USA Politics (redux)

[Karl Henning]

Opinion: A sobering, new report shows how much work is needed to protect democracy

By Jennifer Rubin, Columnist

Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that has done yeoman's work in litigating against the lawless Trump administration, devising software tools to enhance election integrity and battling election disinformation, is out with a comprehensive report of the status of democracy. It makes for a sobering read.

If nothing else, the report highlights that the danger of election subversion and the ensuing constitutional crisis is immediate and real. Republicans have pushed more than 200 bills around the country that would enable Republican legislatures to dislodge neutral election officials, challenge and overturn results and undermine confidence in election outcomes. For other elections they do not win, expect Republicans to try to delegitimize the results. (This playbook is already in use in New Jersey, where Republicans are fanning false claims of voting irregularities in the governor's race. If devices were in place in the state for Republicans to politicize voting administration, election turmoil would no doubt persist.)

Protect Democracy notes that efforts at the federal level, including in the compromise Freedom to Vote Act, must be coupled with lobbying, legal challenges and public education at the state level.

The effort to prevent delegitimization of elections also requires the debunking and challenging of phony elections "audits," such as the one conducted in Maricopa County, Ariz. (which turned out to confirm President Biden's victory). These are the preseason warm-ups to anticipated GOP efforts in 2022 and 2024 to sabotage vote tabulation and certification.

It is worth noting that such efforts must also include fixes to the Electoral Count Act to prevent a possible Republican House majority in January 2025 from accomplishing what the MAGA rioters could not: Overthrowing the will of voters by refusing to certify electoral college votes.

To combat the near-term threat, Protect Democracy also insists on accountability for attempted intimidation and manipulation of election officials in 2020 through civil and criminal litigation. The report warns that "if there is no accountability for past abuses, they will only repeat themselves more dangerously."

Beyond the immediate danger of disrupted and stolen elections, Protect Democracy continues to highlight intermediate steps to shore up the guardrails of democracy including passage of a bill it helped formulate, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, reform of the War Powers Act and efforts to rebalance power between the "ever more imperial executive and a hollowed out and broken Congress."

As essential as the short- and intermediate-term reforms may be, a more fundamental threat looms. Protect Democracy calls this the "structural and cultural factors that inflate the political power and appeal of authoritarianism." The "socio-cultural drivers" of a mass movement seeking to challenge the foundations of a multiracial democracy demand solutions well beyond the political realm.

This entails confronting the White evangelical crusade to prioritize White power and Christian ideology over democracy. Right-wing pseudo-intellectuals, unabashed champions of nativism in right-wing media and cynical Republican politicians have heightened racial resentment and undermined the building blocks of democracy. In many instances, however, they are merely racing to catch up with the mob.

The prevalence of conspiracy theories, flight from science and fear of marginalization point to a greater crisis in rural, White and evangelical communities. White evangelicals' Faustian bargain with Trump and his movement meant that these communities sacrificed their religious virtues and principles for power and the false sense of security that a ruthless warrior could push back the tide of secularism and racial diversification. As evangelical conservative and pro-democracy advocate David A. French writes, "[T]he pursuit of Christian power led to prominent Christian voices endorsing nation-cracking litigation and revolutionary efforts to overturn a lawful election — the Christian 'deal' looks bad indeed. When push came to shove, all too often the pursuit of justice yielded to the pursuit of power."

Reinvigoration of democratic values, inculcation of tolerance, renewed respect for diversity and acceptance of science must come from authentic voices with credibility in those communities. The rest of Americans must recognize that excusing the plague of racist authoritarianism and unhinged — sometimes violent — rhetoric as the result of "economic dislocation" or "lack of respect from elites" misses the mark and infantilizes millions of Americans.

These Americans need to decide if they believe in the American creed or simply want to impose their will on a nation in which they no longer represent a majority. The answer to that fundamental question will in large part determine the fate of our democratic experiment.

[Karl Henning]

And, the media fails the Public again:

How the media missed a New Jersey senate candidate's racist social media posts — until he'd already won.

By Paul Farhi

Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EST

Edward Durr was such a long-shot candidate in his New Jersey state Senate race that no one seemed to notice something rather striking about him: He had a history of posting bigoted, misogynistic and derogatory comments on social media.

"Mohammed was a pedophile!" he wrote in 2019 in a tweet that also described Islam as "a false religion" and "a cult of hate." In other online posts since last year, he has called the coronavirus "the China virus," blamed an "influx of #illegalAliens" for spreading disease, used the motto of the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement and compared vaccination mandates to the Holocaust. He also denigrated Vice President Harris on Facebook, writing that she had earned her position only as a result of her race and gender.

Yet none of it rated news coverage, even after Durr, a commercial truck driver who had never held office, became the Republican nominee for New Jersey's 3rd Legislative District in April. According to a search of the Nexis database, which catalogues thousands of news sources, there were no published or broadcast reports about Durr's posts in the six months leading up to Election Day.

Durr's comments made plenty of news after last week's election, when reporters finally caught up to his social media history. But by then he had already scored a stunning upset over Democrat Steve Sweeney, one of the state's most powerful officials. Durr, 58, won the Senate seat by roughly 2,200 votes out of 65,000 cast.

