The Sins of Jim Crow Returning

So in-between the time that the Supreme Court ruled to allow more extreme gerrymandering among the Republican-controlled states - you'll notice they stopped Virginia from their own Democratic gerrymander - and my heading off to vacation in Las Vegas to see the Grand Canyon and get my left leg mangled in an e-bike accident (ow ow ow), it shouldn't be too shocking that most of the Southern (Confederate) states controlled by racist Far Right Republicans sped faster than ludicrous speed to redraw their already-skewed congressional maps to erase all Black-majority districts they could (via George Chidi at the Guardian (US)):

The reaction speed of southern states to the US supreme court’s decision last week in Louisiana v Callais has been breathtaking for voting rights activists.

One week after Callais, Louisiana’s governor has ordered the state’s ongoing congressional election to be set aside while state lawmakers redraw maps to eliminate a Democratic-majority – that is, a Black-majority – seat covering Baton Rouge.

Alabama’s Republican-majority legislature is drafting legislation in a special session that will allow it to set aside the results of a completed primary later this year if courts lift an injunction on its redistricting.

Florida was amid a special redistricting session as the ruling was handed down, passing a congressional map for 28 districts that packs Black and brown voters into four districts on the south Florida coast and Orlando, eliminating every other Democratic majority.

DeSantis and the other Republican bastards in Tallahassee as I feared did cleave the Tampa metro to turn everything in those counties into "safe" Republican districts, in spite of the huge Democratic numbers I personally know exist in that region (well okay, maybe not Pasco County...).

The corpse of the Voting Rights Act was still warm as these inheritors of John C. Calhoun and Jeff Davis celebrated their efforts to deny Black voters in their states any representation at all. It's like the conservatives who make up the modern Republican Party in the Deep South - many of whom were Democrats until the great migration to Reagan's GOP in the late 1980s - were waiting for decades to eagerly undo everything back to 1965 1855.

Donald Trump’s demand to tear up political norms has been met by Republican states eager to dust off a segregation-era playbook that maximizes the political power of white voters.

“What’s happening right now is probably the swiftest disenfranchisement of Black folks since Reconstruction, due to disenfranchisement by racist gerrymandering. And they will lie and say that it’s for political purposes,” said the Democratic state representative Justin Pearson of Tennessee, a Memphis legislator running for a congressional district blown into pieces by Republican lawmakers. “They cracked it into three. The district stretches hundreds of miles … it’s completely diluted in thirds almost to the percentage. It’s surgical, how they remove the possibility of Black participation.”

A lot of these maps will get challenged in the courts, but what success could any of them bring when the top court controlled by six Far Right Republican Justices already sided with the segregationists to bring the horrors of Jim Crow back?

Via Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

Following the Civil War and the end of slavery, the Republican Congress led an ambitious campaign of Reconstruction to integrate the formerly enslaved into political society and create pluralistic governments in the South. Hundreds of Black men (women still did not have the right to vote) were elected to offices including governor, congressman, senator and on down following the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments. But this was short-lived as white Southerners organized a campaign of violent repression and terrorism known as Redemption to seize back control, while the Supreme Court carved the original intent out of the 14th and 15th amendments and gutted civil rights laws passed by Congress.

These Redeemers imposed new laws and constitutions on the Southern states meant to ensure white rule by eliminating Black political representation and Black voting rights. This push culminated with the enactment of Jim Crow laws across the South as a response to suppress the successful fusion of Black voters with white Populists at the turn of the 20th century. What remained were authoritarian states imposing racial apartheid through legalism and violence...

The former Confederate states would not send another Black congressman to Washington for another 72 years. The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965 following the historic march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made that possible. That law banned the bread-and-butter of Jim Crow — literacy tests and other subjective discriminatory criteria for voter registration — and created legal mechanisms to challenge laws and district maps as discriminatory...

But the court’s decision in Callais threatens all of this by reversing the 1982 Voting Rights Act reauthorization by stating that challenges brought under the law’s Section 2 to district maps must prove intentional racial discrimination. The decision also requires any challenge to yield to the partisan motives of state legislators, who can now claim they are eliminating Black majority seats simply because they predominantly elect Democrats.

This is the endgame of all that conservative shifting into a Republican Party driven by Culture War racism/sexism that made certain most Blacks would shift over to the Democratic Party, giving the Far Right judges the 'excuse' of "oh, it's okay if the gerrymandering is ONLY partisan in nature," with the full understanding that racism is driving the differences between the two major national parties.

It's painful that the Southern states are the ones racing to do this, because these states happen to have the largest Black populations across the whole nation. Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina all top the list, with only Maryland up north with a large enough Black population but currently not under the control of racist Republicans threatening to take away their representation (and even their right to vote, and even their citizenship). The only former Confederate state without a sizable Black population - Texas - is currently obsessed with gerrymandering to subdue the Latino vote instead (and also the large Black population in major metros like Houston).

The horrifying thing is how the Republicans in these southern states believe they can get away with gerrymandering black voters out of representation (and political power) with the belief that yes, too many WHITE voters will not turn against these redrawn maps. Even with the risks that the Republicans in these "safe" districts are vulnerable to independent or moderate voters in these regions who could vote for Democratic challengers - especially if they're mad at trump and the whole GOP for tariffs, inflation, oil wars, inflation, immigration raids tearing apart communities, and even more inflation - these wingnuts are convinced enough Whites will vote with their fears and their rage for even more racism.

It would be pretty to think that enough Whites - the ones who aren't conservative, the ones who are still Democratic voters in these redrawn districts, the ones who have a clear idea where all our economic and social ills are coming from (trump and his crooked buddies) - will prove these assholes wrong and refuse to give Republicans the false "majority" control they hope these rigged districts will bring. The Far Right knows, deep down, they really aren't the majority of this nation: otherwise, why would they gerrymander in the first place (and second, why else try to take away voting rights period)?

One of the major reasons to gerrymander is to drive down voter turnout / interest especially by the party getting drawn off the maps. It is high time for Democratic voters - and every No-Party-Affiliated voter - to rise up against these rigged districts and do everything possible to vote Republicans out. 

Fight the corrupt powers of trumpian misrule, America. 

Fight the Far Right assholes trying to take away our power to vote.

Get the goddamn vote out this midterm.

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN.

The Arc of Justice, Pretzeled by the Far Right Undoing the VRA

Goddammit. Just as I was writing a long spiel about gerrymandering, this extremist Roberts Court decides to come out with a ruling against redistricting for minority representation that basically made things worse for democracy (via Lawrence Hurley at NBC News):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday further weakened the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law aimed at protecting minority voters.

The justices, split 6-3 with the court's (note: Republican) conservatives in the majority, told states they can almost never consider race when drawing maps to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters who long faced discrimination in elections.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that while there may be extreme situations where the use of race can be justified to draw a map, no such conditions existed in the Louisiana case. As a result, the new map was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander," he added.

This ruling ignores the long, horrifying history of segregation when post-Civil War southern states slid back to control under ex-Confederate racists who rigged elections, took away voting rights for Blacks, and drew maps in such a way that pretty much guaranteed racist one-party rule well up into the Second World War. But that's the point: Alito and his fellow Far Right conservatives wanted to return to that segregationist era ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s ended their racist regimes. Labeling the Louisiana district as a "racial gerrymander" is irony of the sickest kind.

The implications could be immediate: as much as we're weeks away from midterm primaries kicking off, a number of Republican-controlled states were already in the process of last-minute gerrymandering efforts that can get a boost from this ruling to erase every Black majority district off their maps. Not only the congressional districts, but the state legislative districts are at risk of seeing every Black/Latino representative getting mapped out of office.

If there's any ray of hope, it's the one David A. Graham shared in that dummymander article I quoted in my previous blog entry:

The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

The state-level Republicans may be eager to redraw Black majority districts out of existence, but they run into the risk that those voting blocs with blend in with the surrounding districts that the conservatives made sure were racist White enough to lean conservative/Republican. A lot of those "racial gerrymandered" Black districts were intentionally over-packed with Democratic voters to where that district could be +20 Dem while the surrounding four or five districts leaned +2 or +5 GOP. Without that overpack, that +20 Blue can flow into those GOP Red districts and shift them enough to where the Republicans lose their advantages in spite of their map rigging.

This is why the Republicans are also working overtime to take away voting rights from everyone they fear/hate. Don't be surprised if there's a lot of last-minute legislation under the guise of fighting "voter fraud" to take away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Blacks, women, and college students to solidify whatever "win" the Far Right inflicted on this nation today.

Keep fighting. This was how things were in the 1960s and here we are again, but these rights are worth fighting for, there is an America still out there worth fighting for. Don't let these bastards win: Vote every fucking conservative Republican out of office while we still can.

Update: Adam Serwer at the Atlantic explains it better than I can.

As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, (segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick) had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.”

In fact, Kilpatrick’s conversion was no conversion at all. To understand it is to understand the Roberts Court’s decision today in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical.

In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people.

What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

The best way to stop racists is to stop fucking voting for them. Get every Republican out of office now.

The Gerrymander Wars Escalate

Any regular follower here knows I am not a fan of the gerrymander.

I've railed about it often: how it distorts true representation, suppresses voter interest and turnout, and drives the major political parties to pander more to the monied powers than to genuinely represent their districts and states.

For some time there in the late 2010s, I had some hope that legal fighting over the gerrymandering efforts by Republicans in key battleground states like Florida would end the issue: That the skewing of representation and denial of voters rights would irk even conservative-leaning courts to level the electoral field and letting sanity prevail.

Alas, the Roberts Court in 2019 nuked those hopes from orbit. All I had left were my observations that even by 2022 the GOP efforts to rig the congressional elections in their favor had turned farcical and clinging to a diminishing returns cliff - all those distorted districts and they still only have a 4-5 seat lead in the House - of their own making.

With the 2026 midterms looming - and with growing evidence that the slim Republican holdings in both the US House and Senate are slipping away - you can taste the desperation of the Far Right to impose their minority rule with escalating efforts across GOP-controlled states to skew their gerrymandered districts even more. Especially as trump himself - openly noting that losing Congress this 2026 would end his reign of madness and sadism - has been running around since 2025 - when his polling numbers slipped as ICE thuggery and tariffs increased - demanding states like Texas and Indiana redraw their districts to keep Democrats from gaining control of a divided House.

The big difference this election cycle - and a big reason why the Republicans are panicking in public - is that the Democratic Party finally decided to take the gloves off and do their own extreme gerrymandering to counter the decades of GOP mapmaking that drove us to this cliff.

I've noted before that yes, Democrats were guilty of gerrymandering in states their legislatures controlled, especially in Maryland, Illinois, and California. It's just that the Dems never pulled it to the extremes the way Republicans did in Texas, Ohio, and Florida. 

Until now: California passed a voter referendum in 2025 allowing them - the most populous state - to skew their congressional districts to where Republicans may not have any seats left; and Virginia passed a voter referendum this month allowing them to redraw districts to where mathematically speaking the Democrats can win the US House by 1-2 seats.

The Virginia results are under legal scrutiny at the moment, so it may not be settled for this midterms. In the meantime, the GOP panic that they could lose the House - and lose it for a long time, because they don't have as many nationwide voters as they'd like to keep skewing the results - has resulted in map madness in the large-population states they still control.

Florida, for example, called an emergency legislative session: Not about data centers, or AI, or education needs, or funding for the upcoming hurricane season; but about redrawing a map they already skewed 20-to-8 in their favor back in 2022. It's bad enough that they're planning to divide the Tampa metro - as huge a Democratic Party stronghold in the state you can find - so that none of the seats representing that metro will favor Dems: A clear partisan attempt to negate the rights and powers of a large number of American citizens.

The funny thing about all this? All of these Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves into permanent victory could actually help them lose it all (via David A. Graham at The Atlantic):

But partisan gerrymandering does have one ultimate weakness—a foe that doesn’t always win, but whose victories are especially satisfying. That foe is gerrymandering itself. If you have never heard of a dummymander, this is probably a good time to learn the word. Dummymander is the term that the political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas L. Brunell coined for what happens when a gerrymander backfires, hurting the party that it was designed to help. Dummymanders are nothing new, but the bunch of new districts drawn in recent months mean that they could play an important role in the outcome of the midterms...

Now the action is mostly reaching its end as the deadline for finalizing 2026 maps nears, although some questions remain. (Among them: Will the Supreme Court issue a ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act in time for Republicans to draw new maps for this cycle? (editor's note: goddamn this foreshadowing...) The consensus among election analysts is that the redistricting will end up giving Republicans only three or four new seats, if any. But Democratic prowess in recent special elections raises the possibility that rather than a cold-blooded political hit, the GOP’s efforts could end up as a Pyrrhic victory.

In late January, a Democrat won a Texas state Senate seat in Tarrant County—in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024. Most House districts won’t see a shift that big, but victories like these have raised the possibility of Democrats catching enough of a blue wave that maps drawn to help Republicans might actually hurt them. The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

One thing that keeps getting overlooked in these gerrymander wars is the role no-party-affiliate (NPA) or independent voters play in how districts get won. When they're drawing these maps, the Republicans (and Democrats) look at how much they can spread out their registered voters they expect to show up, and then pray that the third-party indy voters either side with them or fail to show... which is a huge gamble to take if you're trump's party when polling shows a lot of independent voters are pissed at trump right now. You can survive independent voter outrage if your district is +5 or +8 in favor of your party, but you can't if you've got the percentages at +1 or +2.

Many of Grofman and Brunell’s examples of dummymanders come from late in the 20th century, when Democrats still held lots of southern seats because of historic party support, but were on the verge of losing them to Republicans. For example, they write that the map Georgia Democrats drew after the 1990 census looks more like a Republican gerrymander than one drawn to help Democrats, which the authors blame on “the belief that it is good to be as thin as possible as long as you still remain breathing.” Entering the 1992 election, Georgia had nine Democratic House members. Three won, but three lost, and three more retired.

In the wake of those 1990 redistricting, the Republicans rose on the demographic - and racist - shifts from social conservative Democrats fleeing a party more inclined to defend civil (Black) rights. Those shifts were accelerated in the 2000s by the War on Terror of 9/11 and the growing evangelical Christianist voting base, which led to the Tea Party/anti-Obama fervor that drives the modern Republican base to this day.

Thing is, that partisan shift is pretty much played out. For all the ongoing outrage and demonizing the Far Right produces and consumes within their own circles, they can't increase their voting base any further. At best, they can bamboozle or enrage certain voting blocs - Latino men for example in 2024 - to side with them for one or two election cycles before their hypocritical true selves emerge and drive those blocs off.

