Please help me with this practice free response question.

Question

Describe an action that states could take to respond to the Bush v. Vera decision if they disagreed with the decision.

Answer 1

The actual response that states took to this was to argue that their gerrymandering was designed to lower the impact of Democratic voters and the fact that those Democratic voters were predominantly minorities was not part of their decision-making. A different Supreme Court in Rucho v Common Cause in 2019 held that partisan gerrymandering was acceptable unless direct intentional racial gerrymandering could be proven.

In the mean time, the court had struck down the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required strict scrutiny of voting changes in states (in Shelby v Holder, 2013). The standard that the court applied in Bush v Vera was then no longer applicable.

So we can see that the actual response was to mobilize to gain control of the presidency and the Senate so that they could nominate and confirm justices to the court who would ignore the issue of gerrymandering.