I hate to tell you, Heskimo, but you've thrown the Monopoly Man a little out of whack.
Extreme partisan gerrymandering may be on the way out...
The Supreme Court is hearing a case on whether partisan gerrymandering can be considered unconstitutional, and Kennedy is likely to be the deciding vote. ... Wisconsin is appealing a decision by a lower court, which ruled that the way Republicans crafted the state’s electoral maps in 2010 was illegal. The attorneys for the state, who are defending the maps, got plenty of questions from Kennedy, while the Wisconsin Democrats, who want the maps struck down, got none. Kennedy spoke 10 times during the state of Wisconsin’s arguments. He asked five questions and made five statements.
“If you get a lot of questions, you’re going to lose,” Adam Liptak, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, told FiveThirtyEight in 2015.
Justices aren’t just asking questions to get information from the lawyers arguing their cases. In some ways, the questions aren’t meant for the lawyers at all. The justices ask questions to signal their positions to their fellow members of the court, and to potentially sway other justices to their side. If they’re skeptical of one side’s argument, they often pepper that side with queries. Chief Justice John Roberts has even described the lawyers as a “backboard” — the questions bounce off them and come right back to the bench.
A body of academic research has confirmed this conventional wisdom, showing empirically that questions from the justices are usually bad news for the party on the receiving end. The number of questions, their length, their linguistic content and even the tone of voice in which they’re asked are all statistically significant factors in predicting the court’s eventual decision.
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Kennedy didn’t speak during the Wisconsin Democrats’ arguments, but they were clearly speaking to him. Their attorney cited him twice during his arguments, and, as one of their attorneys in lower court, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, told FiveThirtyEight, “Our first Supreme Court brief … cites Anthony Kennedy all over the place and that’s not purely for tactical reasons, it’s actually because he’s said a lot of things that we think our test is consistent with.”
Of course, some of the other justices had plenty to say during the Wisconsin Democrats’ arguments. The most junior justice, Neil Gorsuch, dismissively compared their legal test to the hodgepodge of spices in his steak rub, and Chief Justice Roberts called it “sociological gobbledygook.” But Kennedy sat in silence, taking in a case that was tailor made for him.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wh ... 538twitter