Not so supreme

I appreciated the series of articles on the Supreme Court in your July issue. But while the proposition advanced by Mark Tushnet in Nick Gillespie's interview ("Not So Supreme") that "society's going to be pretty much where it would've been if the courts hadn't said a word about it" may apply to abortion, pot, and sodomy, it does not apply to the Court's tinkering with states' basic governance.

The "one man, one vote" decision has put the states into a one-size-fits-all straitjacket when it comes to organizing their legislatures. It denies them the ability to use the same rationale as was used to set up the U.S. Senate by giving a considerable weight to geographic representation. This may mean little to the flatlanders who live in the East, but to those who live in the and West, it has meant that in states like Colorado the water flows to urban concentrations east of the front range at the expense of the Western slope. It means that sparsely populated eastern Washington is hamstrung by a Growth Management Act that was written for sprawl-averse, population-rich Puget Sound Basin.

More recently, the Court outlawed open primaries, voted into being by the people in Washington state in the 1930s. The Court sided with weakened and polarized major parties in California whose closed partisan primary system had been set aside by a vote of the people.

The open primary not only gives the people a better chance of electing candidates whose appeal crosses party lines; it gives independent and third-party candidates, such as the Libertarians, a better shot at victory. I expect the courts will continue to do all they can to perpetuate two-party dominance.

The Supreme Court stretches the reach of the federal government, choking out states' ability to be laboratories of democracy, as shown by its rulings on abortion in the '70s, primaries in the '90s, and now medicinal marijuana.

Matt Ryan

Bremerton, WA

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