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Why Texas Gerrymandering Matters

Okay–better late than never…

Media has reported on the effort being mounted in Texas to re-gerrymander that state’s already-extreme gerrymander, in an effort to add five Republican seats, and potentially save the House for the GOP.

One of the things that national polling misses is the fact that a political party can win the national vote by millions, but thanks to our structure–elements like the Senate’s disproportionate representation and the Electoral College–the party garnering a minority of the vote can win control of Congress and the Presidency.

I’ve written a lot over the years about the pernicious effects of gerrymandering, and lest memories of those diatribes have faded, I’m going all the way back to 2001. This is what I wrote on May 1st of that year.

The Indiana General Assembly is preparing to embark upon what individual legislators call redistricting, and what the rest of us call gerrymandering. It will be an intensely partisan endeavor.
The goal of this exercise is to draw as many “safe” seats as possible—more for the party in charge, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to retain control, the majority needs to cram as many of the minority into as few districts as possible. While gerrymandering is nothing new, the advent of computers has made the process efficient beyond the wildest dreams of Elbridge Gerry, the former Vice-President for whom it is named.
In gerrymandering, neighborhoods, cities, towns, townships—even precincts—are broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers are what drive the results—not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not competitiveness.
Safe districts undermine the democratic process.
  • If one is guaranteed victory, it is easy to become lazy and arrogant, safe to scuttle popular measures without fear of retribution.
  • Lack of competitiveness can make it impossible to trace campaign contributions. When the folks with “Family Friendly Libraries” send a check to Representative Censor, who is unopposed, he then sends it to Senator MeToo, who is in a hot race.  Senator MeToo’s campaign report shows only a contribution from Rep. Censor.
  • Lack of competitiveness breeds voter apathy. Why get involved when the result is foreordained?  Why donate to a sure loser? For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence, why donate to a sure winner? Why volunteer or vote, when those efforts won’t affect the results?  It’s not only voters who lack incentives for participation, either; it’s not easy to recruit credible candidates to run on the “sure loser” ticket. The result is that in many of these races, voters have a choice between the anointed and the annoying—marginal candidates who offer no new ideas, no energy, and no challenge. Pundits describe voter apathy as if it were a moral deficiency; I suggest it is instead a rational response to noncompetitive politics. (Watch those “apathetic” folks fight an unpopular rezoning!)  Reasonable people save their efforts for places where those efforts matter. Thanks to the proliferation of safe seats, those places may not include the voting booth.
  • Gerrymandering exacerbates political polarization and gridlock. In competitive districts, nominees know they have to run to the middle to win in the fall. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who tend to be much more ideological.  Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they are a powerful incentive for the incumbent to protect his flank. So we elect nominees beholden to the political extremes, who are unwilling or unable to compromise.
Of the 150 members of our current legislature, 73 were unopposed in 1998. Most of the others had only token opposition.
Is this any way to run a representative democracy?
The assault on democracy has been going on for longer than we recognize. And it isn’t just Texas.

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Legacy Media Bends The Knee

The Right’s propaganda ecosystem is a huge problem. The spinelessness and cowardice of today’s legacy media is arguably worse.

A week or so ago, I argued that Trumpism has been aided by the inadequacy of our mainstream, “legacy” outlets. As I pointed out, there’s a reason that so many professional journalists have decamped to places like Substack– a reason why so many of us depend upon daily reports from reputable scholars like Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman. My complaint was aimed at news reporting that “sanewashes” and normalizes behaviors that are objectively insane and abnormal, and as an example, I cited NBC’s report of the attack on California Senator Alex Padilla when he tried to ask Homeland Security’s Kristi Noem a question. Tom LLamas repeated Noem’s  assertion that the Senator had failed to identify himself–but made no mention of the fact that widely available video of the incident showed that Padilla had in fact done so. 

It wasn’t a “one-off.”

A couple of nights ago, NBC reported on the status of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and rather than describing any of the truly horrific elements that explain public resistance to that legislation–its vast increase in the deficit or the millions who stand to lose healthcare– it reported that the bill would “reduce taxes,” and ignored the fact that those reductions would lopsidedly benefit the rich. 