One of the media's basic functions is to serve as a watchdog, particularly in scrutinizing candidates for public office. But in Durr's case, the watchdogs failed to bark for years.

His incendiary posts date back to at least 2017, when he called U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) a "pedophile" — one of two times he did so, according to NJ.com. According to Nexis, however, Durr's online history got no media coverage when he ran unsuccessfully for a state Assembly seat in 2017 nor when he ran and lost again two years later.

Political observers in New Jersey say the inattention this time around partially reflected low expectations for Durr's candidacy against Sweeney, a six-time incumbent who is president of the state Senate. "This race wasn't just off the media's radar, it was off everyone's radar," said Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State. "No one even considered that [Durr] was a real threat, and that includes me."

But the lack of media scrutiny may tell a larger tale about the state of local news reporting.

Years of cutbacks and consolidation among news organizations have left many communities without vigorous local coverage. Hundreds of newspapers have folded during the past two decades amid technological and economic turmoil — mostly small weeklies that focused on local issues. They have left behind "ghost" newspapers that try to report on broad territories with hollowed-out staffs or news deserts where there is no local reporting at all.

The southern New Jersey region once had four daily newspapers. But in 2012, Advance Publications merged three that it owned — the Gloucester County Times, Today's Sunbeam in Salem County and the News of Cumberland County — into a single paper, the South Jersey Times. Salem, Gloucester and Cumberland counties form the heart of the district won by Durr.

The Times's major competitors include the Courier Post in Cherry Hill and its sister paper, the Daily Journal in Vineland, both owned by Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper owner and a vigorous cost cutter. The Philadelphia Inquirer is the region's leading metropolitan paper.

The reporting staffs of the surviving local newspapers "have been decimated" and "barely cover local news anymore," said David Wildstein, who runs the New Jersey Globe, a digital news site focused on state issues and politics. "It's a shame."

Collectively, the South Jersey Times, Courier Post and Daily Journal list a total of 13 news reporters on their mastheads, covering a four-county region that has a population of just over 1 million. Editors of the papers didn't reply to multiple requests for comment.

Harrison said the broader news ecosystem is similarly grim. She estimates that the number of reporters covering the New Jersey State House in Trenton has fallen by about 75 percent over the past two decades. TV stations in nearby Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del., reach parts of the third district as well, but regional TV stations rarely cover local politics, especially those in a nearby state.

The nonreporting is a "sad illustration" of a larger crisis in the news media, said Tim Franklin, the former editor of the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel who now heads a local-news initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

"The voters in South Jersey's 3rd Legislative District should have known about Durr's posts long before Election Day," Franklin said. "Local news and information is the oxygen of a functioning, self-governed democracy. And our system is choking from expanding news deserts and ghost newspapers. . . . We have many fewer journalists covering the very state officials who have a profound effect on people's everyday lives."

Some of the nonreporting might arguably be laid at Sweeney's feet, suggests Wildstein. Reporters often rely on leaks of damaging information about a candidate supplied by an opponent. But in this instance, it's unclear whether Sweeney's campaign possessed such "opposition research" or tried to disseminate it during the campaign. (Sweeney's representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

For his part, Durr tacitly admitted his social media posts could have proved an embarrassment during the campaign. After his comments were reported last week, he deleted his Twitter account and released a statement. "I'm a passionate guy and I sometimes say things in the heat of the moment," he said. "If I said things in the past that hurt anybody's feelings, I sincerely apologize."

He added, "I support everybody's right to worship in any manner they choose and to worship the God of their choice. I support all people and I support everybody's rights. That's what I am here to do, work for the people and support their rights."

[Pohjolas Daughter]

I wish I saw a path to having anyone other than Trump in the White House in Jan 2025. Maybe my brain's just weary of it all.

I understand the feeling.  You're not alone.

PD

[JBS]

And, the media fails the Public again:

How the media missed a New Jersey senate candidate's racist social media posts — until he'd already won.

By Paul Farhi

Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EST

Edward Durr was such a long-shot candidate in his New Jersey state Senate race that no one seemed to notice something rather striking about him: He had a history of posting bigoted, misogynistic and derogatory comments on social media.

"Mohammed was a pedophile!" he wrote in 2019 in a tweet that also described Islam as "a false religion" and "a cult of hate." In other online posts since last year, he has called the coronavirus "the China virus," blamed an "influx of #illegalAliens" for spreading disease, used the motto of the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement and compared vaccination mandates to the Holocaust. He also denigrated Vice President Harris on Facebook, writing that she had earned her position only as a result of her race and gender.

Yet none of it rated news coverage, even after Durr, a commercial truck driver who had never held office, became the Republican nominee for New Jersey's 3rd Legislative District in April. According to a search of the Nexis database, which catalogues thousands of news sources, there were no published or broadcast reports about Durr's posts in the six months leading up to Election Day.

Durr's comments made plenty of news after last week's election, when reporters finally caught up to his social media history. But by then he had already scored a stunning upset over Democrat Steve Sweeney, one of the state's most powerful officials. Durr, 58, won the Senate seat by roughly 2,200 votes out of 65,000 cast.

