Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 18m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 61.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, sailors start a mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin.
Adam Liptak reports Supreme Court Rejects Theory That Would Have Transformed American Elections (‘The 6-3 majority dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory, which would have given state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over federal elections’):
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a legal theory that would have radically reshaped how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures largely unchecked power to set all sorts of rules for federal elections and to draw congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering.
The vote was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing the majority opinion. The Constitution, he said, “does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
The case concerned the “independent state legislature” theory. The doctrine is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”
Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organs of state government — not courts, not governors, not election administrators, not independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections.
The case, Moore v. Harper, No. 21-1271, concerned a voting map drawn by the North Carolina Legislature that was initially rejected as a partisan gerrymander by the state’s Supreme Court. Experts said the map was likely to yield a congressional delegation made up of 10 Republicans and four Democrats.
….
The state court rejected the argument that it was not entitled to review the actions of the state’s Legislature, saying that adopting the independent state legislature theory would be “repugnant to the sovereignty of states, the authority of state constitutions and the independence of state courts, and would produce absurd and dangerous consequences.”
See Moore v Harper, No. 21–1271, slip op (2023):
Pompeii fresco depicts what might be the precursor of pizza: