…The proposed Texas map is designed to net the GOP up to five House seats — potentially enough to decide the majority…
Outside Texas, key Democratic governors have launched an aggressive counteroffensive to try to neutralize the GOP’s redistricting push.
…Newsom, who’s made no secret of his presidential ambitions, has openly accused Trump of “rigging” the midterms and suggested California could redraw its map to eliminate all nine GOP-held seats.
[New York Gov. Kathy Hochul] called Monday for disbanding New York’s independent redistricting commission and embracing partisan hardball, telling reporters that she’s “tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back…I cannot ignore that the playing field has changed dramatically, and shame on us if we ignore that fact and cling tight to the vestiges of the past,” Hochul said.
I mean okay, nice of you idiots to finally play the game that Republicans have been playing for FORTY YEARS. It’s a bit of a too little, too late kind of a things at this point but still nice to see Democrats finally, FINALLY understanding you can’t take the damn “high road” and expect to win Calvin ball.
About damned time. You can’t fight monsters with hope and prayers. You need tanks and bombs
Its about time. Contemporary US voters no longer care about who’s taking the highest road. The nazis need to be stopped by any means necessary.
fucking bullshit.
GOP, and texas in particular, started it. All they had to do was not gerrymander more than it already is, and CA and other states wouldn’t respond in kind.
But fucking hell. Either it’s illegal for everyone, or its legal and fair for everyone. So make this about Texas being controlling assholes instead.
It’s about fucking time Democrats started acting like they’re in a fight for the existence of the US.
If the republicans want to ban gerrymandering on a federal level I’m all for it. They can stop this bullshit that easily
Wouldn’t they lose about 20 seats that way? They aren’t interested in democracy.
GOP, and texas in particular, started it.
Republicans were gaming redistricting since 2010 with REDMAP. From 2016
It was never a secret. In 2010, the conservative political strategist Karl Rove took to the Wall Street Journal and laid out a plan to win majorities in state legislatures across the country.
“He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” read the subhead to Rove’s column.
The plan, which its architects dubbed REDMAP for Redistricting Majority Project, hinged on the fact that states redraw their electoral maps every 10 years according to new Census data. REDMAP targeted states where just a few statehouse seats could shift the balance to Republican control in the crucial Census year of 2010.
That plan worked spectacularly. It’s why today Republicans have a majority in nearly two-thirds of the country’s state legislative chambers. And it’s why in 2012 Democratic statehouse candidates won 51 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, which voted for Barack Obama in the presidential election, yet those candidates ended up with only 28 percent of the seats in the legislature.
The Democratic strategy on this was to basically sit on their asses until 2016 when the DNC decided to found NDRC
McAuliffe and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi convened discussions during the 2016 Democratic National Convention about creating a group focused solely on redistricting. The initiative took on new urgency after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race even as she won the popular vote, reinforcing the imperative that Democrats regain power at the state level. After the election, McAuliffe, Pelosi, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer visited the White House to get Obama’s blessing. “It was the president who said, ‘I’ll bring Eric in,’” McAuliffe recalled. Obama decided to make redistricting reform a central focus of his post-presidency and tapped Holder as his top lieutenant.
in 2017 whose mission wasn’t to gerrymander for Democrats but to install independent redistricting commissions as if gerrymandering isn’t a political arms race.
Many of the Democratic groups fighting for a redistricting overhaul say these sorts of commissions are the future.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder now leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. He is perhaps the most high-profile Democrat focused on this issue, and he said he would “oppose any Democratic attempts to gerrymander” in 2020.
“All we want to have is fairness because if we have a fair redistricting process and fair elections, I am confident that Democrats, progressives will be just fine against Republicans and Conservatives,” Holder said.
They only figured out now that great Democratic leaders before did wrest & wield power to their cause instead of pretend kumbaya is a winning strategy.
Franklin Roosevelt understood the use of power. Lyndon Johnson understood the use of power. And Democrats have got to get back to that.
For the most part, in my lifetime, democrats have always been sitting with their thumbs up their asses.
Remember, the GOP have been working towards this shit for 50+ years- literally establishing “news” orgs like Fox ad propaganda outlets, and gerrymandering at every opportunity or fucking around with judicial nominations, etc.
Trump isn’t the cause. He is a symptom.
This has been a republican strategy decades in the making. The comment above framed it as an arms race and that’s a good way to put it. They’ve had the overthrow of democracy in their heads as an objective and have undertaking a concerted strategy to achieve it.
