“I took some of your arguments in the briefs to be that extreme partisan gerrymandering is a real problem for our democracy,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh told lawyers challenging congressional district maps in North Carolina, drawn by Republicans, and in Maryland, drawn by Democrats, “and I'm not going to dispute that.”
Caused by as well as a cause of hyper-partisanship and polarization, and — many constitutional scholars argue — a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, gerrymandering is, indeed, a problem for democracy. The practice is extreme — and pervasive.
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