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 beneath that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.
JoinWe 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.
Read MoreWe’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.
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.”
It’s that personalist rule I want to focus on.
And to do that let’s go back to TPM ad business.
JoinI sat down with Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker, former editor of The New York Observer and now a columnist for the Times, to discuss this year’s annual TPM Membership Drive and today’s media landscape. We discussed journalist independence, membership business models and why in the Trump Era only truly independent media can tell the truth without fear or favor.
I hope you give it a look.
Ready to join the TPM community as a member and support our team’s work? Just click right here.
It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.
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You’ve probably seen the story about how, at a DOD presentation, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quoted what he apparently thought was a bible verse but was in fact the faux biblicalism delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Jules Winnfield, in Pulp Fiction. There’s a lot here. Yes, the faux godly Hegseth should really be a bit more versed in the bible. But it’s really perfectly apt that he’s not. If you remember, Winnfield is a hitman, a killer, a man of meaningless violence. He wraps his murders in stylized bible verse imitations to give them some mix of giving them retributional ooomph and just for kicks. Is there any better description of Pete Hegseth? I can’t think of one. Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism is a permission structure for domination and violence. The biblical text is a source of handy quotes to the extent it advances those aims. But he’s neither smart enough nor serious enough to mine the text in any serious way. He’s just a different version of Jules Winnfield.
Yesterday I noted G. Elliott Morris’s argument that extremely poor consumer sentiment in the U.S. is no mystery once you look properly at what Americans mean when they talk about prices and inflation. In short, just because prices stopped going up in the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency didn’t mean the public stopped being mad about them going up (and staying up) in the first half of his term. I’m pretty certain that this explains a lot about what sank Biden’s presidency and the dynamics of the 2024 election. But does it explain what’s happening now? When I wrote yesterday’s post, TPM Reader SB agreed, but argued that it went beyond that — that the still-declining consumer sentiment, the extremely sour public mood goes beyond the post-COVID inflation shock. It’s also about extreme wealth inequality, SB argued. Then, this morning, Paul Krugman began what he says will be a series of posts on his Substack in which he argues that while he agrees with the “excess price” framework, he’s not sure it’s a sufficient explanation.
Krugman didn’t really get into what exactly he thinks it is. As I said, he said he’ll address it in a series of posts. But the gist is that there’s a larger politico-economic explanation that goes beyond how long people stay mad about prices. Krugman says he thinks the deepening sense of economic gloom is driven by the fact that the public was upset about inflation, voted to move in a direction and then had the new guy do basically everything he could to stoke more inflation into the economy and generally whipsaw the economy in 20 different directions for a series of bizarre and obscure ideological fascinations.
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