It is Tuesday, June 9th at 2.42 p.m. as we're recording this, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Roman, so what does the term gerrymander mean to you?

Well, as I understand it, it means like drawing a ridiculously shaped district in order to advantage your own political party.

I think that's right. So if you see a district that actually doesn't look like anything that

you would find in nature or a political nature. That is, it's not a square, it's not a rectangle.

It might have very strange contorted shapes in it. It's probably been gerrymandered.

And so you're right. Jerrymandering refers to the creation of a voting district that is

deliberately drawn to advantage a particular political party.

And the name goes back to 1812 when the Massachusetts governor, Elbridge Jerry, decided to approve

congressional districts that were drawn to help his

party, the Democrat Republicans. And one of the newspapers at the time, the Boston Gazette,

published a cartoon of one of these strangely drawn districts, likening it to a dragon, which was

a salamander, and deemed it the now famous term jerrymander, after

Elbridge Jerry. And ever since, lawmakers have tried to draw congressional districts for

political purposes. Jerrymandering is a common part of today's electoral politics. But today,

the situation with gerrymandering is a mess and arguably a hyper-partisan undemocratic mess because of recent Supreme Court decisions.

But understanding this mess, which is itself a complicated story, requires untangling several constitutional threads, and those involve

redistricting, political questions, the Voting Rights Act, and six members of the Supreme

Court who are acting in increasingly polarized and partisan ways. You ready? I am ready. Let's do it. This is what Trump can teach us about con law. This is what Trump can teach us about con law.

An ongoing series of indeterminate length and sporadic release, where we look at cracking, packing, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and use them to examine our Constitution like we never have before.

Our music is from Doom Tree Records.

Our professor and neighbor is Elizabeth Joe, and I'm your fellow student and host, Roman

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