Not to spoil anybody’s holiday cheer, but let’s not forget that we have a sick relative on life support this Christmas and her name is democracy. We are intensely hoping that the old girl pulls through, after the past five years of non stop assault upon her being. Democracy has had some real ups and downs the past year in particular, and let’s pray that she’s got another recovery left in her.
Her case is not being helped by the fact that the GOP is standing in the room ready to kick out the plug at their first opportunity. They’ve been busy little elves this season. Ever since the census, they’ve been up all night, burning the midnight oil, redrawing and redistricting so that they can have the ultimate Christmas present, enough non-competitive seats to guarantee them a House majority and maybe a Senate as well — at least until the next census and they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it. Dana Milbank, Washington Post:
This year Republicans have managed to take fully 40 percent of competitive House seats out of play. All but about 25 seats of the 435 in the entire country will be insulated from the will of voters even during wave elections — not just for 2022, but for a decade.
The move might limit Republicans’ upside in next year’s midterms (they had to toss Democrats a few more safe seats to shore up their own), but it could also keep them in the majority for years, even if the national popular vote goes consistently against them. Already, Republicans could lose the popular vote by two or three percentage points and still control the House.
The changes guarantee more extremism in Congress (the only competitive elections will be primaries, which on the GOP side favor the far right), and whichever party is in control will have a slim, ungovernable majority.
The worst offender is Texas, where President Biden got nearly 47 percent of the vote in 2020 and Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke got more than 48 percent in 2018. Republicans redrew maps to give themselves both of Texas’s new congressional seats (even though most of the population growth was in Democratic-leaning communities of color), and they reduced the number of competitive House seats from six to one.
Democrats get nearly half the popular vote in Texas, but they can expect just a third of the House seats (13 of the 38). In order to get above 37 percent of the seats (that is, more than 14 seats), they would have to win an inconceivable 58 percent of the statewide popular vote. Republicans “have rendered elections meaningless, basically,” Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights group, tells me. And “it’s all at the expense of communities of color.”
And that, as they say, is the bottom line. The GOP is the white party. They fear people of color, they fear gays, and most of all they fear women. So they’re doing the best they can to ignore the reality of the actual population and gerrymander so as to jerry rig as many elections as they possibly can.
Dave Wasserman, redistricting maven with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, forecasts a 30 percent to 40 percent decline in competitive House races from the 51 there were in 2020. Using slightly different measures, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), formed by former attorney general Eric Holder, calculates that 15 of 38 competitive seats from the 2020 election (meaning those decided by 5 percentage points or fewer) have already been redrawn as safe seats.
In addition to Texas, other redistricting abusers include North Carolina, where Biden got 48.6 percent of the vote but Republicans are attempting to control 11 of the state’s 14 House seats; and Ohio, where Biden got 45.2 percent of the vote but Republicans aim to control 13 of 15 congressional seats. Red states are similarly using redistricting to achieve supermajorities in state legislatures.
One of the reasons that Madison Cawthorn feels so safe in acting completely batshit is that he’s running in a redrawn district and he believes he can’t lose. He’s out there on his power high, drunk with vainglory and sprinkling arrogance on his cornflakes. He believes he’s invincible. And in this brave new congressional map world that the GOP is creating, he may be right. He wouldn’t last too long in a real democracy, but all indications are that we are no longer living in a real democracy. The fact that Cawthorn got elected to Mark Meadows’ old seat in the first place is all that you need to know to tell you that democracy is in danger of flatlining.
Add to this the fact that the Democrats are still playing by Marquess de Queensbury rules, bringing a lace handkerchief to a dog fight.
Democratic states have abuses, too (Donald Trump got 32 percent of the vote in Massachusetts, which has no Republicans in its 9-member House delegation), but Democrat-run states generally leave redistricting to bipartisan commissions, to produce fairer results.
“That has left Democrats playing with one hand tied behind their back,” Wasserman tells me. He calculates that such commissions cost Democrats 10 House seats they could have had if Democratic partisans instead seized the map-drawing in California, New Jersey, Washington, Colorado and Virginia. Were Democrats to practice the extreme measures Republicans have used, they could conceivably eliminate all but three GOP House seats in California (from the current 11) and all but three in New York (from the current eight).
Marc Elias, a Democratic elections lawyer who is fighting several of the new maps, says the bipartisan commissions were sabotaged by pro-Trump Republicans who refused to negotiate. “Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith,” he has concluded, noting that such commissions in Virginia and Connecticut couldn’t even produce maps.
Dealing with the GOP these days is like dealing with a convict on death row. Of course he’s going to do anything he can to save himself, with annihilation staring him in the face if he does nothing. The Republicans are going to do whatever they can to ensure their survival and we have to be realistically attuned to that.
Passing voting rights legislation is the only way. In the days and months to come you will read many such articles like this one of Dana Milbank’s and mark my words, you will realize that there is no truer statement, that voting rights legislation is the only way to save democracy.
In CA, the boundary-drawing commission is *required* to be nonpartisan. The maps also get a public comment period (which I suspect is just for show).