Tag: gerrymander

Gerrymander for Me but Not for Thee

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I was watching a part of the PBS News Hour on YouTube.  Books and Capon were talking about gerrymandering.  Well actually Capon was away.  So, they found some big fat hen from the New York Times to squawk in his place.  Well, the upshot was that gerrymandering would lead to the “end of our democracy.”  Now to be fair Books said that the result of California following what Texas did was equally corrosive to democracy but he blamed Texas for getting the ball rolling.  And he wasn’t sad because the Virginia Supreme court shot down their gerrymander.  So, I guess you could say he was trying to be even-handed with his criticism.  I guess.

But the hypocrisy that both of these lefties commit is ignoring the fact that there are six states in the Northeast that are slightly more than 40% Republican voting and they have exactly zero Republican Congressional House Representatives between them all.  There are 15,430,000 people living in New England.  40% of that is more than six million people who are only represented by Democrats in the House of Representatives.  So, pretending that Donald Trump is responsible for gerrymandering the opposition out of existence is a joke.  The New Englanders have been perfecting this scam for decades.  What seems to be upsetting them is that between this initiative by Trump and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the racial gerrymandering decisions from the last century there is a real danger that Democrats might have a hard time keeping control of the House of Representatives even in midterm elections when Republican Presidents are in the White House.  And if that is the case there would be serious repercussions in the governance of this country.  And with the Democrat leadership announcing that they will eliminate the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court if they get back in power, it should be clear to the Republicans that there must be great fear on the Left about the chance that redistricting will shut them out of governance in the future.  So, packing the Supreme Court and giving citizenship to millions of illegals are their answers to the problem.

Well, we truly live in interesting times.  The war in Iran is threatening to make the midterms a blue wave but at the same time the gerrymandering in the South and elsewhere could counteract this.  And honestly, I don’t think there is any way to avoid these election oscillations back and forth but I do find it hilarious that the Democrats like to virtue signal their moral superiority when it comes to gerrymandering.  All it does for me is confirm just how dishonest they all are.  And it just makes me certain that there is no reason to think that we have any common ground with the Left.  They can justify any of their crimes by claiming they are the victims of fascism of one kind or another and by the end of their narrative we end up as the criminals who must be stopped “by any means necessary.”  Imagine that!

A Big Win by the Supreme Court

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The big news this week is the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.  A racially gerrymandered district in Louisiana was challenged on the basis that creating a black district for racial reasons was unconstitutional.  The Court agreed and found that district’s creation unconstitutional.

This ruling is quite important because it has the potential of eliminating something like twelve districts in the Deep South that in addition to being majority black are also exclusively Democrat in their choice of elected officials.  That is an enormous switch in the balance of power in the House of Representatives.  The question remains to be seen how quickly can these states redraw the districts.  If they can do this in time for the 2026 federal elections it would massively increase the Republicans’ chances of retaining a majority in the House.

In addition, going into the 2028 presidential election it would allow other states to adjust their districts strictly by partisan advantage and so the number of seats nationwide would be even larger.  Some estimates of as many as twenty-four Democrat controlled seats disappearing are out there.

The severity of this problem has the Democrats in an uproar and they have been talking about getting the government back in their hands as soon as possible and eliminating the filibuster rule to increase the number of seats in the Supreme Court to overturn this decision.  Now, that is going to have to wait at least until 2028 since Trump wouldn’t sign such a bill and overriding his veto would require many more senate seats than anyone imagines them to get in 2026.

In the short term this situation is something of a game changer.  This has the potential of eliminating a whole industry centered around finding racial inequity around every redistricting action across the country and forcing jurisdictions to prove they are not disenfranchising every racial and ethnic minority under the sun.

On a personal note, I find this decision incredibly encouraging.  The present Supreme Court despite Chief Justice Roberts’ social justice leanings has done amazing work in dismantling the unconstitutional decisions that have come down over the last half century.  Eliminating reverse discrimination and knocking out the Roe v. Wade decision are huge wins for conservatives and constitutionalists alike.  And, God willing, they’ll continue on in this vein and eliminate the Gay Marriage decision and several other overreaches that past courts have unjustly burdened this country with.

The next two things that I’m hoping for is the reversal of Oglethorpe (gay marriage) and the reestablishment of unfettered freedom of association for Americans.  As a charter member of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club, I’m hoping to see the day when a men’s club will not have to admit women just because girls’ feelings are hurt when men get to escape from them for a few hours of screech-free relaxation.  If the Bill of Rights still exists as part of the Constitution, then the First Amendment protects our rights to assemble and express our preferences by associating and not associating with people according to our commonalities and differences.  Let’s hope these gains continue.

Re-Counting the Census

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Wow.  Can he do that?  I guess he can.  This may turn out to be a really big deal.  How much might California’s population decrease if illegal aliens are discounted.  A million?  Three million?  Maybe more?  What if all of a sudden there are more people in Texas and Florida than New York and California?  Not to mention all the illegals in Illinois, Virginia and New Jersey.

So, this is Trump swinging for the fences.  I can’t imagine that the same federal judges that have challenged him on every executive order and every action he takes won’t write injunctions against this.  They may slow him down but I think the Supreme Court may back him on this if he can make the case that illegal aliens are being counted in defiance of the intent of the census to count how many Americans need representation in each state.

I listened to a little bit of a podcast where James Carville was freaking out over this and he said that if the Democrats can get the White House and both houses of Congress in 2028, they should immediately declare DC and Puerto Rico states and add six seats to the Supreme Court in order to claw back control of the federal government.  I took that to mean that he’s in a panic.  Trump is fighting gerrymandered fire with fire.  Massachusetts has been 100% Democrat for ages.  The Supreme Court has said that gerrymandering is not within their purview.  Since racial gerrymandering is no longer allowed, it’s only natural for the red states to copy states like Massachusetts and maximize the number of Republican house seats they can manufacture.

Trump is playing hardball and he’s doing it while he has the maximum clout he’ll ever have.  Could it backfire?  Not really.  It could fail to get all he’s looking to get but it’s not like the Democrats could ever get any angrier than the already are.  And this is the moment when the Democrats are as unpopular as they’ve ever been or maybe ever could be.  So, this is the time to strike.

We are living in very turbulent times.  We have elected Trump because the other Republicans were useless and dishonest.  We’ve hired a pragmatist who doesn’t like losing.  It certainly behooves us to back his play.  Any Republican wringing his hands or whining about alienating the Democrats is not to be listened to.  In fact, these are the people we must replace.  Trump has a vision of how to defeat the leftist political movement.  It entails restoring prosperity to the American middle-class and eliminating as much of the bureaucracy and the NGO’s that leech money and power from the federal government at the expense of the tax payers.  He is dead right.  Defunding USAID and other slush funds that feed the Left is brilliant.  Recounting the census is also brilliant.  He is doing everything he can to allow the real majority to get the government they want.  If he keeps up like this, it won’t be enough to add him to Mt Rushmore.  We’ll have to put him on the million-dollar bill (which will have to be added to circulation to allow for buying Starbucks coffee in a few years).