David’s view
The most important story in electoral politics right now is the Republican drive to re-draw as many state maps as they can, through three interlocking methods. And Democrats, ready as they are to “fight back,” are in a weak position to resist.
First, the Trump administration is lobbying red state leaders to eliminate as many Democratic seats as possible. There’s been no real resistance in those states; the internal criticism has come from Republicans stranded in blue states, like California Rep. Kevin Kiley and New York Rep. Mike Lawler, who want a truce so that their Democrats don’t push them out of jobs.
Next, the administration hopes to benefit from a forthcoming decision in , if the Supreme Court’s conservatives side with “non-African American” plaintiffs who argue that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, requiring map-makers to consider minority representation when they draw districts, is racially discriminatory.
Without that, nothing would compel — for example — South Carolina to maintain Rep. Jim Clyburn’s historically black seat, which runs from Columbia to Charleston. As it happens, Rep. Ralph Norman, a Republican candidate for governor, has pre-emptively called for that district to be scratched out.
The administration’s third move is the most ambitious — a mid-decade re-do of the Census, which would add a citizenship question. There’s no constitutional basis for that question, or for a mulligan of a $15 billion process that must be done “within every subsequent term of ten years” of the Congress.
But the goal is the same as it was six years ago, when Trump attempted to add a citizenship question ahead of the last census. Stop counting non-citizens, and maps (as well as government funding formulas) could only be drawn around citizens, which would eliminate at least a single-digit number of seats that Democrats usually win.
And the larger goal is historic, as old as the arguments between Hamilton and Jefferson, about whether the city or the country would get to run America. Each of these actions would reduce the political power of cities; once de-powered, the cities would lose some of their self-governance.
Austin, Houston, and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which are all losing seats on the new Texas map, have watched local reforms struck down by Republicans in the capitol — in the GOP’s mind, for the cities’ own good. Nashville, which reliably elected Democrats to Congress, lost that ability when Republicans split the city into three red districts. It still elects a Democratic mayor, who, according to Kristi Noem, “doesn’t deserve to be in office.”
Last month, at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s conference in Indianapolis, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts explained how that could happen: “When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense.”
What do you do with cities that elect progressive Democrats, give sanctuary to illegal immigrants, and do not put enough criminals in jail? You don’t let them run themselves. You certainly don’t let them run the country. Their elections can’t be trusted, their immigration policies are probably a scam to import quasi-legal voters, and their ideas — from re-zoning to grow their populations, to bike lanes, to the whole book of criminal justice reform — are poison. That’s the mindset, as easy to see as its goal.
Notable
In the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie expects a ruling that will weaken the Voting Rights Act and end the “fourth American republic.”
Comments