that Orleans-Baton Rouge district was what was adopted in 2011. In 2022, when the census data came out for 2020, uh, you had a situation where you had a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor. The Democratic governor said, we need a second majority minority district in Louisiana's congressional districts. And the legislature said, No, we don't. We should have one. And they overrode the governor's veto of the map and they reenacted basically a map that looked very similar to the map that they had in 2011. They were immediately sued in the middle district of Louisiana. And a district judge in the middle district said, Yep, you have to draw a second majority minority district because all of these jingles requirements are met, and you have to draw it. So the state went up, appealed at the Fifth Circuit.
SPEAKER_00Let me just say, this is very good and very helpful to me, but just to understand what the district court did at this stage, they said you have to draw a second African-American majority district because Section 2 required it? Correct.
SPEAKER_02The middle district told the state section two required it.
SPEAKER_00They had to draw up two opportunity districts, which don't have to be majority black.
SPEAKER_03Well, they just have to provide the ability to elect. There's no debate about that. I mean, that's clearly what the law is. They only have to create an ability to elect district under section two. They don't have to draw a majority black district. Supreme Court's made that very clear.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So the district with the middle district of Louisiana told Louisiana they had to draw a second black district. The decision was stayed and the case was paused pending. The other Alabama case, the decade later, a Rick's Alabama case, was sort of pending. The case went through the Supreme Court, did not upend the district court decision out of Alabama. The Supreme Court sent the Louisiana case back down for basically remedial proceedings. And by this time, Louisiana had a Republican governor who had been the attorney general and still a Republican legislature. And the governor said, Great, I'm going to call the legislature into special session. We're going to draw a new district. So they called the legislature into special session, and the legislature drew a second majority minority district.
SPEAKER_00So this is the second uh meeting of the legislature to draw another map.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00In the same decade, right?
SPEAKER_02Same decade. You know, subject to the court order. So the state said, Great, we're going to draw a second majority minority district. So they kept, you know, a bunch of the Orleans-Baton Rouge shape. And then, you know, there isn't enough African-American population in Southeast Louisiana to draw a second district there, no matter whose map you looked at. So you had to get more African-American population somewhere else. And so you either needed to go up to Monroe, which is what the plaintiffs in the case wanted, or you had to go to Shreveport, which is what the legislature did. So it created this district that looked like a backslash down the center of the state. Within a week of the governor signing that second majority minority district, the state was sued in the Western District of Louisiana. And now we had a three-judge court in the Western District of Louisiana alleging that the map with the second majority minority district was a racial gerrymander, it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the 14th Amendment. After an expedited proceeding in April of 2024, the three-judge court in the Western District of Louisiana issued an opinion saying drawing the second majority minority district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. So now you're the state and you're like, I drew one and a federal court told me no. And now I drew two and a federal court told me no.
SPEAKER_03Let me interject here if anybody's still listening at this point since we're so deep in the weeds. But to win their case, to prove that the state under the Voting Rights Act had an obligation to create a second VRA district, the plaintiffs identified a region of the state, as Jason was mentioning, which was basically in the northeast part of the state, where a second reasonably compact VRA district could have been drawn. The legislature didn't want to draw the district there for political reasons. They wanted to protect the Republican incumbent up there, and they wanted to screw a Republican incumbent who was kind of on the outs with the legislature, partly because he had opposed Steve Scalise in the House leadership contests and for other reasons. So the Voting Rights Act didn't require them to draw this highly contorted district. The Voting Rights Act required them to draw a reasonably compact district, which they could have drawn. They just refused to do that for political and incumbent reasons. That's why they ended up with a district that the courts then said violates the Constitution.
SPEAKER_00And you, Rick, are also observing that part of the legislative decision making here was not necessarily racial decision making. It was to protect an incumbent, who I understand may have been the Speaker of the House of Representatives as well. I don't know if it was that district. No, it wasn't that. They had partisan political reasons to devise the districts the way that they devise them, even with the two districts, right? So all this mess comes up to the Supreme Court. And what does the Supreme Court do?
