On Gerrymandering, Republicans Have Stopped Pretending
One of my favorite cliches is “saying the quiet part loud”.
This refers to keeping the real, and often bad motivation for doing something secret while you come up with some bullshitty but more acceptable motivation you feel comfortable sharing with the world. But every once in a while, you just can’t help yourself and reveal the truth.
For example, if you call your boss and tell her that you can’t come into work because you have COVID, and rabies, oh…and that weird disease where eight foot long worms live in your heart, but halfway through the conversation you say “Plus, I hate this damn job, and you suck and if i could feed your larynx to hyenas, I would”, you have said the quiet part out loud.
Recently, we have seen the same phenomenon play out in Texas, the state where I went to law school. And Oh God did I fit in! People have never seen anything like it. People wearing Stetsons would come up to me all day long and say “Sir, nobody fits into Texas like you do”. It was tremendous. No Collusion!
Anyway, the Republicans who control the legislature and governor’s mansion in Texas feel that aggressively redrawing their congressional districts to the benefit of their party every ten years isn’t near enough. They have decided to do a largely unheard of mid-decade gerrymander to guarantee that as many seats as mathematically possible are filled with the asses of Republicans.
The problem is that gerrymandering has historically been seen as a distasteful form of cheating. You can’t convince swing voters to support your candidates, so you make the voters irrelevant and make swing voters extinct by creating districts so deep red or blue that your party couldn’t lose if your nominee was Jeffrey Dahmer with a Podcast called “Munching on the Neighbors”.
So when political parties were engaged in gerrymandering, they generally denied they were doing it for partisan advantage. And they usually did so with the appropriate faux outrage. “Us? You’re accusing us of partisanship! Well I do declare…why I never…I oughta….”
They claimed instead that when they were drawing districts that looked like a Rorschach test riding a moll-rat, they were validating some important value, like diversity, or it’s opposite, “keeping communities of interest together”, or not dividing counties or historical affinity, etc.
But if the Trump era is going to be known for one thing, other than having so much cool stuff you can buy to make the President rich, it’s the end of adherence to norms. For example, if there’s an ethnic or racial group you don’t like, don’t bottle it up! Say it loud. I’m bigoted and I’m proud!
I think it’s because Trump will literally say or do anything. And no matter how horrific, he never seems to pay a political price for it. It can lead one to think that all of the dodging and obfuscation of the past 200 years has been an unnecessary waste of time.
This new era of candor has clearly reached the gerrymandering debate. Republicans in Texas aren’t bothering to talk about how their new redistricting bill is in service of some greater societal good, or beneficial for all Texans. Not even a little bit. I’ve watched a lot of interviews with Republican lawmakers over the past week or so, and their answers to the standard questions can be distilled as follows:
Q: Why are you redistricting for the second time this decade?
A: We want more Republicans to win.
Q: What’s wrong with the plan you passed just 4 years ago?
A: Not enough Republicans are winning.
Q: But why do it now?
A: Because we can.
Q: What about disenfranchising voters?
A: We don’t care.
Well then. I guess we can at least be grateful that they are finally telling the truth. Soon I guess we can expect justifications to Medicaid cuts such as “The poor can go eat a bag of dicks”.
But the newfound candor does not make the policy any better. Gerrymandering is awful for many reasons. It makes the voters irrelevant pawns in the personal power grabs of politicians, it robs people of their voice, it creates districts which are not competitive in general elections which leads to more and more extreme people filling more and more seats. It makes a mockery of the basic ideas behind democracy.
By kicking gerrymandering up a notch and making it even more pervasive than it already was shows the basic contempt that the politicians behind it have for the people they represent and essential amounts to a big middle finger from our “leaders”. Oh shit, did I say the quiet part out loud?
