Should Democrats draw extreme partisan gerrymanders in states they control the way Republicans are doing in states where they have control over redistricting maps? On today’s BradCast we have a very animated debate on the issue, along with a discussion of the few other ways that fans of democracy may still try and save the republic from the GOP’s unabashed authoritarian lurch toward minority rule. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]
But, first up today, a few quick thoughts on the corporate media, yet again, wildly misreporting national economic news amid the very robust — and, in many ways, record — recovery, while the country attempts to come out from under its pandemic-induced recession. On Friday, new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) declared that America’s unemployment rate continue to tumble to just 4.2% — a remarkable, nearly half point decline since just last month to virtually where it was pre-pandemic. Nonetheless, morning headlines focused instead on lower than expected new jobs created in November, which sent the stock markets tumbling once again. That, even though, over the past year, the BLS has substantially upwardly revised previously reported monthly jobs numbers every single month except for one. They’ve done so with numbers that are nearly double or more than the initially reported monthly BLS statistics, amounting to nearly 1 million more jobs in 2021 than initially reported.
While its unclear why initial BLS numbers are now so far off the mark. Historically, they always revise. But, this year, post-pandemic survey numbers have been wildly off for some reason. The consequences both politically and economically have been huge. The fact that the corporate media can’t seem to account for that by now in their panicked reports with each new “disappointing” set of numbers — which will almost certainly be revised up very soon — remains disturbing. That, as media continue to misreport on inflation and downplay positive economic news such as the lowest number of new weekly jobless claims since 1969 just last week; the nearly 1 million new jobs created this year alone; and the 1.1 million jobs filled since just last month’s BLS report, to name a few points that have received much less notice from the media…for some reason. If the media can’t adjust for the misleading initial BLS reports themselves, perhaps Biden’s Labor Dept. Secretary should help them.
THEN, as we’ve been documenting, Republican-controlled states around the nation continue to implement new, extremely partisan redistricting maps for U.S. House and state legislators following the 2020 census. With computer-drawn precision, these new maps will ensure GOP gains in 2022 — and a Republican majority in the U.S. House — even if America votes exactly as they did in 2020, when Democratic House candidates received nearly 5 million more votes than GOP candidates.
Two years ago, the GOP’s stolen and packed U.S. Supreme Court declared they would not intercede in fights over partisan gerrymanders. So, how can Democrats push back against this anti-democracy putsch by Republicans hoping to secure minority rule in the House for the next decade (adding to already existing minority rule in the Senate and electoral college, as baked into the Constitution, and on the Supreme Court, thanks to Republicans gaming the system there in recent years)?
We’re joined today for a lively discussion on exactly that by JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS, author and election law professor at University of Kentucky’s J. David Rosenberg College of Law. Last week, he proffered at least one solution in an op-ed at Politico calling for litigation in state courts all over the country, now that SCOTUS has washed their hands of the matter, while Democratic obstructionists in the Senate (Manchin and Sinema) block the party’s ability to reform the filibuster in order to ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide in the Freedom to Vote Act.
“It was thought to be that the House of Representatives would be ‘the people’s house’, the body that would represent a majority of the people and be a check on some of these other institutions that might give outsized weight to the smaller states, the rural states — in the pre-Civil War era, the states that were trying to protect slavery,” Douglas explains today. “But now, with sophisticated computers and algorithms where we can predict with such accuracy how people are going to vote, the House has become completely out of whack, such that Democrats need to win a lot more than 50 percent plus 1 in order to gain a majority in that chamber.”
With federal courts no longer an option for the time being, Douglas notes that almost all states have constitutions that, unlike the U.S. Constitution, grant citizens an affirmative, fundamental right to vote. Those provisions, declaring that elections must be “free” or “free and equal” or “free and open”, can and should be exploited to challenge the parties in power currently drawing maps that deprive residents of those rights, he argues. “My argument is that state courts should robustly use these phrases to protect democracy, and to throw out maps that are so skewed that the maps don’t represent a fair democracy, a fair majoritarian rule, but instead keep the party in power to stay in power, to entrench them in power, just because of the way the lines are drawn.”
Douglas observes that, while more challenges are beginning to be filed along those lines in state courts in recent days, he “was a little surprised” that, at least until recently, there had been very few such challenges brought in state courts, despite legal foothold offered by many of those state constitutions. “If we’re looking for a solution to a situation that is untenable for democracy, at least here’s one where we’ve seen some success,” he tells me. “Just a couple of years ago, both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the North Carolina Supreme Court relied on their state constitutions to strike down gerrymandering maps in those states. And other states’ Supreme Courts have relied on their state constitutions for other democracy decisions, other issues involving the right to vote. So we have some precedent that is favorable to using these state constitutions robustly.”
While I also support such challenges — along with sharing Douglas’ call for reforming the Senate filibuster to allow passage of federal legislation that would ban partisan gerrymanders in all 50 states — I’ve also recently been forced to reluctantly change my position on partisan gerrymanders in states controlled by Democrats. I believe “blue” states should not unilaterally disarm. That, due to the threat to democracy itself now posed by the GOP gerrymandering scheme to “win” a House majority with a minority of votes in 2022 and then use that majority to steal the Presidential election in the House in 2024, as Douglas himself warns against in a separate op-ed this week at CNN.
Despite his assertion in his CNN piece that “we must treat the 2022 election as existential for the continued vitality of our democracy,” noting that “American democracy barely survived 2020. The attacks on 2024 are already underway” and “Whether they succeed will depend on what we do right now,” Douglas remains firmly opposed to tit-for-tat partisan gerrymandering by Democrats and explains why.
He and I have that out in a very lively debate to close out today’s program…
“The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.” –Will Rogers