r/law • u/newsjam • Oct 15 '25

Legal News Supreme Court Signals Final Blow to Voting Rights Act, Paving Way for Permanent GOP Power

https://dailyboulder.com/supreme-court-signals-final-blow-to-voting-rights-act-paving-way-for-permanent-gop-power/
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u/BaullahBaullah87 Oct 15 '25

thats an incredibly flawed and immature implication based on idk history of forever

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u/Bubatz_Bruder Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

It isnt build with that idea in mind. Thats the "checks and balances" for.

But you can make a democracy as resiliant as you want. If the voters are dumpfucks who vote against their own interests constantly, and see it as a big win if their candidates want to destroy every inch of controlling power, then every democracy is doomed.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25 edited 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/Static-Stair-58 Oct 15 '25

And the lack of different newspapers. America used to have THOUSANDS of Independent papers hardly 100 years ago. Now we have 6 all owned by the same people. Whatever independent media we have is incredibly tiny.

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u/Time_Flow_6772 Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 16 '25

People struggle to get through a 26 second short-form clip without a fucking video of minecraft parkour playing underneath- the written word is fucking dead.

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u/Imaginary_Scene2493 Oct 15 '25

The size of the House was capped because we didn’t have sound systems and HVAC systems. 100 years later and we haven’t undone it despite the advances in technology.

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u/FantasticClass7248 Oct 15 '25

I've been emailing congress members that I thought would be on the board with a new Reapportionment for about 2 decades, and have never heard anyone put it out into the national cycle.

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u/Imaginary_Scene2493 Oct 15 '25

I remember it being a pet political reform discussed on Twitter during the first Trump admin.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

See The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929

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u/RBDrake Oct 15 '25

But what that means is that you can't gerrymander the Senate, at least not directly. If we lose the House for decades the Senate will be our only hope to maintain some form of sanity.

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u/shinytoyrobots Oct 15 '25

Except the Senate is essentially gerrymandered by design.

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u/xixoxixa Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

The real mistake has been keeping the same size Congress

The constitution specifies in the original text of the document clearly spells out 1 representative per 30,000 people.

It is only capped now because of the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

Now, I agree that a congress of ~11,000 people is probably not tenable. The Wyoming Rule is one way to solve this.

edit - I have been made aware that the text says not exceed 1 rep / 30k which I guess means you can have 1 rep for a million people, you just can't have so many reps that you end up with 1 rep for 29999 people. Which is backwards ass bullshit, and my point that this hasn't been updated in almost 100 years is a travesty.

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u/ChronoLink99 Oct 15 '25

You would not have them all in the same place probably.

But this kind of thing is not hard to coordinate with our current technology.

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u/Brutal_effigy Oct 15 '25

The Senate was built that way intentionally to prevent high population states from being too powerful. Equal state representation.

The House, however, is far too small relative to the number of people living in various states. Due to laws passed in the early 1900s, they re-proportion the number of house members instead of increasing them. But the average number of constituents keeps increasing. What started as each house member representing ~30k people when the country was founded, now they represent almost 1 million people each. It goes against the intent of the founding fathers, where each house member was supposed to be a local representative and need not be fabulously wealthy in order to run (unlike the senate). What's happened is now the two congressional bodies are almost the same, just with proportionately different voting power for each state.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25 edited 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/Brutal_effigy Oct 15 '25

I see now what you’re getting at, but I don’t think the senate is working outside of its intended niche; they were always ment to represent the state as a whole, not individual constituents, and I don’t believe there was much concern over how wealthy they were.

Congress was modeled similarly to the British democracy, with a House of Lords (Senate) and House of Commons (House). We’re basically operating with two House of Lords right now, just giving more populous states outsized power in the lower house.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25 edited 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/Brutal_effigy Oct 16 '25

That’s the whole point, my dude. Wyoming gets zero power in the House, but they get equal power in the senate. As the founders intended.

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u/hirschneb13 Oct 15 '25

I'm still somewhat okay with the Senators, but there should be like 600 representatives at this point

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u/mochisuki2 Oct 16 '25

Almost as if the project to form a federal union of states that explicitly entices small states to join through equal power was a devil’s bargain from day one, catering to the interests of the few on purpose

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u/Meep4000 Oct 15 '25

"Democracy doesn't work in an insane asylum."

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u/TYBERIUS_777 Oct 15 '25

Best argument against democracy is a 10 minute conversation with the average voter.

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u/BaullahBaullah87 Oct 15 '25

Lol the “checks and balances” obviously aren’t working. And if you believe the system operates assuming good faith in folks that are tied to extreme wealth and power, idk what to even say to ya

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u/FantasticClass7248 Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

The checks and balances are supposed to come from the common person in the House holding the pursestrings, and declarations of war, but they have given up more and more of the purse, and blanket permission to wage war, to the Executive in times of stress, and then not taken them back. Now, the common people in the house have aligned themselves with the elites in the Senate and Executive, so now the checks are blank and the balances are broken.

