An Equal and Opposite Reaction

That big drama playing out now, aside from wondering if TFG gave Alaska back to Russia, is whether Texas will forcibly extract five new Republican districts via gerrymandering even more severely than they already have. The president asked for it, so the Big Bad Tough-guy Texans immediately rolled over and began rigging our government even further in their favor. Texas Democrats went on the lam, which sounds like chickenshit but is, in fact, the most effective thing they can do, given their minority status. Their best chance is to deprive the process of the minimum number of participants to hold a legal session (aka, deny a quorum).

The problem there is that they can’t run forever, and eventually, Texas will either reel them in or change the law to allow further business to take place without the runaway legislators. It’s not like it will be hard to find a sympathetic judge in the area. So if they’re as determined to prop up the Cheeto in Chief as I think they are, this is going to happen. The question is what to do next.

Ben Sargent, TexasObserver.org

This is where Governor Gavin Newsom of California strode into the fray and declared that if Texas pulled such a stunt, his state would too, thereby nullifying the new advantage. I know that there are some in the Hell Yeah camp, and others in the Don’t Stoop to Their Level camp, because we don’t know where it will all end.

For the record, I hate gerrymandering. If it were up to me, every state would be required to appoint a bipartisan panel in charge of creating a district map that’s logical for geographic reasons, with an outcome that’s consistent with the state’s political makeup. In other words, you can’t do what Wisconsin and North Carolina did and produce a map that creates a majority of Republican representatives in a state with a majority of Democratic voters.

My state of Maryland is one of the few states that’s heavily gerrymandered Democratic. We only have one Republican representative, the noxious Andy Harris, whose district is made up of the entire eastern shore. The current map was actually put to a referendum a few years back, and passed easily.

And I voted for it as well, because while I’m against gerrymandering in general, I’m even more against being a sucker and letting Republicans pull every trick in the book to amass and consolidate power that will last for generations, while we righteously take the moral high ground straight to a permanent minority status. I say, if they stop their gerrymandering, we’ll stop ours. And the same goes in California.

I don’t want this to happen, and every effort should be made to stop them in Texas. I just don’t see how that will be done, not with the field tilted so far in their favor to begin with, and the ultimate backstopping of the current SCOTUS, who blessed such gerrymandered atrocities in the first place. So the only alternative is to fight fire with fire. I want Democrats to actually put up a fight and DO something. Use what power they have without shame, just like the GOP does. They never apologize, they don’t care if something is “unpopular,” (in which case they go on Fox “News’ and MAKE it popular) so it if helps get them the power they want, whether it’s putting a hold on an opponent’s Supreme Court seat, or expediting one of their own in the same situation, they just do it. All the critics eventually forget about it and move on to the next week’s outrage.

Meanwhile, they come out of it with a much stronger position. To them, everything is fair game in the pursuit of power. In fact, it’s not only fair game to them, it’s God’s will.

I’d like to see the Democrats borrow a little bit of that chutzpah and play some hardball themselves. I’m tired of being the noble but losing warriors fighting the good fight. If we don’t step up our game, the fight will soon be over, and we’ll be locked out of the ring for the foreseeable future and then some.

Republicans are working to cement themselves into the only positions of power. Once they do, politics will no longer matter because they won’t need to curry our favor. They’ll be running the country forever, and we’ll be the commodity they buy, use up, wring out, and dispose of. Our elections will have the same certainty about them as Russia’s do.

And the counter-gerrymandering may not work anyway… Remember that SCOTUS can no doubt find a way to rule that Texas’s map is legal, but the other blue ones aren’t. It’s not like they have any consistency of standards, other than “Whatever Republicans want.”

I hate the gerrymandering too. But we at least have to slow them down. While the reliably blue state of Maryland may have to sit this one out, because there’s only one seat to be gained, no matter how they draw the maps, it will be up to California, Illinois, and New York to hold the wall against the MAGA horde. I will support their efforts and hope that it can all be reeled back in later, once cooler heads appear on the horizon.

Retirement clock: 10 days and counting…