SPEAKER_03Well, if you want me to uh start that discussion off. So basically, the Supreme Court decision in C. was teed up last term before the court. It was argued. And then the court said we want to have re-argument in the case because the court clearly wanted to consider very, very large issues that hadn't been fully kind of briefed in the initial round. So this term, the case was re-argued, rebriefed. By the way, you now had a change of administration. So you had the Solicitor General of the United States coming in on behalf of Louisiana in this case. And in the opinion by Justice Alito, we could talk about a lot of the details, but fundamentally, the opinion redefines what makes a violation under Section Two in such a way that Section two, I think, will have almost no practical impact anymore. I I think the decision really neutered Section Two for most practical purposes. I think there were things that had changed since the Supreme Court created this framework in 1986 in this Thornburg versus Jingles case that Jason mentioned. And there are various ways the court might have modified that framework to an extent to take those changes into account. There were a number of ways of doing that that had been proposed. But the court went much, much farther than that and adopted a way of applied Section Two that I think, I think most people who study this believe really eviscerates it and makes it almost of no practical significance.
SPEAKER_00That's the result. Right. Now uh part of the explanation for the outcome, if I understand it correctly, is that the court distinguished racial motivations in contrast to whether or not redistricting is motivated by partisan considerations. And this whole issue of can it be unconstitutional to redistrict using just partisan motivations? That's something you're quite familiar with, Rick, because that's an issue that you were involved in again at the Supreme Court. And just to speed up the whole timeline for our listeners a little bit, that uh in 1986, I think the Supreme Court said it's possible that partisan motivation could be unconstitutional, although they were unable to identify a single instance of it whenever a case came up to it. And that brings us to the Ruco case or Rucho.
SPEAKER_03Rucho, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, which was what in 2018 or 20?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think roughly 2017, 2018. There you go. All right.
SPEAKER_00So and this is a case where the allegation was that some redistricting in Arizona was unconstitutionally partisan. What happened?
SPEAKER_03Right. Well, they had they so they actually had two cases before them. One was from North Carolina, which was a Republican partisan gerrymander, one was from Maryland, which was a Democratic partisan gerrymander. And as you said, the Supreme Court in the mid-80s had held that partisan gerrymandering could violate the Constitution, but they had never struck down a plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The case out of North Carolina, so I represented Common Cause in this case, Common Cause versus Retro. In the case out of North Carolina, you had statements from the Republican legislatures who were leading the redistricting process, the chairs of the committees, you know, saying things like, well, we've drawn the map the way we have because we couldn't figure out how to create one more Republican district. Or we think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So that's why we drew these districts in the way we did. You know, there's no question the partisan motivation was explicit. It was, as they said, it was as far as they could figure out how to go in turning a what is roughly a purple state, maybe somewhat Republican-leaning, but certainly not a deep red state into a state with uh an 11-2 congressional delegation. So I have long argued against partisan gerrymandering. I've long wanted constitutional constraints on it. I think that's it kind of follows in the wake of Baker versus Carr and Reynolds versus Sims, and the court recognizing that one of the problems in democracy inherently is that if those with power have the power to control the election process, there's a risk they will use that power to entrench themselves and their partisan allies more deeply in office in anti-competitive kinds of ways. So I think that's what the court recognized that idea in the one-vote-one-person cases. I was hoping the court would recognize the same thing and impose some constraint on partisan gerrymandering. So while I was successful in the Alabama case, we were unsuccessful in the Rucho case, five to four. And the Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims are not justiciable at the federal courts, meaning the federal courts are not open to hearing these claims based on the court's conclusion that there aren't appropriate judicial standards to manage this problem, to address the problem.
SPEAKER_00So they took one step back to the era of Justice Frankfurter who said, We're not going to get into this, right?
SPEAKER_03I think that's a good way to put it. Yes.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And in fact, I'd like to poll the current Supreme Court to see whether they think they should go all the way back to Justice Frankfurter and stay out of this mess, which they seem to be enthralled with. My reason for fleshing this out with both of you is uh to explain in terms of the Calais case, the Louisiana case, where you, Rick, have observed the result is that it has arguably uh uh really diluted the effectiveness of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, that the justification in the case, in part, was that really the motivation Louisiana, just like the motivation North Carolina that you just described, was partisan. It was not racial discrimination, it was partisan motivations. So that seems to change the whole redistricting ballgame quite a bit. If that's no longer unc partisan redistricting is no longer unconstitutional, and if it can mask racial discrimination, or at least arguably uh substitute for it, then uh we we are in a different ball game, which seems to be the reason why we one of the reasons, there are other reasons, one of the reasons that we are in this era where redistricting is now just going to be a a very, very different game.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So can I just elaborate a bit on what you said? Yes. And to use the example you asked about, you know, under you asked about under Section 2, or the way it had been understood all the way up until this Calais case, what would happen if a state decided we want to get rid of this Voting Rights Act district or this majority black district? And that's exactly what becomes permissible under this Calais decision. So, as an example, one of the things that happened in the aftermath was Tennessee decided to take a district that had been based on Memphis, that actually a former student of mine, his father occupied this district for many, many years, Harold Ford, then he was.