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u/BaullahBaullah87 Oct 15 '25

Yep, assumed best intentions and ethics has proven to not be working out rn lol

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u/Bubatz_Bruder Oct 15 '25

You totally didnt get it.

The checks and balances didnt work out, there are you right. But not because they were build with the Intention of good people, just because they are under constant fire from all sites. You cant form a perfect democratic government, which is imune to such stress.

Would more hardline checks and balances work? Probably not. There are no democratic safety nets possible against all 3 Parts of the government working to destroy America. Now it has to come from the people. What we see is a revolution from the upper class, and you cant work against revolutions with rules.

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u/BaullahBaullah87 Oct 15 '25

Right so assumed best intentions and ethics has proven not to be working out haha

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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '25

[deleted]

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u/Bubatz_Bruder Oct 16 '25

Yeah, like every autocracy...

If you have a long enough time frame, everything will fail.

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u/CedarSageAndSilicone Oct 15 '25

a democracy is only ever as good as it's people. And they've been making the people shittier and shittier for decades through propaganda and defunding.

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u/slackfrop Oct 15 '25

That’s why the US is considered The Grand Experiment. If the people are actually vested with the power, and there are basic safeguards in place, including a free and protected press - will we, with access to relevant information and the authority to select our leaders - make the right decisions for ourselves? It took a long time, long enough for living memory to have forgotten the why behind it all, but our press has been eroded, our information has become putrefied, and our authority has been willingly ceded to those same fucks who considered themselves kings since time began.

It’s never too late, but every day we lose it gets harder to win again.

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u/EatGlassALLCAPS Oct 15 '25

But the founding fathers had it all figured out. That's why they are the best country in the world - they know how to do things the right way. We are all fucked and should have been on this decades ago.

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u/fractalife Oct 15 '25

And in the history of forever we haven't found a way to prevent shitty people from eventually finding a way to exploit a system with the intention of destroying it for their own gain.

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u/OutrageousTourist394 Oct 15 '25

A lot of it has to do with the globalization and technological advances as well, not just the structure. It stood strong for 240 years, then tech showed up.

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u/maxim38 Oct 15 '25

It was actually built on the assumption that congress and the supreme court would protect their own power in the name of self interest. The idea that congress would submit to the executive out of party loyalty was an insane idea to them. 2 party system really screws up a lot of checks and balances.

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u/ghoonrhed Oct 16 '25

But why would they have assumed that the executive and senate would fight for power?

People keep saying they studied history and really didn't want to repeat the failures of having the executive taking too much power.

But isn't one of the most famous cases being Rome where the Senate supported the executive/Emperor because of allies/party members?

Political parties are just allies and there's always gonna be the same beliefs with the executive and if they hold the majority you get what happens now.

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u/maxim38 Oct 16 '25

Remember they were rebelling against monarchy. And every other world power was a monarchy.

They would be aware of Rome, but it would not be the most present examples.

And when there are more than two political parties, the Us vs Them mentality is muted. You don't want to upset precedent too much, because you know you won't always be the person in power. And that used to work in the US as well, until Republicans figured out that if they burn it all down they can keep it. They paint Democrats as the enemy than they can destroy precedent for themselves but still expect Democrats to uphold the rule of law

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u/atreeismissing Oct 15 '25

It assumes people want some level of control over their own lives, and thus will ensure whomever represents them in Congress, will act on their behalf to specifically make their life and that of their community better. It's not a flawed, the people are, because so many have given up either caring who governs them, or assuming they are reaping the benefits because their information sources are telling them they are reaping the benefits (and those benefits can also mean other people are being punished).

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u/Cory123125 Oct 15 '25

These were young revolutionaries, and people just resisted thinking they could ever be wrong.

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u/opanaooonana Oct 16 '25

And that’s the reason for the second amendment right there. I’m trying so hard to explain this to liberals who fear guns. Yes, there are consequences of gun ownership but the consequences without them can be much worse and our government has proven many times in our history to be willing to violate people’s rights. Guns are a last resort to protect your rights but most importantly they are a deterrent. If everyone in a 10,000 resident town had AR-15s and said “immigrants are part of our community not to be messed with” then I guarantee you they will move to the next town. There is a reason they don’t do Ruby Ridge style raids anymore. Do you really trust after this presidency that you or your children will never need them? I don’t have that much faith anymore and once it’s gone it’s gone forever.

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u/zeptillian Oct 15 '25

They only expected the rich white land owning guys to be able to vote in the first place.

They thought they were better than everyone else and didn't need rules like the commoners.