This is one of the reasons the Republicans are not only struggling to gerrymander every state they can to favor themselves, they're also desperate to take away voting rights from everyone - Blacks, women, college-age, LGBTQA+ - they don't want voting. The conservative mindset on full display that only THEIR side should have power and rights, and everyone else needs to sit there in our cages being grateful for the crumbs thrown our way.

I'm terrified of the damage these gerrymanders are going to inflict: the lack of honest representation that will ignore the needs of our communities just as we need help from government the most.

The only true way in my opinion to end these gerrymander wars is for the rest of us - all of us - to show the fuck up at the polling stations during the midterms and vote the Republicans - the ones most responsible for propping up that child-raping, grifting, sadistic trump - out of office. As much as the Democrats are playing these mapmaking games, they're not the ones responsible for this monstrous tyrannical regime arresting families, crashing economies, and bombing schools.

We are long past due holding the Far Right accountable for all the sins they've inflicted on the rest of us. To hell with their games: VOTE THE REPUBLICANS OUT.

Then we'll see an end to these fucking partisan maps.

Thoughts About the 2022 Midterms

A lot of post-midterms articles are out there on the Intertubes, a number of wry observations and urgent recriminations towards Republicans, and I would recommend glancing at Rude Pundit's to get a taste of the schadenfreude getting served over the GOP's historic failures.

I say "failure" even as the Republicans claimed (slim) control of the U.S. House of Representatives - and retained control of a number of Red states - because it's been traditional in the modern era of partisan politics that the party in opposition to the White House - this year the Republicans in opposition to the Democratic President Biden - wins big in the following midterms. This year, the Republicans were expecting a "Red Wave" to counter the 2018 "Blue Wave" that gave Democrats control of the House vs. donald trump.

The polling - mostly from conservative-leaning providers like RCP - were all pointing to a huge 30-seat flip of the House. There were a number of projections Republicans could regain a tightly fought Senate, even in spite of the crazed candidates running in various campaigns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona (and several others).

Republicans were beating the war drums hard on the economy, railing against signs of a recession as inflation (re: gas prices) soared to levels that hurt any President's standing with voters.

This was also all happening with the 2022 district realignments for the House, where the updated Census numbers required new maps and allowed the parties - yes, Democrats did it too - to aggressively gerrymander those districts to give them advantages. Republicans held the gerrymander advantage due to controlling enough battleground states to outduel the Dems (who also shot themselves in the foot by not gerrymandering New York to their advantage, screw you Andrew Cuomo).

Throw in the Republicans attempts at voter suppression - far greater than what they had in 2018 and 2020 - and there was every likelihood that turnout would drop, hurting Democratic chances.

And with all of that going the Republicans' way... they STILL failed to retake the Senate - which added an extra Democratic seat meaning the 50-50 power-sharing is no longer working and Mitch McConnell can suck it - and their win in the House was by a meager five seats, causing headaches for party leadership they weren't expecting.

It is, according to historians, the worst midterm performance for an opposition party since 1962. There was a similar situation for Democrats in 2002 failing against Dubya, but the 9/11 attacks and the patriotic fervor clearly skewed the situation. There were the Republicans failing against FDR in 1934, but the Great Depression was still happening and a lot of Americans still hated them and Hoover for screwing them over.

The Republicans ought to be rejoicing in that they control the House, which they can use to investigate Biden's administration family for scandals every day they meet on the Hill, and file every impeachment complaint until all they do is vote on embarrassing Biden and Harris for the 2024 campaign (lacking control of the Senate, no impeachment will go their way: For the Republicans it's all about making the Democrats look corrupt and weak to their own voting base). They are openly planning repeated hearings over Russia's planted evidence Hunter Biden's laptop, as it's the only thing they can do other than force federal shutdowns to break the entire government.

Instead, the Republicans are in-fighting over the poor results. They were expecting a wave and all they got was a trickle. The My Pillow guy Mike Lindell - who is constantly shilling conspiracy theories for trump's Big Lie about "stolen votes" - is challenging for control of the RNC, arguing the current head - Mitt Romney's daughter Ronna McDaniel - failed to inspire better turnout. There were a number of reports of GOP leaders railing against trump's involvement, pushing on them unstable and unpopular candidates like Hershel Walker in Georgia who hurt turnout among needed independent voters.

There are going to be post-mortems, autopsies, follow-up reports, what have you, which the Republicans will ignore like they did after they were stunned in 2012, when they expected four years of Tea Party fauxrage would turn America against Obama. The GOP's response after that loss was to double-down on the Far Right fearmongering to encourage their voting base to stay faithful, and they've been spiraling downward ever since thanks to trump's takeover in 2016.

If the midterms are showing me anything, these are the observations I've made:

Like Bob Burnett points out at Common Dreams, the American electorate is polarized to the point of frozen stasis. In previous eras before the Culture War shifted all of the Conservative votes to the Republicans after 1994, there was an expectation of centrist/moderate party voters crossing the aisle to vote for candidates or issues regardless of party. By 2014, branding won out: Republicans (tm) can no longer find themselves voting for ANY Democrat (tm) (and the same goes for Dems refusing to vote for any GOPer) even when the issues should compel them to vote for the other party that's in favor of those issues.

While this means you can rely on your party base, it means you can't expect any more voters to flip your way. Whatever independent/No Party Affiliate voters are out there, you find yourself praying for them to show up for you to overcome any demographic limitations you've already set for your party with the gerrymandering and suppression. And voter turnout for NPAs is unreliable at best.

The results are also telling me that for the Republicans this is the best they can do for turnout, and they STILL screwed up. This is as far as they can get for voter turnout and numbers going their way. Even WITH the extreme gerrymandering favoring them, even WITH the voter suppression laws they put in place to reduce turnout numbers... the Republicans STILL couldn't pull off a Red Wave of their own.

For every voter the GOP had on their side showing up angry over inflation, the Democrats had voters showing up angry over the loss of abortion rights. For every Red state they held onto, the Republicans lost control of a couple of state legislatures they could not afford to lose.

And this was the midterms. Voter turnout for Presidential election cycles are higher, and 2024 could well be a repeat of 2020 in that regard.

This is also something hurting Republicans in the long run: The inevitable demographic shift of older (Boomer) voters to younger (Gen Z/Millennial) voters is starting to happen. One of the things the Republicans realized in 2012 was that by 2028, simple dying off of the older generations that make up the Conservative voting base will increase just as the kids who grew up watching Republicans burn everything down will get old enough to vote. (The divided Generation X sitting between the two generations is too small a voter bloc - they're the ones not showing up to vote at all - to help Republicans) We are looking at a one-two punch for Liberal-leaning younger voters that could flip even Red states Blue in ways that suppression and gerrymandering can't stop. 

It's one big reason why the Republicans doubled-down anyway: They figured that the 2028 demographic shift was unstoppable, so they worked in the short-term to dominate Congress and the White House to ensure the one thing that could counter that Blue shift - a Far Right Supreme Court - would be in place to prevent the full liberalization of America that would undo everything they've done since Reagan's tenure.

In the short term, the Far Right won. In the long term, the bill for all the damage they've done - the racism, the deficits, the corruption made worse by trump's rise to power - is coming due. This middling, frustrating midterm fiasco for the Republicans is the beginning of the end of the control they've had on the public discourse since 1980.

And it terrifies them. The Far Right Republican base have a pretty good idea what these midterms mean, and the panic showing through their ongoing performative outrage is going to get worse.

The Wingnuts are about to double-down on the previous double-down to turn crazier than they've ever been. Stay safe, people.

