Attention is on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives today as it should be. In fact Moses Mikey is slinging b.s. as I’m starting this. I’ll have more to say about him later today in another article. (Update – the House vote was almost unanimous. Only one dissenter. WOW. Suck on that Thune!) Still, other big events are taking place and a huge one just came to light with an appeals panel voting 2-1 to block the mid-cycle gerrymander Texas engineered to give the GOP five additional seats in the House. This is huge. Added with other GOP attempts to stack the deck that have in some cases fizzled the “Red Gerrymander Wave” could turn out to be a mere “Red Ripple.”
There will be plenty more to come on this but let’s focus on what we know as reported by The Associated Press. Texas is as of now blocked from using the new map which would have added five, count em FIVE GOP seats to Congress. The linked article is brief, and takes perhaps a minute to read. But at the heart of it is a portion of the ruling which will cause Chief Justice John Roberts to go batsh*t insane as it hoists him on his own petard:
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” the ruling states.
Roberts as you know has made doing away with the Voting Rights Act which gave non-white voters actual chances to vote blacks and other minorities into elected office including federal office one of his key missions. He’s been the driving force behind SCOTUS decisions that have eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and his smarmy, whitebread white-privilege line in an opinion saying ‘the way to end discrimination is to not discriminate’ was a judicial f**k you to anyone who believes in fair representation. Under his guidance SCOTUS conservatives have put a stamp of approval on partisan gerrymandering but gave a hail and hearty NO to racial gerrymandering.
Well, Roberts can suck it. He created the very foundation on which Texas and other states have set about trying to redraw Congressional maps to give Republicans more seats. What’s he going to do. Reverse his own freaking precedent? Texas will appeal of course. But even if SCOTUS takes up the case (again, opening Roberts to more legacy destroying ridicule) even if they do it likely won’t matter. Time is running out and absent a half-baked emergency ruling that overturns Roberts’ own precedent primary season is around the corner and it’s unlikely this all could be settled in time for the 2026 midterms.
In another article from The Hill we learn that the panel had an interesting makeup. Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote the opinion for the majority:
Appointed to the bench by President Trump, Brown was joined by U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, an appointee of former President Obama.
U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, an appointee of former President Reagan, dissented. His opinion was not immediately filed on the public docket.
Trump of course will blow a gasket over one of ‘HIS’ judges slapping him down. As I indicated earlier some red states have chosen to pass on giving in to Trump’s demand they redistricts to give the GOP more seats. Kansas and Indiana come to mind. In other states like Missouri and North Carolina where I live we’ll have to see how lawsuits play out. Out in California which put the proposed new map to the voters instead of having a group of legislators do things there’s a lawsuit too. It’s based on the claim California’s map is a racial gerrymander, only instead of favoring black people it favors ‘brown’ people. Given how many people in that state have Hispanic heritage that’s going to be a tough sell in court but we’ll see.
I want to return to the Voting Rights Act and Roberts’ zeal to cripple the ability of black voters to have some blacks representing them in Congress. THAT is what he was after and he got his way. Both Texas and California have large Hispanic populations and introducing that factor into the equation at a time when his GOP (make no mistake, Roberts is very much a REPUBLICAN Chief Justice) is the last thing we wants. If he feels tortured all of a sudden, well, he’s the idiot who shoved the cattle prod up his own rectum and didn’t hold on to the control part!
In closing, I offer this. Conservatives killed Irony long ago but that hasn’t stopped them from regularly digging up Irony’s corpse to give it another beating. Trump might have wound up pulling off a slasher movie trick of re-animating the corpse of a mass murdering psycho. Only in THIS case he’s reanimated Irony which can deliver him an electoral slap upside the head with what could turn out to be a combined backfired/failed effort to gerrymander a continued House majority.
Imagine how delicious it would be if the only state who’s mid cycle gerrymander holds is California! Because unlike the other cases they let the voters decide whether or not to do it? That’s an actual possibility I foresee pundits starting to kick around. I sure hope so because it will drive Trump even more batsh*t insane than Roberts is today. Irony deserves some serious payback on Trump and the GOP. This could be a pretty good start.
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So we’re left with no R+ anything and with D+5.
I’m happy with leaving R ‘hoist by their own petard’.
I read an analysis yesterday that said when this all shakes out the GOP will likely have (in theory at least) given themselves another two or three seats nationwide than they currently have. However as Murfster has explained more than once when gerrymandering gets greedy a Party starts slicing the bologna too thin. It’s that overconfidence that can leave them in shock on election night when a big batch of seats that had (in theory) perhaps a five point advantage (often less) were in the bag events they can’t control turn election day into a ‘bad day.’
Candidate quality matters and the primaries should be interesting as hell. Anyone in the thirty or so districts currently believed to be competitive (won by five or so points, if that) have GOP candidates running on a ‘Trumpier than Trump’ platform Republicans will get their asses handed to them. Even seats that had been won by high single digits will also be in play. That of course assumes WE run good candidates who know their districts and run ‘local’ campaigns. That yes, tie their opponent to Trump and how the GOP enabled him.
What we will need is at least a twenty seat majority. That would give Jeffries some room on certain votes, allowing ten or twelve Democrats in what had been GOP districts or even ‘tough’ ones) to break ranks at times.