SPEAKER_00Harold Ford Jr., he was there when I was a law student.
SPEAKER_03Right. And then Harold Ford Jr., who was my student at Michigan Law School, then ran for the seat and won it and held it for a number of years. And I think he was one of maybe the second youngest person ever elected to Congress at the time he he was elected. In any event, the Tennessee legislature in the immediate aftermath, if Calais carved that district up and spread those black voters out around surrounding districts so they no longer were concentrated into an effective opportunity district. And what Calais permits is for the Tennessee legislature to say, we want these districts to be Republican districts. And that over effectively overrides the Voting Rights Act claim. So, I mean, to go back to Louisiana, for example, Louisiana has six districts. If the Republican legislature says we want all six of these districts to be Republican-leaning districts, the Voting Rights Act under Section Two had said, well, you can't do that if you're going to dilute minority voting power. But now that kind of, in a sense, overrides Section Two, or that's a defense to a Section Two claim. That's why, in my view, Calais kind of really eviscerates Section Two, because if a state can say, we want to make these districts Republican, at least as long as VRA districts are electing Democrats, as they all almost all do, I think maybe they all do, I should say, you'll never be able to win a Section Two claim in a redistricting context, if that's an appropriate defense. So that's a really dramatic change.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it is. And you know, I think your Tennessee example, which uh is a good one, is also Reflective of the complexity of uh redistricting results because the district, which had for decades been represented by either Harold Ford Sr. or Harold Ford Jr. for the last 10 or so years, has been represented by a white Democrat. Right. Even though it was a majority black community in that congressional district, they have elected a white representative.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So the V so the VRI didn't require the election of minority candidates. It required, where there was polarized voting, an equal opportunity to elect minority preferred candidates. Now, in most instances, those were minority candidates, but there were a few examples, like Steve Cohn from Memphis, uh the minority community having a strong preference for a white candidate who was then elected from these VRA districts. That's a good example.
SPEAKER_02So one of the criticisms that Republicans have long had of the Voting Rights Act and the way it's been used and interpreted by courts is that essentially it was used as a ratchet to create more Democrat-leaning districts. And I'll just give you one example. I actually have a cert petition pending in two cases that I'm handling out of Washington State right now. Washington State and the Washington State legislature, they had a commission that draws their districts, and the commission agreed to draw a majority Hispanic citizen voting age population district in the Yakima Valley. The district elected a female Republican Hispanic to the state senate. And the UCLA voting rights project challenged the district as unlawful under Section 2 and claimed that it unlawfully diluted the votes of Hispanic voters, despite the fact that it elected a Hispanic Republican woman. And after trial, the judge found that it did. And then he issued a remedy that drew it as a no longer a majority Hispanic district. So this is literally like literally they that the testimony was the district elected the wrong kind of Hispanic to the district. I mean, people sat on the on the witness stand at trial and said she's the wrong kind of Hispanic because she was a Republican Hispanic, not a Democrat Hispanic. And the judge said, yes. And so this is the this is the sort of twisting and manipulation of the law that Republicans have long criticized about, you know, kind of how the Voting Rights Act has been interpreted. And I think that that message from Republicans broke through to the court, and the court really started to realize how the Voting Rights Act has been manipulated to essentially elect more Democrats.