And Io Saturnalia!

Dark Days for Florida in 2022

I woke up to a gray day.

Not only because of an incoming Hurricane in mid-November - remember when hurricane seasons ended in October? Thanks to climate change, not anymore! - making it a dreary rainy day.

It was a gray dreary day because here in Florida for the 2022 midterms, I woke up to news that Republican Governor Ron DeSantis - that racist, immigrant-bashing, blasphemous moran - not just won re-election but he won in a blow-out by nearly double digits over Charlie Crist.

There was a similar result with Marco Rubio - that wet noodle of a Senator who barely shows up and only for television interviews - winning big against Val Demings for the U.S. Senator seat.

It was basically a massive blowout statewide in Florida for Republicans, while at the national level the GOP suffered with poor results, failing to flip the Senate (so far, some states are undecided but the Democratic incumbents are holding on) and barely winning the U.S. House despite poll predictions having them win 25-plus seats to wreak havoc on President Biden's hopes.

So today was me sitting around waiting for a hurricane to hit muttering to myself "What the hell happened?"

Previous midterm elections - with Florida's Governor races as part of the ballots - were never this bad for Democrats. In 2018, DeSantis eked out a win over Andrew Gillum with 4.07 million over 4.04 million votes. In 2014, Rick Scott won against Charlie Crist with 2.86 million votes over 2.8 million.

But this time, 2022 with DeSantis facing Crist who was running his second chance as a Democrat (Crist was a Republican Governor 2006-2010 but switched parties when he lost favor with a growing extremist GOP), the results were 4.6 million for DeSantis and 3.1 million for Crist. The voter turnout for the Senate race was pretty much the same: Rubio at 4.6 million and Demings at 3.1 million. 

Democrats just... lost over a million Florida voters somewhere. In a midterms where Democratic voter turnout saw moderate or better gains across most of the nation. What the hell happened?

In my darkest, angriest mindset, I'm going to the conspiracy angle of hard voter suppression happening. Republicans didn't gain voters all that much between 2018 to 2022, but the Democrats obviously lost them. I would be screaming about somebody somewhere blocking Democratic voters in likely Blue districts... except there's been no reports of that on social media or regular media.

Hey, if QAnon can run around screaming "stolen elections," I have a right to scream the same thing. It's just... dammit, where's the evidence of it? Alas.

The only other rational explanation was voter disinterest. All those Democratic voters just... refused to vote for the party this year. There's two reasons why that could be the culprit.

One of the bigger voter suppression stunts DeSantis pulled this election cycle was aggressively redoing the U.S. Congressional districts with extreme Republican-friendly gerrymandering. It was so blatantly partisan a gerrymander it ought to have been voted down by even the Republican legislature, or at least stricken down by the courts. And yet, nobody fought it.

Worse, the Florida Democratic party failed to challenge for every district in spite of that gerrymandering. Several districts had no Democratic congressional candidate, increasing the voter disinterest to turn out for the other important races for Governor and Senator.

Study after study shows that extreme partisan gerrymandering affects voter turnout. When DeSantis redid the Congressional map, he not only improved the odds of state Republicans winning extra U.S. House seats, he also improved his own odds to win re-election by depressed Democratic turnout.

The second reason for the drop in Democratic voter turnout? There had been complaints before - and this time around seemed to prove it - that the Democratic voting base just didn't like or trust Charlie Crist. Due to the fact he used to be Republican, the fact he still stood as a more Centrist moderate candidate to a base that would prefer progressives, and the fact he just didn't seem to reach more people this time around all hurt the overall ticket. How this affected Val Demings - who had a better rapport with the Democratic base, and should have seen better results - still doesn't make sense outside of the anti-Crist factions just refusing to show up at all.

And for all the evidence that the Democratic Party is failing to reach Hispanic voters - especially here in Florida, where the Cuban and Puerto Rican voting blocs are heavily social conservatives - I don't think that is a major reason for the missing voters from 2018: If the Hispanics were flipping parties, we'd be seeing an increase in Republican turnout this 2022 over 2018. Still, the failure by the Democratic Party at both the state and national level to appeal better to Latino voters is a major setback that the Dems have to address.

My mood is not lightened by the reports of Democratic gains elsewhere, especially in Midwest states where Dems gained control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota. There may be a chance that the Democrats keep control of the Senate - only with gaining one extra seat, which may not be enough to break the filibuster/cloture stranglehold - but the Republicans are about to gain control of the House (due in strong part to DeSantis' gerrymandering, damn him). The reports are that the GOP will have a slim lead in the House, but that a schism between more hardcore wingnut factions could undercut the fight for Speakership. I doubt it: Republicans will unite even if it's behind a spineless cur like McCarthy if there's a chance to get their Cruelty agenda passed.

So here I sit, waiting for another storm to hit Florida, praying that at least this hurricane can well hit Mar-A-Lago like a bullseye and wash it all into the sea.

I've been raging and fuming ever since 2010, ever since sanity failed my state when the Republican voters eagerly put into office a documented Medicare Fraud. It's only gotten worse since then: The cruelty, the failures of leadership, all to "own the libs" even as the state literally falls apart bit by bit, disaster by disaster.

I'd like to move away, I'm at that point of giving up on the state I've lived almost my whole life. But I'm too old to go job-hunting across states anymore, and damn it all the rent is too damned high.

Gods help us.

Four For the Fourth: Fixing the Flaws

Reminder: here are links to my other Four For the Fourth blog articles, one about a plea for silent firecrackers, one about women's rights to independence, and one about needing more metal music on the TV specials dammit!

This is, as mentioned earlier, one of the most dire 4th of Julys I've ever honored.

Because the state of our nation is at a crossroads between majority progressive reform and minority violent retrenchment. As David Atkins notes at the Washington Monthly:

The Roberts Court has imperiled America’s unity. The country’s center-left majority is disenfranchised and under assault from the likes of Samuel Alito. Something has to give.

The large, productive populations of blue states like California and New York—which famously give far more to the national treasury than they get back—chafe under a system that affords far more clout to the citizens of Idaho and Wyoming. The voting majority that won seven of the last eight presidential popular votes and that constitutes 70 percent of the GDP will throw off the yoke of a conservative minority. Most Americans below the age of 40 are progressive—well to the left of today’s median Democrat—and will not buckle under the imposition of a white Christian nationalist agenda by an aging conservative minority.

They know that the Supreme Court has lost its moral authority. Republicans have won the popular vote in a presidential election only once in 30 years, yet Republican presidents have nominated most of the Court’s justices. No Democratic president has chosen a chief justice since Harry Truman in 1946. The last Republican president entered office having lost by nearly 3 million votes even with the aid of a foreign dictatorship, whose help he begged for on the campaign trail. One of those justices was stolen outright by Mitch McConnell under pretenses of it being an election year, only to see the Senate confirm another justice while votes were being cast in the next cycle. The Senate that confirmed those justices is absurdly skewed in favor of small, white, rural conservative states, such that Senate Democrats represent 43 million more voters yet are locked in a 50-50 tie. And the Senate’s skew will only become more blatantly unjust and unsustainable...

The Framers created the Senate and the Electoral College to bring small states on board with the larger national project and to temper what they worried would be the passions of the electorate. They feared demagogues—yet ironically, their solution enabled the rise of one. Their concessions to slave states failed to prevent the Civil War. They got many things wrong and could not foresee or prevent the rise of political parties. Crucially, they also expected future generations to change the Constitution frequently, yet it has barely been amended in almost a century...

