Why You Should Care About Evenwel v. Abbott

One of the ways the Left seizes and controls political power in the United States is by capturing the big cities in states like California, New York and Illinois, thus delivering the entire state to the Democrats when it comes to the Electoral College and rendering the hapless residents upstate, downstate or in the 99 percent of the Golden State not located in San Francisco and West Los Angeles effectively disenfranchised. But a case from Texas, which the Supreme Court just agreed to hear, could change all that:

The case — known as Evenwel v. Abbott — is arising from Texas. It’s about whether voting power has to be apportioned equally by general population or by eligible voters. The impact could extend way beyond the Lone Star State, shifting political power away from cities. Particularly cities with relatively high, non-voting immigrant populations like — oh, say — New York. The case has the potential to require authorities to strip away during the redistricting process population that isn’t eligible to vote — undocumented aliens, felons, children.

Edward Blum is the conservative constitutional sage who heads the Project on Fair Representation, which provided counsel in this case. He tells me the Nine could force redistricting. The court could, he said, “help upstate New York districts dramatically…” Slate.com is already suggesting that a victory by Mr. Blum’s clients — two Texas voters who feel under-represented — could mean “more Republican districts.” This is because most states apportion districts based on total population, which, Slate says, “includes noncitizens, children, felons and others ineligible to vote.”

What a good idea: make the Left eat its “one man, one vote” fetish — oh, how they hate the fact that the states are equally represented in the U.S. Senate, no matter how large or small they are. Soon enough, we will hear the predictable howls. In the meantime, let’s all thank Justice Clarence Thomas:

The Justices’ move into the Texas Senate redistricting case comes fourteen years after Justice Clarence Thomas, in Chen v. City of Houston in May 2001, was the sole member of the Court who went on record in favor of sorting out “what measure of population should be used for determining whether the population is equally distributed among the districts.”

The usual choice considered by legislatures is to make districts more or less equal by dividing up shares of the state’s total population, or, as an alternative, to draw lines based upon some measure of the voting members of the population — such as the numbers actually registered to vote.

Two Texas voters, who wound up in state senate districts where they say their votes will count less than the votes in another district even though each of those districts has about the same total number of people, argued that this contradicts the “one-person, one-vote” guarantee of voter equality. Their votes would have counted equally, they contended, if the legislature instead had used voting-age population as the measure.

Given that Obama is intent with flooding the country with non-citizens, this could be big — a real chance for the American people to take back their country again.