SPEAKER_03Here's the way I think about the relationship of the Act to partisan politics. So in the 1990s, as we talked about at the very beginning, Republicans actually very much liked the Voting Rights Act because at the time, by creating these VRA districts, it did make surrounding districts more Republicans. And so there was this alliance between Republicans and voting rights groups in the 1990s. And in 2000, I don't think there were big partisan effects. In 2010, Republicans, you know, were in charge of redistricting, and they basically were willing to live with the VRA status quo. And even in 2020, the redistricting, they didn't really, in southern states, go after the existing VRA districts. But I do think that over time, as partisan gerrymandering wars got more and more intense, and as control of the House seemed to turn on finer and finer margins, and both sides started trying to squeeze out every additional district they could for their side. Republicans started looking at areas like New England, where Republicans get 40% of the votes, but none of the congressional seats are Republican-leaning. And then they come to the South and they say, well, we have control of the process here. Why do we have to create these Democratic-leaning districts, you know, in Louisiana or Alabama and the like? And so I do think that the changing nature of partisan competition over districting and the sense that politics has become existential. So who controls the House or the Senate or the White House? The stakes are viewed as so high that I think the partisan effects of the VRA became more of an irritant to Republicans, though they didn't go after these districts in the 2020 round of redistricting. What happened is VRA plaintiffs won additional districts after 2020 in places like Alabama and Louisiana. And that's what triggered these states to then really fight very hard before what they thought rightly would be a sympathetic Supreme Court to kind of push back on all of that. But but I think the partisan effects of the act became more of a real irritant, if that's the right word, more upsetting, more disturbing to Republicans as the partisan gerrymandering wars reached the intense white hot point they've gotten to.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I agree with Rick on that. And I really do think there were some advocates on the Democratic side who I think pushed the Voting Rights Act claims for partisan advantage in a way that really did cause a backlash from Republicans. And I think despite the fact that certain Democratic lawyers are like, oh my God, the Supreme Court did this. I think you have to put that in the context that Rick just did, which is as the Voting Rights Act was used by certain advocates on the left to push for more Democratic seats, it became a problem for Republicans who wanted to maintain control of the House or even of state legislatures. And I think that's where this kind of came to a head in Calais at the Supreme Court.
SPEAKER_00Well, this uh all brings us to the observation uh that our national politics has become much more polarized and seems to be very narrowly split uh between the two major parties, and that's contributing to all this intensity that you just described in terms of redistricting. It also seems to have contributed to uh the activities relating to mid-decade redistricting, right? You you everyone is worried about the upcoming uh off-year election, and uh the Republicans uh want to maximize their seats in Texas, and the Democrats respond by maximizing their seats in California and elsewhere. I did ask uh Rick before the the program, uh you know, has has this ever happened before where it has been redistricting mid-decade? And I understand it has. Uh when did that happen, Rick?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so the last time this happened in in a major way was actually out of Texas in the early 2000s. And the context there was the Texas legislature had been divided along party lines at the time of the census and the redistricting. So the federal courts imposed a redistricting plan. Then in subsequent elections, Republicans got full control of the process in Texas, and they said, well, we don't want to live with this court-ordered plan. So they engaged in mid-decade redistricting in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. And I filed an amicus brief in that case on behalf of myself and two of my academic colleagues at NYU, Sam Zakharov and Burt Newborn, arguing that even if the court wasn't prepared to take on partisan gerrymandering as a general matter, it should recognize a ban on mid-decade redistricting when not done subject to a court order. And what we were concerned about at that time was that this would set off this terrible spiral in which states would constantly try to improve their margins, election cycle to election cycle, by engaging in mid-decade redistricting. We thought this was very bad for the democratic process, constantly destabilizing the districts. Voters have enough time understanding who their congressperson is if you're changing their districts every two years. And at the time, I thought that that what Texas was doing might set that off. It actually didn't. I mean, the Supreme Court rejected the argument, needless to say.
SPEAKER_00Well, they did another Frankfurter, right? They said, no, we're not gonna go. You know, it's not in the Constitution, it's not illegal by statute. I mean, right.
SPEAKER_03Some state, some state yeah, some some state constitutions or some state courts ban it as a matter of state law.
SPEAKER_00So you know, states can change their laws as long as it doesn't violate the constitution.
SPEAKER_03Death spiral didn't really happen in the 2000s that I was worried about. And it didn't happen after the 2010 round of redistricting, but it's happened today because and it was set off by President Trump pushing the Texas legislature to redraw its districts, to squeeze out more Republican seats in a context in which partisan control of the House hangs on a kind of a knife's edge. And and that triggered this whole spiral that I had been worried about 20 some years ago that didn't happen, but is is actually happening now. And of course, Democrats said we're not gonna sit by you know and unilaterally disarm. If Republicans are gonna do this, we're gonna do it. And and I think this is just very bad for the democratic process.