The reason I started this blog back in 2006 was to start arguing over the amendments our nation needed to repair a creaky and aging federal constitution: A model of governance that needed to update for a 21st Century that was more progressive than the Founders realized, and stuck to an electoral model that wasn't meant for so many states and a population more than 50 times the nation's original size.

I mean, I got into a tweet debate with Conor Friedersdorf this morning about the problems with the U.S. Senate representation:

Back then the population disparity (10 times) was not as immense as it is today (68 times) between the largest state (CA) and the smallest (WY). You can fit 25 states plus DC into CA and still have room for New Jersey. THAT'S how bad the Senatorial imbalance is now.

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) July 4, 2022

This is just one of the many things that need to get fixed so that the tyranny of Minority Party Rule doesn't destroy this nation.

Just amending the representation in the Senate - to end the equal seating of two Senators per state regardless of population, which has unbalanced this Senate to where the political minority of small states can logjam the entire legislative process - would be a huge reform. Changing the rules so that the ten most populous states receive an extra third Senator while the ten smallest states shrink to just one Senator would be the most rational means of doing it (although the small states will begin screaming how their representation is being taken away. Too bad. You don't have enough people to justify having that much power!). Just by changing this, the responsibilities of the Senate - especially the consent and advise for judicial appointments - will reflect the interests of the majority of voters nationwide.

Most other reforms our Constitution should focus on would be fixing a Supreme Court that has become too partisan, and too much a source of political brinksmanship that has helped polarize our parties.

The simplest fix to correct the Court right now - the near-permanent Far Right stranglehold on six seats out of nine - would be to expand the court. And this wouldn't even need an Amendment because Congress already has the power to add or subtract from the bench. This has actually happened before in the 1860s when the nation was responding to the last time the political minority - Southern slaveholding conservatives - caused this level of damage. They shrank the number of Justices in 1866 to stop Andrew Johnson from replacing retiring jurists with pro-segregationist people, and then re-expanded the number to nine (where it's been since) to give U.S. Grant and the then-liberal Republicans the chance to ensure an anti-slavery pro-rights Court would work.

So adding four seats - while the Democrats control both the White House (Biden) and the Senate (tie-breaker vote) before the 2022 midterms shake things up - would be the simplest thing but also greatest political hazard for Democrats. They worry that a future Republican-held Congress and White House would escalate like an arms race: If Dems upped the seats to 13 for a 7-6 ideological advantage, the future GOP would respond by added 10 seats for a 16-to-7 sledgehammer. Even though there IS a legitimate reason to expand to 13 seats - there are 13 judicial districts (11 state regions and 2 special jurisdictions) that require oversight by a Supreme Court Justice - the Dems don't seem to want to go that route.

Even though the Republicans would jump at the chance to expand to 13 seats right now if they were in power, and bump it up to a 10-to-3 advantage they would never let go of.

There is another way to fix the Supreme Court but it might involve an amendment: Setting retirement age limits. Right now due to wording in Article III Section I, judicial appointments may be lifetime. Best way to make sure the SCOTUS seats change hands - by either a term limit (12 or 16 years) or mandatory retirement (65 years old) - and make it harder for either party to plan any long-term control of the judiciary.

Another Amendment this nation needs in this dark hour is something, anything, to stop the partisan gerrymandering that gives the state parties too much control over who can actually run for office and who can win. We've seen the evidence and reports about how gerrymandering districts to extremes reduces voter interest and turnout. We know how gerrymandering pulls away power from the urban populations and gives that power to sparse rural areas. We've watched the last 10 years how partisan gerrymandering gave us minority party rule at both the state and Congressional levels. 

Instead of fair districts, instead of ensuring each person's vote will count, gerrymandering diminishes that power and grants it to the special interests - mostly the greedy and the evangelical - who don't care about what happens to the citizenry. If we could get a Congress responsive enough to pass such reforms... but we can't, because there's enough figures in both parties who prefer the gerrymandered status quo. The irony: Gerrymandering makes sure we don't get enough reformers elected to end gerrymandering anyway.

Oh, and getting rid of the broken Electoral College - a system that violates the will of the majority of Americans, may well deny us rightfully-elected Presidents in the future - is a must.

The United States need so many other reforms to our electoral system and to the checks and balances that ought to exist between the federal branches and the states. To get there, we as voters are going to need a concerted effort - by enough Americans across enough states - to use whatever power we have left at the ballot box to pass these reforms and restore both our rights and our safety. 

That means voting FOR those who can reform our system - Democrats - and voting AGAINT those who will corrupt it further - Republicans - for their own greedy sadistic needs.

This won't be a good Independence Day until we're independent from the corrupt powers in high places.

Good luck. Keep fighting.

Update on DeSantis' 2022 Gerrymander of Doom

I mentioned a month ago my rage at Florida Governor DeSantis' heavy-handed gerrymandering effort to skew the Congressional districts so far Republican as to offend common sense. Well, the court matter is moving relatively quickly because a couple days ago a district court smashed DeSantis' map with a sledgehammer (via Mary Ellen Klas at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)): 

In a swift reversal of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bold political gambit, a Leon County Circuit Court judge on Wednesday threw out the new congressional map drawn by the governor and approved by legislators, ordering a new map drawn by a Harvard expert to be put in place.

Judge Layne Smith, in a ruling from the bench after a four-hour hearing, found DeSantis’ map unconstitutional under the Fair Districts Amendment of the Florida Constitution “because it diminishes the African Americans’ ability to select the representative of their choice.”

Smith, who served in the administration of former Gov. Rick Scott, was appointed to the county bench by Scott and later appointed to the circuit court by DeSantis. He said it would be up to lawmakers to decide if they want to enact a new map when the Legislature convenes for a week-long special session on May 23.

But in an effort to get precincts set for candidates to qualify, he ordered a map drawn by the plaintiffs’ expert, Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere, to replace the one approved by the governor and Legislature...

It should be interesting to note that Smith's place on the bench is due to Republican governors putting him there, and he still noted how racist DeSantis' gerrymandering was. It's also helpful to note that Smith is well aware of the urgency of the matter, bringing in a third party serving the court to make a replacement map should the Florida Legislature refuse to act. Considering the Lege DID have a Congressional map - only for DeSantis to veto it and force his own obviously broken one to replace it - it would be interesting to see if the House and Senate re-pass their original bill and dare DeSantis to veto again.

Back to the report:

Voting rights groups, such as the League of Women Voters of Florida, and individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuit April 22 and asked the court for a temporary injunction and to order the Legislature to redraw a constitutional map.

The plaintiffs argued that the district drawn by the governor’s staff, and approved by the Legislature along mostly partisan lines, violated the provisions that prohibit the state from diminishing the ability of minority voters from electing candidates of their choice.

Smith ultimately agreed.

“I do find persuasive the arguments that were made about the diminishment of African American votes,” Smith said. “...The district that has since been enacted and signed into law by the governor does disperse 367,000 African American votes between four different districts.”

He acknowledged that the governor’s proposed Congressional District 5 may be a more compact district but said it is not in line with the minority voting rights protections in the state Constitution...

However, an attorney for the state, Mohammad Omar Jazil, argued that recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have restricted the use of race as a guiding factor in redistricting cases.

He said that adhering to the Fair District provisions would not be considered a compelling interest as required in the federal Constitution.

“No court has ever held that complying with a state constitution is a compelling interest,” Jazil said.

