Portside

Some of America’s nearly 20,000 police departments have already started a few reforms, but most have not.

With Gill v. Whitford, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the most important case in decades dealing with how Americans are represented in Congress and state legislatures.

The city of Miami can sue Wells Fargo and Bank of America for damages under the Fair Housing Act, the Supreme Court says, allowing a lawsuit to continue that accuses the big banks of causing economic harm with discriminatory and predatory lending practices.

Activism matters. And political morale changes quickly.

We have once again entered a phase in law-making, where discriminatory policies codifying exclusions based on race, religion, ability and immigration status have taken hold, emboldened by this Administration. With the appointment of Gorsuch, we risk losing the highest court in the land to partisan, ideologically-driven cruelty — masked as “originalist” readings of both statute and law — repeating history again.

This was first time in more than three decades that a federal court ruled for the plaintiffs in a partisan-gerrymandering suit after a full trial. It also dealt a critical blow to a very particular kind of gerrymander—call it “extreme seat-maximization”—that emerged in Wisconsin and a handful of other states in the most recent redistricting cycle.

Voting rights advocates have won a string of court battles, but state election officials have found ways to restrict early voting anyway—often at the behest of GOP leaders. ----- Rethinking about our two party system and our election system: Ranked-choice voting opens up elections to a broader, more diverse range of candidates and ideas. ----- Modernizing our voter registration system.

There has not been a liberal majority of Justices since Nixon was President. If Hillary Clinton is elected, that will change.