SPEAKER_02You have the collision of the president's push for the mid-decade redistricting with the Calais decision coming out at the exact same time. And I think it was a it was a perfect storm of opportunity for folks on both sides to really engage in a fight that happened over the last six months, and I think is going to continue into the the 2028 cycle.
SPEAKER_00One of the things that's uh grown out of this, uh, and I kind of want to make sure we wrap up here uh in time by covering not only redistricting, but also the element of the Supreme Court, which is deciding how to inject itself in these issues, as we just discussed. You know, are they gonna are they gonna do a Frankfurter or are they gonna do an Earl Warren, right? And and really get into this stuff. And uh so the Supreme Court is controversial. Uh there are discussions and and debates about you know that whether they're doing the right thing and whether they are two partisan. And uh Rick, uh you served on President Biden's commission on the Supreme Court that was vested with sort of analyzing that issue even before we got to Calais and the current redistricting disputes, and whether or not uh to recommend that Congress uh increase the size of the number of justices on the Supreme Court, which is the power of Congress to make it bigger, make it smaller, more justices, fewer justices. The Constitution doesn't say anything about that. It's up to Congress, right? What did the Commission do? And did it come out with any recommendations that might be relevant to our discussion here or redistrict?
SPEAKER_03Well, so as a starting point, the executive order that created the commission instructed the commission not to make recommendations. And that's actually not an uncommon thing because presidents don't want to be boxed in by their own commissions. What triggered the commission was that, you know, during the Democratic primaries and the run-up to 2020, there was a lot of discussion about this issue of, you know, court packing or expanding the court. And President Biden or candidate Joe Biden at the time didn't want to take a position on that. He thought, I think he said during the campaign, I would appoint a commission to study these issues. And our mission was to look at the major reform ideas that are out there about the court, not just to look at court packing, but we looked into adopting the 18-year terms for the justices. We looked into congressional control of the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. We looked into ethics reform concerning the court. It was a very large commission, 35-some people. I think many people expected the president to appoint a very like a completely Democratic party-oriented commission. That wasn't the case. The commission was co-chaired by Bob Bauer, who did White House counsel to President Obama, and Christina Rodriguez, who's now the Dean of Yale Law School. And it was intentionally designed to be somewhat bipartisan or somewhat cross-ideological. So what the commission did, and I'm actually quite proud of the commission's work, was to look at all of these major proposals and to go through the issues about them. What's the history behind the issue? What are the pros? What are the cons? What considerations have to be taken into account if reform was going to go in this direction or that direction? So I think I didn't expect anything to happen, you know, in the immediate aftermath of the commission's report, which is like a three or four hundred-page study of the court. But I do think if we get to moments where court reform is a serious political issue, I think the report will be a kind of a major starting point or a blueprint for discussions if a political window opens up. And you know, people on the commission definitely divided, had different views about these various issues. There was not any uniform view about almost any of these issues, even within the commission.
SPEAKER_00I assume that this uh commission report is available uh online somewhere, certainly at the NYU law library, at the very least.
SPEAKER_03Well, it used to be on the White House. I I haven't looked uh since President Trump took office, but I know you used to be able to just go to the White House webpage, look for Supreme Court Commission, and find it. I uh after this podcast, I'm gonna go take a look to see if it's still available there. But it's a it's a yeah, it's a public U.S. government document.
SPEAKER_00All right. So and uh nothing actually happened after that in terms of any Biden proposals or any proposed uh legislation, or what was there?
SPEAKER_03Aaron Ross Powell Some Democrats have introduced legislation on some of these issues, but but it's always been at a very low level so far. But you definitely hear Democrats in the campaign mode talking about already about court reform needing to be on the table. What there are different kinds of reforms that one could talk about.
SPEAKER_00So And when it comes to term limits, as was discussed by the Commission, and you mentioned 18 years. Currently, Supreme Court justices serve for life. Uh that's correct. And a term limit, however, would require, would it not, an amendment to the Constitution?