However, the plaintiffs countered that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, that “provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply...”

The Fair District Amendments DO clarify that the districts cannot be drawn to diminish minority voter representation, which is likely the point on which Smith pinned his decision. It should be noted that DeSantis' map also violated another provision in the Amendments saying the districts should not skew favorably to one party over another: Nobody can tell me a "20-Republican to 8-Democrat" map in a state where Republicans and Democrats are near-equal in registered voters is NOT skewed.

As Klas notes in the Times article DeSantis is already planning to appeal, and Judge Smith is expecting that even as he finalizes his court order. By the looks of it, the next stop is the state appellate court and then the Florida Supreme Court (and if DeSantis is really pissed about it, the U.S. Supreme Court).

There is no guarantee that Smith's ruling will stand: The upper state courts are just as stacked with Republican appointees and Federalist Society conservatives, to where they can rule for DeSantis by ignoring or even mis-reading the state constitution and its amendments.

But this is a good sign, that even a Republican-picked judge like Smith said Aw Hell Naw to DeSantis' openly partisan and racist attempt to pack the U.S. Congress with gerrymandered Far Right wingnuts.

Here's hoping THIS Gerrymander dies a quick death. And DeSantis has to choke on eating its remains.

P.S. I hope that Harvard guy Ansolabehere - wait, seriously, Ansola Be Here? - draws up a new Congressional district that includes one district that's No Party Affiliate plurality, just so we can see how fcked up partisan gerrymandering really is.

P.S.S. I shouldn't mock other people's last name. I suffer from that fate myself. Did I ever tell you how one year my high school yearbook added an "h" to the end of my last name? They made me Scottish! The school cafeteria started serving me haggis! I'm with Mike Myers on this: All Scottish cuisine IS based on a dare.

DeSantis' Map to Electoral Hell

Update: Many thanks to driftglass for including this article in Crooks&Liars Mike's Blog Round-up! 

If there's a "Things I Despise" list, somewhere in the Top Five is a seething disgust for my state's pandering demonizing governor Ron DeSantis, he of the Culture Wars obsessions in a desperate attempt to outmaneuver the likes of trump himself for the 2024 Presidential primaries.

Somewhere just slightly above him is a raging disgust for the constant corruption of state-level gerrymandering, where every ten years the Far Right Conservatives running Florida and half the other states intentionally skew the population numbers to carve out party-friendly districts to where Republicans will have enough "safe" seats to hold onto political power even when statistically speaking their numbers put them in the minority.

(And yes, I hate the hypocrisy of Democrats configuring their own gerrymandering in response. It's a downward spiral where only partisans survive while moderates who can't campaign in any districts get kicked to the curb)

I had been hoping across the years of blogging at this place that eventually the gerrymander would face enough legal scrutiny in the courts that the damn thing would expire, but alas in 2019 the conservative-bent Supreme Court decided to not only spare the gerrymander but gave it a nice home and a full pension.

From there, it was only a matter of time - the 2022 Midterms which OH FCKING GOD IS THIS YEAR - that the gerrymander would come back to mock my pragmatic sense of electoral fairness.

So of course I was dreading how the Florida Legislature - dominated by Republicans since the 1990s and looking to enforce that dominance for another ten years - would carve out new state-level and federal Congressional districts even with the constitutionally-mandated Fair Districts amendments limiting how they could twist population zones into five Republican districts for every one Democratic even though the party split statewide is close to 45-45 with 10 percent third-party/no-party registered.

(If the redistricting process was truly fair, you'd think at least ONE No-Party-Affiliated district would pop up at the state level out of 120 Representative districts, but nooooooo.)

Apparently, for the state districts - House and Senate - the voting was done along party lines and the Florida Democratic members questioning the lack of transparency although it doesn't seem like there's much room to challenge the final maps. The state maps were sent to the State Supreme Court for final review and apparently that Court - as Republican-leaning as they are after 20 years of one-party rule in Florida - were cleared this March.

What happened to dial up the redistricting drama this cycle was an unusual veto of the Congressional maps, something that DeSantis could interfere with and did so. Previous governors never insisted on drawing up their own redistricting maps, but DeSantis did that this time and with a map a little more partisan than even the legislative Republicans were comfortable with. 

At first it seemed like the Lege were going to put up a ruckus when DeSantis called for a special session - which costs extra to the taxpayers, by the way - to get them vote his way... and then this week the GOP legislators pretty much rolled over and agreed to support DeSantis' map. To Joe Hernandez at NPR for more:

Republican legislative leaders in Florida say they're going to give up trying to redraw the state's new map of congressional districts and instead consider one offered by Gov. Ron DeSantis during a special session next week.

DeSantis, a potential Republican presidential aspirant, has been pushing a map that's considered more advantageous to his party.

The announcement on Monday by state Senate President Wilton Simpson and House Speaker Chris Sprowls came two weeks after DeSantis vetoed a map that had been approved by the legislature.

"At this time, Legislative reapportionment staff is not drafting or producing a map for introduction during the special session," the lawmakers said in a letter. "We are awaiting a communication from the Governor's Office with a map that he will support."

The ACLU of Florida condemned the legislature's decision to punt the responsibilities of redistricting to DeSantis, calling it an "unprecedented" and "undemocratic" move.

"People should pick their politicians, not the other way around," the group said in a statement...

DeSantis is arguing that the Lege's map carved out two Black-majority districts in North Florida that he feels should be more "race-neutral," but in the process he's looking to redraw everything else around that to skew the results more in favor to Republicans. To refer to Jane C. Timm and Marc Caputo over at NBC News:

The map — which would carve up a Black-held district — was released Wednesday afternoon, just days after state legislators said they would defer to DeSantis, a Republican, on the new congressional boundaries. The Republican-controlled Legislature drew maps that would have created less of a GOP advantage, but DeSantis vetoed them last month.

DeSantis' map would create 20 Republican seats and eight Democratic ones based on 2020 electoral data, according to Matthew Isbell, a leading Florida-based Democratic data consultant who analyzed the maps Wednesday evening. Florida’s congressional delegation consists of 16 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the House. The state was apportioned an additional House seat after the 2020 census.

“It’s so blatantly partisan,” Isbell said. “The only way you can create a 20-and-8 map... was to basically say, ‘Screw Black representation.’”

As I've mentioned earlier, in terms of voter numbers there's a near-even balance between registered Republicans (5.14 million) and registered Democrats (5.03 million) so in a 28-seat situation it ought to be 15R - 13D (if you calculate the No-Party count of 3.8 million, it ought to be 11 Republican, 10 Democrat, and 7 NPA).

Yet this gerrymandering by DeSantis would give Republicans a 20-to-8 advantage in Congressional seats. It's insanely wrong, and gives too much power to Republicans when it shouldn't.

And it's unconstitutional as hell. Those Fair District Amendments I'd mentioned earlier require that the redrawn districts do not conflict with minority (read: Black and Latino) rights, and those districts cannot be drawn in such a way as to "favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent." The map that DeSantis wants clearly over-represents Republicans, and by breaking up two districts that were designed to protect minority representation he's violating that rule as well.

It's clear that this is a matter heading to the courts, but it's also under a deadline because these midterms require the electoral maps be in place for the Congressional primaries by September (meaning August at the very latest). Even if this matter gets sped through the appeals process, there is a very dark possibility that at least for 2022 DeSantis' map will be the one used for the national election cycle this November.

