We had an illustration Tuesday night of one of the most crucial questions in our current politics and the one that will determine whether civic democracy can have a rebirth in the U.S. Gerrymandering is a bane to civic democracy because it dilutes the expression of the popular will by building district lines around partisan advantage or to diminish the power of disempowered minorities. Democrats spent much of the 2010s and 2020s fighting a legal and legislative battle against gerrymandering. But the Roberts Court has chosen to legalize every manner of gerrymandering, making the current a destructive race to the bottom.
Democrats had a choice. They could express effete outrage and a meaningless devotion to broken norms and principles and agree to wage elections on a permanently tilted plane. Or they could decide to play by the rules Republicans had forced on everyone. They did just that and it was unquestionable the right decision by every measure. It really never seemed to occur to Trump Republicans that Democrats would fight on the playbook Republicans created. There’s a special comedy to this because anyone familiar with the facts on the ground knew that Republicans had already used gerrymandering much more aggressively than Democrats. So there was much more juice in the gerrymandering lemon for Democrats if and when they decided to employ tactics Republicans have been using for more than a decade. It’s worth Democrats considering how deeply Republicans had internalized the belief that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.
We have two noteworthy pieces for you this morning in TPM Cafe, both in different ways speaking to the state of the GOP.
Government agencies are normally funded for a year at a time, but Senate Republicans appeared poised, through the budget reconciliation process, to fund ICE and CBP for three years, depriving a potential, future Democratic House (or Senate) majority of a key check Congress can exercise over the executive branch: the power of the purse. A budget reconciliation bill lasting through the end of Trump’s term would insulate ICE from attempts at congressional reform of the type Democrats have been demanding since February. Charles Tiefer, former general counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives and a widely quoted expert on congressional oversight, sounds the alarm.
For history professor A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Josh Kovensky’s recent reporting — on the far-right’s attempt to create a state and even nation-wide controversy about the presence of Indian immigrants in Texas — brought to mind a 2006 furor in Texas, which pit nativist figures like Rush Limbaugh against a more moderate GOP than the one we have today, inspiring Congress to attempt an immigration crackdown that was later derailed by pro-immigrant activism. It’s a fascinating story and one that underscores what has become a theme at TPM: The extent to which, two decades later, the fringe has won control — at least for now. Read that here.
A little less than a year ago, Trump began his push for state legislatures in, first, Texas, then other red states, to redraw their congressional district lines, a gambit that, he had apparently been told, would help him hold onto the House in the midterms even as his poll numbers began the long march downward that continues to this day.
Democrats counter-attacked — and, as Khaya Himmelman reports this morning, they are succeeding. (Trump is now telling supporters he believes gerrymandering may be “not good.”) Virginia voters have followed California’s lead, authorizing new, bluer maps for their state. As things stand now, that puts Democrats slightly ahead in this fight.
The overall picture is quite a bit more complicated, however. Here’s some of what we’re keeping tabs on.
We’re moving into the second half of our Annual TPM Membership Drive. So we’re at the crunch time when we really need to be adding numbers. Let me be as direct as I can. If you’re not a member, your signing up today will make a big difference in the vitality and health of TPM. I would be so grateful if you could take a moment literally right now and click this link and sign up. We’ve made it super easy. I delay things I plan to do as much as anyone. But if you could take a moment literally right now and click that link we would all appreciate it so much.
The country is beginning to wake up to the sheer level of strategic failure of Trump’s impulsive and unilateral war on Iran. Let me start with an extended quote from a weekend article in the New York Times …
I’ve described to you many times how TPM was saved by an early shift to building a membership system. We began it at the end of 2012 and started building it in earnest in about 2014. That gave us a five or six year head start on almost everyone else. We were thus much better positioned when the collapse of the digital ad economy hit in the couple years just before the pandemic. But today I’d like to share with you another part of that transition because it intersects with a fascinating story of Trump era corruption published today in the New York Times. It’s the story of a couple Syrian-born billionaires, already in business with the Trump family, lining up Trump’s personal support to secure another vast payday. In “a sign of how powerful Mr. Trump has become,” Times reporter Eric Lipton says after laying out the basic facts of the story, “To get almost anything done in the nation’s capital requires not alienating a vexed and vengeful president, and, ideally, pleasing him.”
In Frisco, Texas, far-right activists are seizing upon the growing community of immigrant families from India as an example of the racist “Great Replacement” theory, with white Americans being supplanted by newcomers of color. The recent furor has a certain political logic to it that echoes events from exactly 20 years ago in the very same part of the Lone Star State. This may be the far right’s attempt to revive the spirit of 2006.
The TPM Social Club is joined this week by Max Rivlin-Nadler of Hell Gate, an independent publication owned and run by journalists devoted to covering NYC.