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell Well, that's a question that academics debate, and there is that debate is played out in the report. There are some people who think it can be done by statute in various ways. There are some who think it would require a constitutional amendment. There are issues about would it apply to the sitting justices or only to new appointments? You know, there are a lot of well one of the things the commission process generated was a recognition of all the kinds of questions that have to be thought through for any of these uh kind of uh proposals. But uh, you know, I would mention we, Supreme Court is the only high court in the world in which justices do not have either a mandatory retirement age or a fixed term of office. Life tenure has changed dramatically over the years. So, you know, up till 1970, the average justice served 15 years. Since 1970, you know, we're seeing people stay on the court getting appointed much younger, staying on the court much longer. So the average length of service has gone way up what it had been historically up until the 1970s or so.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Some people would say that there are many aspects of our constitutional system you won't find anywhere else in the world. And that might be a reason to preserve those elements. But that's for another day and another debate. Before we sign off, after this wonderful discussion, in order to wrap up redistricting, I'd like to recognize each of you for a short prognostication of you know what to look for going forward in redistricting, you know, between now and let's say the next census, which is only in 2030. I mean, we're we're only four years away from the next census. So let me start with Jason and then Rick.
SPEAKER_02So I think we're gonna be looking at additional legislatures, both Democratic and Republican legislatures meeting in 2027 to redraw for 2028, where they see opportunities. I think that's quite likely. I think 2030, particularly after the census comes out, all of the population projections show a shift of about 10 or 15 seats from what are traditionally thought of as blue states to what are traditionally thought of as red states. And this will affect not only the U.S. House of Representatives, but also the Electoral College in ways that could be very dramatic for the next decade. So I think that looks like it's coming down the pike in 2030, unless these population shifts that are projected and are kind of underway between states change or reverse, which at least at this point they don't show any signs of slowing down. Just to give you a quick example, California could lose between five and seven congressional districts because of the population shifts out of California to other states. Democrats losing five to seven electoral votes out of California for the 2032 and 2030, 2036, and 2040 presidential elections could be very significant. So I think redistricting and reapportionment, I think, are gonna be on people's minds a lot the next couple of years.
SPEAKER_03And Rick. Yeah, I think I think that's right. I think that you're gonna see more aggressive partisan gerrymandering still. You might think we've gotten to the endpoint, but we haven't gotten to the end point. I think these redistricting wars are just gonna continue. Each side is gonna really maximize its number of seats in states in which it has control. I don't think it's gonna be good for voters or for the democratic process or confidence in the process. I do wonder if Congress would consider some significant reform going into the 2030 process. Any reform like that would probably have to have some degree of bipartisan support. You know, you could imagine maybe the Senate gets rid of the filibuster, maybe one side rams through some approach to gerrymandering over the, but I still think it's more likely you would need some degree of bipartisan support. So there are certain reforms that could do that that would really significantly reduce the effects of partisan gerrymandering. I don't want to get too far into this, I guess, at the end of a podcast, but but there are there are ways of designing the process through legislation that would significantly reduce partisan gerrymandering and in a way that would neither give one party nor the other any significant advantage. Uh, but we can leave discussion of that perhaps for another time.
SPEAKER_00I don't know what the future would be for proposals that don't give one party or the other a significant advantage, that uh always seems to be an obstacle in uh legislation and compromise.
SPEAKER_03I I think a lot of people on both sides recognize that this process has gotten to a point where it's really unhealthy. And so if there are approaches that don't seem to tilt the deck one way or the other, maybe there's some opening for that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, uh, let's hope so. I I say what I said, not to be uh negative about this, but having uh seen Congress work for the last 40, 50 years, when it comes to any proposals that really implicate their own re-election, they're they may complain about the process, but the solutions don't seem to invite bipartisan solutions uh by and large. Well, let me just thank both of you, uh Richard Pildis and Jason Torchinski for being on early returns. I also want to thank our sponsor, the Holtzman Vogel Law Firm, for their support of this program. Any opinions that are expressed here, I have to say each episode that those opinions are those of our host, me, and our guests, and that they do not necessarily reflect the views of our sponsors or their clients. By the way, all of our episodes are available on BuzzSprout as well as other podcast platforms such as Spotify and the National Law Review. I hope you listeners will check them out. And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join us on the next edition of Early Returns. Have a good day.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for joining Early Returns, Law and Politics with Jon Baron. We hope you will join us for future episodes, which will continue to bring you voices and insights from the people engaged in our political landscape.