And that could seriously impact on which party controls the U.S. House heading into 2023. If the Republicans regain control of the House even by one seat due to DeSantis' manipulations, we are likely going to see the swift retuning of Congressional investigations into baseless allegations of unproven voter fraud and meaningless impeachment inquiries against President Biden out of sheer spite for what legitimately happened to donald trump (twice).

This is why I hate gerrymanders. Instead of voting for actual representation on issues that matter to constituents it's all been turned into an exercise of map-making to let partisan hacks seize control, and wield power for their own selfish needs and NOT for the people living back home.

I hope to God DeSantis' map fails and that sanity - even if it means a 17-11 Republican "majority" that still doesn't represent us - prevails.

In the meantime, the only remaining way to defeat a gerrymander is to GET THE VOTE OUT and override the statistical disadvantages that the Republicans try to force on Democratic voters. Rise up, Democrats, turnout still means everything...

In The Year 2021, Will a Just and Shining Future Finally Be Won

The year 2020 is officially ended, although much of the madness and dread that permeated that long long soul-sucking period of history - such as a trumpian administration sinking faster into corruption before Biden's inauguration - still awaits a future purging.

I still need to make a reckoning of that year - part of me wants to write up a Winners/Losers checklist but it's difficult to finish while the chaos is slipping to and fro - but in the meanwhile we do need to look ahead as Infidel753 does at his blog: 

1. When 2022 and 2024 arrive, most of the Democratic voting base will judge Biden and the Democrats in Congress mainly by results.  Has the pandemic been vanquished?  Have jobs and wages (not "the economy", which takes in all kinds of things, but jobs and wages specifically) recovered?  Has federal legislation to protect voting rights from state-level gerrymandering and vote suppression been enacted?  Has Medicare access been expanded or some other kind of public option been provided?  Have DC and Puerto Rico become states?  If the Democrats achieve results, our voters will care only that it was done, not how it was done.  Conversely, if little or nothing is accomplished, nobody will much care about whatever reasons or excuses are offered...

You need to go to Infidel's blog and read the whole article: It's not so much a checklist of a Liberal To Do List as it is a manual (and warning) of what to expect in the coming political cycle.

Much of what's coming is a pattern of destruction and obstruction we've already seen: The Republicans have already made it abundantly clear they will NOT respect the legitimacy of Biden's Presidency and will do everything to break it (and break the nation in the process). The Far Right media will obviously beat the "Impeach Biden" war drums within a day of Biden's swearing-in: for example, pinning the fault of 350,000+ Americans dead of COVID on his shoulders rather than on trump whose actual malfeasance in the affair was - and still is - the primary culprit in that tragedy.

The Republicans are going to spend 2021 - all of the 2020s decade - doing everything they can to hold onto the corrupt Minority Rule powers they wield. They've gotten to the point of Rule Or Ruin in their world-view, they no longer believe in the ebb-and-flow of power cycling between the major parties like it's done for much of the 20th Century. They're at the point that Republicans are terrified of the future... because the path forward from here follows the Democratic/Liberal ideals, not their own.

Half of what Infidel discusses on his article can only occur if the Democrats hold slim control of both halves of Congress, so with the Senate still on the edge with two Georgia Senatorial runoffs we can't be certain how far the Democratic agenda can go. All of what Infidel suggests is where it SHOULD go, such as the needed inclusions of new states to grant those regions - a broken Puerto Rico in particular - the legitimacy of statehood to stabilize their communities and promote better public service. A lot of what Infidel lists are things that should have been happening for ages, denied or blocked only because a calcifying Republican Party refused to see the merits of such efforts (has it ever occurred to Republicans that a habitually conservative Puerto Rican population could go Red and NOT Blue in future federal elections?) to even compromise or provide bipartisan effort to achieve them.

But Republicans can't and won't compromise any more: Politics is officially a Zero Sum game to them, so it's left to the Democrats to get things actually done anymore.

Which is where this coming decade offers so much potential for getting things done. While the Game of Demographics - the shift from older white conservative voting blocs to younger ethnically open liberal blocs - is still not really there yet for liberals to feel safe about achieving results - in health care reforms, civil rights, wage and employment rights, better education, a more just and loving world - the signs are aligning towards it.

What Biden, Harris, the Democratic leaders in Congress, the GOTV leadership of Democrats in battleground states -not just Stacey Abrams but thousands like her - what they can achieve this first year in a Biden Presidency is the foundation of a Liberal (not yet Progressive, sorry BernieBros) era that ought to repair not only the damage done by a vandal-plagued trump Era but also build past the roadblocks that Republicans have been throwing in our nation's path since 1994.

A lot of this still depends on those Georgia Senate races - the early voting on that (with huge numbers) wrapped up and the official election day for that is coming up next - to where none of us can feel safe about what's ahead. If Republicans can keep a slim 51-seat lead in the Senate, that means Mitch McConnell remains in power and can wield every obstructionist tool at his disposal to delay the Democrats' agenda for another two years at least.

If it comes to that, if Congress becomes a pit of McConnell's hellish desires, Biden and the Democrats can still try to rebuild as much of the federal system they can - while still wary of the conservative Judiciary trump and McConnell have built to oppose the oncoming Blue Path - with a dedicated effort to undercut the corruption the Republicans have been operating with at the state level. 

The long-term objective of breaking the Republican Minority Rule needs to focus on the insane level of Gerrymandering the Republicans commit at the state level in battleground states - Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida especially - and that the Far Right will keep deploying to suppress future Democratic voter turnout. There have been successes in weakening the Gerrymander efforts, but our nation has yet to find a way to kill those damn things outright. With the chaos trump infused into the 2020 U.S. Census efforts, it's likely the Republican-controlled states will use skewed numbers to Gerrymander even more to prevent Democratic majorities - even slim ones - in those states to elect honest proportional representation.

That's just one thing I can think of that Biden and the Democratic Party needs to be doing. Infidel's list of To Do's - again, go to that link - lists a whole lot more. Every one of them a necessary act to recover from this pandemic, from this economic malaise, to repair this collapsing edifice we know as the United States of America.

We should see an end to the trump years like the fading nightmare it's all been.

We are going to wake up to a busy decade of hard work. That shining future is just the morning sunrise. Get some coffee if you need it.

Blind From The Bench: Republican Justices Let Gerrymanders Live, Dooming Fair Elections

To make the long story short: A Republican-controlled Supreme Court ruled today that they shouldn't interfere with Republican-controlled state legislatures that are making partisan gerrymanders that overwhelmingly favor Republicans at the expense of the voters' right to choose (via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog)

In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that partisan-gerrymandering claims pose particularly difficult problems for courts because it is well settled that legislatures can consider politics when drawing district maps. The question that courts would have to decide is when the consideration of politics has gone too far and violates the Constitution. But there’s no requirement, Roberts wrote, that a party’s representation in a congressional delegation or state legislature reflect its share of the statewide vote – a concept known as proportional representation.

Instead, Roberts emphasized, what plaintiffs in partisan-gerrymandering cases are asking courts to decide is what level of representation would be fair, and how to draw maps to achieve that level of fairness. There are many different ways to measure fairness, Roberts suggested, and choosing among them “poses basic questions that are political, not legal.” Nothing in the Constitution provides standards to decide what is fair, much less the kind of “limited and precise standards that are clear, manageable, and politically neutral” that courts would need. In the absence of such standards, Roberts concluded, courts should refrain from deciding partisan-gerrymandering cases...