NBC’s evident fear of incurring Trump’s wrath–its “compliance in advance”– pales, of course, in light of Paramount’s recent agreement to pay off the Mafia Don who occupies the Oval Office. Paramount has been in the process of an $8 billion merger with Skydance, for which it needs regulatory approval. The company settled a lawsuit with Trump that was so ridiculous that a first-year law student could have predicted it would have been laughed out of court. (Trump sued over what he claimed was unfair editing in a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris.)

Paramount’s agreement to pay sixteen million dollars for dismissal of this laughable threat was widely–and accurately– seen as a kickback that will allow the merger to go forward. It was payment for a government approval–in other words, a bribe. CBS thus joined Disney (the parent company of ABC News) another part of the mainstream media that has bent the knee to our gangster President.

An opinion piece in the Washington Post summed up the betrayal of 60 Minutes and professional journalism.

After “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens in April announced his resignation, correspondent Scott Pelley said on air, “Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

Honest journalism requires noting that Paramount’s leaders will never, ever hear the end of this abject decision. Nor should they. Much has been made in the recent past about attacks on the First Amendment, whether it’s the administration’s expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it won’t swallow “Gulf of America” (a dispute that’s tied up in the courts); the targeting of student protesters for their speech; attacks on lawyers for their past work; or any number of actions seeking to snuff diversity language from the handbooks of corporate America.

There is ample case law establishing the right of editors to choose what material they publish and the manner in which they cover public issues and officials. “That very function — the one that happens many times a day at newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, networks, social media accounts, newsletters, whatever — is what Paramount failed to stick up for. It doesn’t deserve the likes of “60 Minutes.”

So here we are. We’re awash in propaganda from Fox News and its even more pernicious clones. And now we’ve learned that we can’t depend upon the so-called legacy media to set the record straight. Sometimes, it’s sins of omission–NBC failing to provide even rudimentary “both sides” coverage. Increasingly, it’s the betrayal of the very purpose of journalism, which is to inform as accurately and completely as possible.

It’s one thing to make honest mistakes. It’s another thing entirely to allow your bottom line to dictate your coverage. 

America’s experience under Trump has made one thing abundantly clear: American institutions are filled with self-protective cowards devoid of integrity. Those cowards dominate Congress and corporate boardrooms. The lesson of Paramount’s shameful capitulation to our gangster President’s blackmail is that corporate ownership of previously reliable media outlets  deprives We the People of news we can trust.

Unfortunately, without a fully and accurately informed electorate, democracy cannot exist.

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And The Hits Keep Coming..

If there is any consistent theme that runs through the Trump administration’s “governance,” it is antipathy to science and education. RFK, Jr. presides over a truly horrifying assault on medical science;  Trump’s torrent of Executive Orders has hobbled government’s ability to deal with climate change (which MAGA denies)…the list goes on.

And then there’s the Right’s persistent, vicious war on education. Theirs is a movement that is trying–with some terrifying successes–to take America back to the Dark Ages. That effort isn’t new–the now decades-old effort to privatize education, to evade the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State and destroy public education by sending students and tax dollars to religious schools– has recently been joined by an all-out assault on the nation’s universities.

It isn’t just Trump’s assault on elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard. As a recent report from The New Republic documents, among the other obscenities in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” are measures that amount to “an extinction-level event” for the nation’s universities. As the article warns, “If you think the last few months have been bad for Harvard, brace yourself—the “big, beautiful bill” is coming, and with it, a new dimension of destruction.”

While it’s mostly gone unremarked upon in the mainstream media, institutions of higher learning across the country are about to be pummeled by the looming reconciliation bill, which may portend an extinction event for higher education as we know it. The bill weaponizes working-class families’ reliance on debt to finance their college dreams with such intensity that not only will it push millions to the financial brink, it will push them out of higher education altogether.

As the report makes clear, the fallout from these provisions will be monumental. The effect will be to deprive the schools that manage to survive of working- and middle-class families. A college education will once again be within reach of  only the wealthy.

As the article notes, millions of people already consider a university education “to be a costly endeavor that is irrelevant to their everyday life.” That reality would suggest that we should remake higher education into a much more accessible endeavor– that legislators should recognize that improving the educational level of a population translates directly into social and fiscal health. But–consistent with the rest of a bill that honest labelling would title “Protecting Plutocracy”–the legislation would do the opposite. “It will cement the stereotype of higher education as an elite institution into an ironclad reality.”

