Roberts and Gorsuch aren't obsessed with winning every short-game match up. They need gerrymandering to be legal in the abstract and for the long term. If they start trying to thread the needle between California and Texas, they give the lower courts more opportunities to overturn maps in Republican states and a future SCOTUS more elbow room to overturn their whole reading of legislative maps.

In a wave year where Republicans are likely getting swamped out of dozens of seats anyway, there's very little to gain and a lot to lose by creating an exception to the rule on when gerrymandering is legal.

I'm sure they have something worse up their sleeve, and this wasn't worth the PR flak they'd catch.

I'm sure they'll use this to justify flipping the Texas decision

In guessing plan B. If California can use this democrat friendly slanted map then every other state can use whatever conservative slanted maps they draw up.

It's both actually. The justices beholden to Trumpanzee were informed that the election will be stolen anyway and so the fallout from them "looking even more like clowns" wasn't necessary.

The question was more about the constitutionality behind how the map was decided. Republicans were arguing it was about race which is unconstitutional. You can only gerrymander to make a one party state.... Which like... Wtf?

The weird thing is this CA law removed anti-gerrymandering laws. We had a legal barrier here in CA, but this law was to remove that barrier so we could counter TX. It sucked voting for it.

The change is time constrained. Anti gerrymandering laws go back into place.

This was already legally happening in Texas. Cali did this in response to Texas being allowed to heavily gerrymander their state in Republican favor.

Editing to add: And it's a time-constrained deal. This new map will only exist until 2030 when the maps would be redrawn anyhow. Cali put this up to a vote. Texas just...did it without a vote. Its near impossible for on-the-ground voters to get anything on a ballot in Texas due to the way the state Constitution is written.

They have already ruled that severe and perverse gerrymandering is okay. Only racist gerrymandering is technically illegal, but they recently made that acceptable, too. Burn it down and start over.

As long as no one being here illegally was voting,

Narrator: "They weren't."

there is no net political loss for Democrats.

Possibly the opposite. Many of those violently kidnapped and deported have friends and family that ARE citizens and CAN vote. Many of them probably naively voted R in the last election. I suspect many of them will not make that mistake in the midterms.

The GOP will never support clean cut voting laws, they have to manipulate the votes to win anything they haven't had the numbers to win an election since Nixon. That's the reason our voting laws are convoluted in the first place.

There isnt any need for a constituonal amendment to stop gerrymandering. A simple act of Congress will do it

And, to be absolutely clear, nothing less than an act of Congress will stop it nationwide. And any anti-gerrymandering measure that isn't nationwide is an endorsement of partisan gerrymandering in red states.

So, this CA law is removing the anti-gerrymandering legislation that CA Democrats got enacted. The Democrats proposed a state-wide initiative to stop gerrymandering. It won, and we were all happy. Now we have to remove that legislation because Republicans in other states are going the other direction.

If you think getting 20 Republican governors to sign up for a Constitutional amendment that will destroy the chances of a Republican majority US House is a doable do, then I have a bridge to sell you. The thing is, even proposing it would cost the taxpayers million in all the logistical crap that would happen to have a vote for something guaranteed to fail.

I think they're fully confident armed ICE and CBP will be able to keep any lefties and minorities away from the polling booths in Cali,

They've fallen back to "well it doesn't matter anyway because elections will be canceled."