Roberts is basically saying "Not My Problem," passing the buck back to state legislatures that will never take the matter as serious as Roberts claims they should. This is basically abandoning an aspect of Judicial Review that gave federal courts the power to force the other two federal branches - and the states - to play by Constitutional rules.

...Reading her dissent from the bench, Kagan emphasized that the Supreme Court had refused for “the first time ever” to “remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.” Kagan lamented that the “partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights.” The gerrymanders “debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.” “In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review,” she concluded, “the majority goes tragically wrong...”

Similar to how Roberts' conservative court dismantled key enforcements of the Voting Rights Acts - where Roberts and Scalia and the others no longer saw racism and allowed racist states to start suppressing ethnic and young voters - this Court refuses to see how one party - their own Republicans - repeatedly abuse the maps to shape Congressional districts in ways to guarantee virtual strangleholds on enough districts to keep Democrats from out of power.

The only way Democrats ever regain the House at this point is in massive voter uprisings against Republicans' growing extremist agendas. And the only response Republicans will have to that is to gerrymander and cheat even more.

Every Red State where Republicans dominate the state legislatures - like here in Florida - will essentially double-down in their attempt to reduce the odds of Democrats winning or maintaining enough districts to do anything the voters actually want. States where there are slim Democratic voting majorities but have overwhelming Republican elected officials, mocking their own residents needs.

I wrote about this before: The Republicans today rule in the minority, ignoring the majority when it comes to better wages, better schools, better environment, safer gun laws, stronger social aid...

Neither democracies nor republics can live without the accountability elected leaders owe their citizenry.

Right now, the only proper, the only SANE response relies on 108 million Americans who currently refuse to register to vote, either from apathy or fear.

The way gerrymandering works is through Republicans exploiting population gaps between dense urban/suburban areas - that lean liberal - and rural ones - that lean conservative - by packing most liberal (Dem) voters into one tight district and then spreading out shards of liberal voters into five or seven spread-out districts ranging across ten counties where the registered votes are few and far between.

They can get away with this because there are large enough percentages of the states' populations that are unregistered to vote (but could), so they can gauge where that 30-40 percent of non-voters are and plop them into those wide-ranging districts where they can be counted on to never show up.

So here's the deal, Americans. All 108 million of you need to register to vote, right now. Granted, under normal circumstances I'd suggest registering all as Democrats, but I dread that the GOP mapmakers will create algorithms that will just shove all those Dem voters into overloaded singular districts and leave eight districts sparsely GOP. Instead, I'll suggest mixing it up a bit, some of you register as Dems and the rest of you register as No-Party-Affiliate. Being a NPA should drive those computer modelling software crazy, because they can't determine that you're friend or foe. If a serious plurality of voters were No-Party, the GOP can't rely on creating "safe" districts out of you and run the risk of allowing their more extreme candidates alienating enough NPA voters to lose those districts.

The only way to defeat gerrymanders is through voters, lots of us, dedicated to the republic (not Republicans) and willing to overwhelm EVERY district with angry, disaffected no-party votes.

I need to hear from you 108 million by the end of July.

Get registered to vote.

Get ready to vote every Republican out of their goddamned gerrymandered seats.

The United States needs you.

What Florida Republicans Want: No More Voters

If we return our attention to the state level, we'll note that the Republicans have decided to give up on the people and take more power unto themselves.

For example: Passing legislation to make it harder for Florida voters to pass their own amendments. Via Lawrence Mower at the Tampa Bay Times:

 Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday approved legislation that would crack down on citizen petitions, a move that is likely to quash future ballot initiatives disliked by Republican lawmakers and corporate donors.

The bill, which takes effect before the 2020 election, makes it drastically harder to collect enough signatures to make it onto voters’ ballots.

And it will solidify Republican control in Tallahassee by eliminating one of the last threats to their power: the ballot box...

The Republicans have garnered political control of the Sunshine State ever since the demographic/party shifts that changed everything in the 1990s. After the last elected Democratic governor in Lawton Chiles passed away, everything went to the GOP. Even though a solid majority of voters remain Democratic... even as the voter shifts of the last ten years away from Far Right dogma are causing cracks in GOP domination.

The clearest sign of those cracks was the Amendment referendum process. Unable to break the GOP's control of the legislature via gerrymandering, the center-left population have resorted to petition-driven referendums to create State Constitutional Amendments - like anti-gerrymander rules, medical marijuana, funding for clean water and wetlands protection, classroom size limits to stop overcrowding poorer schools - that the conservative legislators can't ignore (well, actually they do, but it stops them from passing laws that would hew further Right Wing). Back to Mower:

What the legislation is sure to do, however, is stifle the last area outside of statewide Republican control in Florida.

Republicans have dominated the Legislature, Cabinet and governor’s mansion for the last 20 years, and every member of the state Supreme Court has now been appointed by Republicans.

But liberal groups and others have seen some success getting their priorities into law by proposing amendments to the state Constitution.

Over the last several years, at least 60 percent of voters have changed the Constitution to require the Legislature adopt fair voter districts, allow medical marijuana, protect environmental lands and restore the right to vote for felons.

And more amendments are on the way — or were on the way before DeSantis signed the bill Friday...

Republicans have fought every measure that a supermajority of Florida voters supported - which has to include a sizable number of fellow Republicans - because they don't fit their agenda of tax cuts, social aid cuts, school funding cuts, and aggressive land development for their rich construction buddies.

Referendums proposed for the coming 2020 ballot included a Minimum Wage ballot to fight the 20-year-plus stagnation of wages for every non-CEO worker, an "Energy Choice" option to break the monopolistic practices of the regional utilities, a statewide ban on military-grade assault rifles commonly used in mass shootings, a separate Universal Background Check amendment, an Open Primary system similar to California's that had all parties as a primary choice (meaning a district could have TWO Republicans in the final election or TWO Democrats in the final, meaning the extremists don't have safe seats either way), a Medicaid Expansion (which the state GOP definitely doesn't want to do), and Taco Trucks On Every Corner okay I made that last one up, but the rest of them are real. Follow that link to Ballotpedia to see more.

Those are issues that matter to the voting public, and things that a supermajority - 60 percent of voters - might want the state government to do.

But none of them are things the Florida Republicans want. They openly refuse to pass laws supporting ANY of that already, because each one offends a lobby group they rely on for campaign funding and future cushy no-show jobs.

They're also terrified of some of the election reform amendments that could pass that would break the Minority Rule they now inflict on the state. Florida Republicans rule without accountability, refusing to answer to the cries of local residents screaming for financial aid to cover feeding their kids and paying for schools and keeping roofs over their heads. The state GOP doesn't want to do anything about regional ecological disasters like toxic algae that are clearly man-made from Big Sugar and overdevelopment consuming our wetlands. 

You see, Florida Republicans are making too much money off of all that. So rather than do what the majority (most Florida residents) wants - clean water, safe schools, healthy families - the state GOP will indulge the minority's (the Obscenely Rich) whims.

What Florida Republicans want is for Florida Voters to sit down and shut up, FOREVER.

This should be as obvious a sign to my fellow Floridians why we needed to stop voting Republican the last eleven years I've been screaming that, and why we all need to stop NOW on voting Republican ever again. Our rights are getting bled dry, one cut at a time, while Republicans feast on our bones and keep us caged. As of today, the only power we have left is the power to VOTE EVERY REPUBLICAN OUT OF OFFICE. For the LOVE of GOD and HUMANITY, that's the one thing WE NEED TO DO.