This existential assault on higher education is not inadvertent–not an unanticipated consequence of fiscal legislation. It is entirely consistent with the goals of Project 2025 and the far-Right anti-intellectual MAGA figures who have already decimated much of Florida’s higher education landscape. The article includes a quotation from influential conservative activist Christopher Rufo, confirming the desired results. “Reforming the student loan programs could put the whole university sector into a significant recession” and state of “existential terror.”

And just in case American voters return a sane occupant to the Oval Office, the bill removes the power of a future President to cancel federal student loans.

While details are still being negotiated between the obtuse and vicious GOP members of the House and Senate, if the measure passes in anything like its current form,  eight million student debtors will see their monthly payments spike from $0 to over $400.

Dentists and doctors who choose to work in low-paying community health care centers will no longer be eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs, dramatically reducing the number of health care providers in communities that are already underserved. The bill even comes after the long-standing, Republican-approved federal student loan repayment plans, which allow borrowers to discharge their debts after a certain number of years of regular payments.

The House version cuts Pell Grants and increases the course load required for part-time students to access aid. People with  jobs or family responsibilities will find it nearly impossible to comply. And House Republicans want colleges and universities to pay back unpaid federal loans extended to “high risk” students–a move designed to penalize institutions that serve low-income students who are more likely to default, turning “the working-class kid studying to become a social worker, artist, or a physician into a liability to her university.”

None of this is accidental.

A recent Heritage Foundation report recommends terminating higher education “subsidies” in order to “increase the married birthrate.” In plain English, it’s an effort to reduce women’s access to higher education–an access that has facilitated women’s growing civic and economic equality. MAGA wants more babies and fewer women in the workforce.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” is a MAGA wet dream.

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The Declaration Of Independence Sounds Awfully Familiar

Given the undeniable fact that the Republicans in Congress continue to ignore their Constitutional duties, it’s probably unproductive to suggest that they take a close look at another of our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence. If they did, however, they might notice that the document describing the behaviors of George III that impelled them to withdraw from the British empire are eerily similar to the behaviors of their MAGA cult leader.

You might think of the Declaration as the original “No Kings” statement, laying out America’s grievances against the actions of  George III that triggered the Revolutionary War. The list of those grievances was extensive, but several seem especially pertinent to the growing resistance to today’s would-be King. 

Consider, for example:

“He has refused his Assent to laws; He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither; He has obstructed the Administration of Justice; He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices; He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people; He has affected to render the Military independent and superior to the Civil power;

“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world; For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent; for depriving us in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury; For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

The Declaration isn’t law. It isn’t even a legal framework, as the Constitution is. But it is a statement of governing philosophy–a stirring declaration of what legitimate governance is and isn’t. Most schoolchildren are familiar with one of the opening paragraphs, an eloquent, “self-evident” description of the basic purposes of government:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Governments, the Declaration tells us, derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Thanks to decades of voter suppression and gerrymandering, the operation of the Electoral College, misuse of the filibuster, and population shifts that have made the Senate a massively unrepresentative body,  it is impossible to argue with a straight face that today’s federal government reflects the consent of the governed. 

We are currently being ruled, not governed, by an illegitimate gang of plutocrats and theocrats who are pursuing goals diametrically opposed to those expressed by the nation’s founders. Re-read that last quoted paragraph. Nowhere does it say that “all White Christian men are created equal.” It says that all men- which we now understand to mean all human beings–have “unalienable” rights. Unalienable rights are incapable of being surrendered, transferred, or taken away. They are rights that are inherently and permanently possessed. The Declaration tells us that protecting–securing– those equal rights is the purpose of government, and that when a government “becomes destructive” of that purpose, when it ceases to perform that fundamental task, We the People have the right to alter or abolish it.

It’s past time to alter a government that has drifted far from its original purposes. Look at the list of actions by King George that prompted rebellion–and think about their striking similarity to the policies being pursued by the Trump administration. Refusal to assent to law. Obstruction of immigration. Denial of due process. Insistence on personal loyalty. Misuse of the military. Interference with trade. Imposition of taxes/tariffs. Transporting people “beyond the seas to be tried for pretended offenses”…

It is past time to return this nation to the philosophy of government expressed in the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We have a delusional ignoramus in the White House, a cabinet filled with unqualified clowns and cranks, a Congress filled with cowards, bigots and Christian Nationalists, and a Supreme Court dominated by theocrats.

We got rid of King George and the Hessians. It’s time to get rid of Trump and MAGA.

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