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Supreme Court Makes Decision To Hear Gerrymandering Case

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


The Supreme Court is set to be back to work in October and one case that it has agreed to hear has many waiting in anticipation.

The case is to decide if Republican legislators from North Carolina GOP have the authority to draw a partisan election map and not have state judges interfering.

“The decision could impact future congressional and presidential elections. The high court will take up the case when its next term begins in October,” the report stated.

“The case of Moore vs. Harper, asks the court to uphold the concept – known as the independent state legislature theory – that state legislators have the sole and independent authority to set rules for. North Carolina GOP House Speaker Timothy Moore asked the high court to consider the case on appeal of his own state Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year to strike down the theory relating to a gerrymandering case,” it added.

“In an election case out of North Carolina, SCOTUS agrees to review the “independent state legislature” theory next term. Under that theory, state legislatures have broad power to set rules for federal elections, even if state courts say those rules are unconstitutional,” SCOTUS Blog said.

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“The North Carolina election case is Moore v. Harper. SCOTUS also adds two other new cases to its docket for next term: Percoco v. U.S. (a case about honest-services fraud brought by a former Andrew Cuomo aide) and Ciminelli v. U.S. (a case about federal wire fraud),” it said.

“In addition to those three grants, SCOTUS declines review in a challenge to New York’s vaccine mandate for health care workers,” it said.

The U.S. Supreme Court could also provide a major update in the coming days about who leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

Earlier this week, Justice Elena Kagan said she expects there to be an update by the end of the month on the court’s efforts to track down the leaker.

During a discussion at Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center with Judge Alison Nathan, Kagan said she suspected none of her colleagues were privy to the efforts of the leak investigation “except for the chief justice, maybe, about what the investigation has turned up, if anything,” referring to Chief Justice John Roberts.

Nearly four months after the leak, the identity of the leaker is still unknown, however.

One Republican lawmaker recently speculated that the Supreme Court’s liberal-leaning justices are likely aware of who the leaker is.

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Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana said he believed that at least some of the justices know the leaker’s identity.

“We all could probably agree that the justices that were appointed by Democrat presidents know who the leaker was,” he said. “What bothers me, it’s not only the undermining that it did of the institution and the trust factor that these folks have with each other,” it’s that now that the trust is broken, “it’s very difficult to restore it.”

Rosendale said he believes the person or persons who released the information will be revealed.

“There could be more people involved, and those people could go all the way to the top,” he said. “Don’t eliminate the judges because you know people, so there’s no way that would happen. No way. Think about it. Michael Sussmann is on trial right now for Russiagate. That happened six years ago. We’re only getting answers right now. I hope it doesn’t take another six years to get answers to what happened at the Supreme Court.”

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The draft opinion was leaked to Politico.

“The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right,” the outlet reported.

In the “Opinion of the Court,” Alito wrote: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

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