The Virginia redistricting decision

Although I am first to criticize the lack of common sense and inability to stick to facts of most LLMs ("AI"), this response to my question by ChatGPT is very telling. BTW, if I had asked the question with a bias towards the outcome, the answer would have been different. But I think this is nonetheless interesting and largely correct. 

My question: 

  I'm pretty shocked by the Virginia Supreme Court decision on the redistricting referendum. I thought courts were deferential to votes of legislative bodies, but EVEN MORE deferential to actual votes of the electorate. And given the recent green light to the most egregious gerrymandering by the US Supreme Court, I don't get how they could reach this decision with a straight face. Can you explain its rationale, and whether the consensus is that it's a primarily politically motivated decision?   

ChatGPT (Open AI)'s answer: 

Your reaction is not unusual. A great many legal commentators — including some who are not especially sympathetic to partisan Democratic redistricting — seem to think the Virginia Supreme Court majority reached for a highly technical procedural rationale in order to invalidate a result it politically disliked. The decision has already generated a lot of commentary precisely because it feels in tension with the modern judiciary’s generally extreme reluctance to overturn enacted maps or voter-approved measures. (Vox)

The core of the court’s reasoning was not, formally speaking, about whether the map itself was an impermissible gerrymander. In fact, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, federal courts largely treat partisan gerrymandering as a “political question” outside their competence. So the Virginia court instead focused on the amendment process itself.

Under the Virginia constitution, constitutional amendments proposed by the legislature must pass in two separate legislative sessions with an intervening general election between them, so voters can theoretically weigh the issue when electing legislators. The majority held that the first legislative approval happened after early voting had already begun for the relevant election. Therefore, they reasoned, the constitutionally required “intervening election” had already started, meaning the process was defective from the outset. (PBS)

That sounds technical because it is technical. The entire dispute turned on what counts as an “election.” Does “the election” mean Election Day itself, or does it mean the entire early-voting period? The majority adopted the latter interpretation. Since some Virginians had already cast ballots before the legislature acted, the court concluded those voters were deprived of the chance to evaluate legislators’ positions on the amendment before voting. (PBS)

The dissenters reportedly argued this interpretation was both overly formalistic and democratically perverse because the electorate ultimately did vote directly on the amendment itself. In other words, even if the procedural sequence was imperfect, the people ratified it anyway. That is very close to the intuition you expressed. (Vox)

And that gets to the heart of why so many observers see the ruling as politically motivated.

Courts are indeed often deferential to enacted legislation. But they are especially deferential to constitutional amendments approved by voters, because striking one down means overriding not merely legislators but the sovereign electorate itself. Traditionally, courts usually require a very clear constitutional violation before doing that.

Here, critics argue the court:

adopted the narrowest and most outcome-determinative reading possible of “election,”
treated early voting as constitutionally transformative in a way Virginia precedent had not clearly established,
and imposed an exceptionally rigid procedural standard despite the referendum’s actual ratification by millions of voters. (Vox)

The broader political context also matters enormously. This case arose amid an escalating national tit-for-tat redistricting war after Republican-controlled states such as Texas and Florida pursued aggressive mid-decade remaps. Virginia Democrats openly intended this amendment as a countermeasure that could shift as many as four House seats toward Democrats. (The Guardian)

That context makes the asymmetry feel striking to many people:

Federal courts, including the current U.S. Supreme Court, have largely tolerated highly aggressive partisan gerrymanders.
But the Virginia court then invalidated a voter-approved Democratic response on procedural grounds.

So even people who dislike the Democratic map itself often see an inconsistency in judicial attitude. The message can appear to be: substantive partisan gerrymandering is acceptable, but procedural imperfections in attempts to counter it are fatal.

There is not complete consensus that the ruling was “purely political.” Conservative defenders argue that constitutional amendment procedures exist precisely to constrain temporary partisan passions, and that courts have a duty to enforce those procedures strictly regardless of consequences. They would say that if early voting has become part of the election itself, then legislators cannot constitutionally wait until voting is already underway before acting. That is at least a legally intelligible argument.

But the dominant reaction in mainstream legal commentary so far seems to be that the majority chose an unusually aggressive remedy and an unusually rigid interpretation in a context where courts normally bend heavily toward validating voter-approved measures. (Vox)

 

  

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"The answer" to life, the universe & everything isn't 42 (Sorry, Douglas Adams), but 1/137, known as the fine structure constant, α (alpha), a pure, dimensionless number equal to the proportional strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles (which is essentially everything we actually see and feel):

α = ⁠e²4πε₀ħc ⁠≅ 1/137.0

Why it has this value, very close to the ratio of two integers, and not some other arbitrary value, is a cosmic mystery.