The democrats were always going to be at a disadvantage simply responding to that, but that disadvantage is made a lot worse by the fact that they don’t seem to want to respond to it. They have an idea of what this country is and that comes with a bunch of lines their unwilling to cross. Meanwhile republicans had a clear idea of what they want this country to be and were willing to trample any line, break any law or norm, in order to make it a reality.
This? The news story we’re responding to? It may represent the first stumbling steps off the starting line. But it doesn’t change the fact that the starting pistol sounded decades ago and the republicans have been running the whole time.
Too little, to late. I don’t want that sentiment to be true, but I find it hard to look at this situation and view it in any other way.
I remember the DNC opposed non partisan redistricting in my state for this exact reason and they got a ton of shit for it. Democratic voters have a hand in this as well because they refuse to play the game and prefer instead to huff farts.
This is exactly what SCOTUS wanted. Now they are getting it.
Good we need to crush them at the polls, then finish the job. In the mean time if you have access to any records(medical, financial, name/address, etc) try and get everything you can for ICE employees, police, elected officials, etc. Distribute when the time is right, use covertly in the meantime
We must do everything in our power to deprive republicans of status, power, even their fucking vote. They are traitor filth.
Decades late and a dollar short.
Fascism is a danger to Democracy. Republicans = Fascists. They are actively trying to end democracy in America, and need to be stopped by any means necessary. It looks like we won’t be executing fascists in the streets, much to my dismay- but using dirty or even illegal tactics have to be 100% on the table because if the fascists win we will never have a democracy again
Shitty graphic
How does changing New York’s redistricting rules help defeat Texas Republicans? Or prevent Florida Republicans or Ohio Republicans or Iowa Republicans or etc. from doing their own bullshit redistricting?
Land doesn’t vote. People do. Redistrict all of the rural areas in any state to include even a single large city in that state and the whole country will be blue. Fascists have been doing it the opposite way for years.
If enough blue states do it, it will directly counter the fascist push to do the same because without cheating, they just don’t have the numbers.
Yes, anti-fascists have to play the same game as fascists. None of this “when they go low…” shit can stand anymore.
But I have a little bone to pick with your first statement: at the state level, that holds up (depending on the state), but at the federal level, land (ok, less populous states) has an outsized influence because of the permanent apportionment law from almost 100 years ago.
Every California house member serves about 760k people, where Wyoming has 576k people total.
That means 9.5M ((760k - 576k) x 52 seats) people in CA (or 16.4 Wyomings) effectively don’t get a say every time the house votes.
And it’s even worse when we get to the electoral college (sum of House and Senate members per state). Wyoming has 192k people per electoral vote and CA has 732k people per electoral vote.
So it’s not entirely fair to dismiss the people vs land vote.
No moral highground please. We are at war.
You are at war.
But, to continue the metaphor, this is like blowing up your own bridges so they can’t be used by the advancing enemy. Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s not something you should celebrate. You are sacrificing important strategic instruments of prosperity for temporary tactical advantage.
We tried that approach with the filibuster. And look and where that got us. The USA as we know it is over.
We are in a new era. A much darker, more ruthless era.
I don’t disagree with you. It needs to be done. But it’s still a bloody shame.
It doesn’t, but the idea is that overtly partisan districting in blue states can compensate the overtly partisan districts in red states and keep the house as a whole in balance.
The obvious problem is that this solution disenfranchises not just the minority voters in red and blue states, but also the majority voters. Non competitive elections are the death of democracy, and benefit only donors, machine politicians and corruption.
Things needs to get bad everywhere before people ask for something better. The US is in the middle of a right wing coup.
It’s all about seats in the House.
How does changing New York’s redistricting rules help defeat Texas Republicans?
Texas is redistricting to give themselves as many red seats as possible…
Like, it should be common sense, but no other state can stop Texas from doing that.
So if Texas does that, the only response is blue states doing it to cancel it out…
Do you understand that now?
What makes you think they won’t, or haven’t already?
Gerrymandering is an old technique, and (tragically) ingrained in US politics. The difference now is how boldly and specifically the lines can be drawn to gain an unfair advantage.
Whether or not California does it, you can count on Ohio and Florida doing their worst.
Exactly. Ohio and Florida are the way they are because they got so gerrymandered that they suffered brain drain and rapidly shifted red
It’s all bad for voters. No matter what party, consolidated power is not good for voters who want advancement, progress, or even just small small steps in the right direction.