One of the media's basic functions is to serve as a watchdog, particularly in scrutinizing candidates for public office. But in Durr's case, the watchdogs failed to bark for years.

His incendiary posts date back to at least 2017, when he called U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) a "pedophile" — one of two times he did so, according to NJ.com. According to Nexis, however, Durr's online history got no media coverage when he ran unsuccessfully for a state Assembly seat in 2017 nor when he ran and lost again two years later.

Political observers in New Jersey say the inattention this time around partially reflected low expectations for Durr's candidacy against Sweeney, a six-time incumbent who is president of the state Senate. "This race wasn't just off the media's radar, it was off everyone's radar," said Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State. "No one even considered that [Durr] was a real threat, and that includes me."

But the lack of media scrutiny may tell a larger tale about the state of local news reporting.

Years of cutbacks and consolidation among news organizations have left many communities without vigorous local coverage. Hundreds of newspapers have folded during the past two decades amid technological and economic turmoil — mostly small weeklies that focused on local issues. They have left behind "ghost" newspapers that try to report on broad territories with hollowed-out staffs or news deserts where there is no local reporting at all.

The southern New Jersey region once had four daily newspapers. But in 2012, Advance Publications merged three that it owned — the Gloucester County Times, Today's Sunbeam in Salem County and the News of Cumberland County — into a single paper, the South Jersey Times. Salem, Gloucester and Cumberland counties form the heart of the district won by Durr.

The Times's major competitors include the Courier Post in Cherry Hill and its sister paper, the Daily Journal in Vineland, both owned by Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper owner and a vigorous cost cutter. The Philadelphia Inquirer is the region's leading metropolitan paper.

The reporting staffs of the surviving local newspapers "have been decimated" and "barely cover local news anymore," said David Wildstein, who runs the New Jersey Globe, a digital news site focused on state issues and politics. "It's a shame."

Collectively, the South Jersey Times, Courier Post and Daily Journal list a total of 13 news reporters on their mastheads, covering a four-county region that has a population of just over 1 million. Editors of the papers didn't reply to multiple requests for comment.

Harrison said the broader news ecosystem is similarly grim. She estimates that the number of reporters covering the New Jersey State House in Trenton has fallen by about 75 percent over the past two decades. TV stations in nearby Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del., reach parts of the third district as well, but regional TV stations rarely cover local politics, especially those in a nearby state.

The nonreporting is a "sad illustration" of a larger crisis in the news media, said Tim Franklin, the former editor of the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel who now heads a local-news initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

"The voters in South Jersey's 3rd Legislative District should have known about Durr's posts long before Election Day," Franklin said. "Local news and information is the oxygen of a functioning, self-governed democracy. And our system is choking from expanding news deserts and ghost newspapers. . . . We have many fewer journalists covering the very state officials who have a profound effect on people's everyday lives."

Some of the nonreporting might arguably be laid at Sweeney's feet, suggests Wildstein. Reporters often rely on leaks of damaging information about a candidate supplied by an opponent. But in this instance, it's unclear whether Sweeney's campaign possessed such "opposition research" or tried to disseminate it during the campaign. (Sweeney's representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

For his part, Durr tacitly admitted his social media posts could have proved an embarrassment during the campaign. After his comments were reported last week, he deleted his Twitter account and released a statement. "I'm a passionate guy and I sometimes say things in the heat of the moment," he said. "If I said things in the past that hurt anybody's feelings, I sincerely apologize."

He added, "I support everybody's right to worship in any manner they choose and to worship the God of their choice. I support all people and I support everybody's rights. That's what I am here to do, work for the people and support their rights."

But how newsworthy is it when a GOP candidate says stuff that's now typical of GOP candidates? Other than calling Menendez a pedophile, there's nothing he said that isn't par for the GOP course.

But this makes it clear that Sweeney deserved his loss. Had he or his staff done any "due diligence" on his opponent, they would have found it and publicized it well before Election Day.

[Karl Henning]

But how newsworthy is it when a GOP candidate says stuff that's now typical of GOP candidates? Other than calling Menendez a pedophile, there's nothing he said that isn't par for the GOP course.

But this makes it clear that Sweeney deserved his loss. Had he or his staff done any "due diligence" on his opponent, they would have found it and publicized it well before Election Day.

Sadly, true.

[milk]

But how newsworthy is it when a GOP candidate says stuff that's now typical of GOP candidates? Other than calling Menendez a pedophile, there's nothing he said that isn't par for the GOP course.

But this makes it clear that Sweeney deserved his loss. Had he or his staff done any "due diligence" on his opponent, they would have found it and publicized it well before Election Day.

There shouldn't be anything attractive about such a candidate. It's very depressing to see how dysfunctional American society seems from this distance. It's tempting to only blame Democrats for seemingly not offering anything effectively substantial. How brain dead do we have to be to end up with such people running government?

[Karl Henning]

Trump's callous new comments on Pence reinforce what he really thought of Jan. 6


By Aaron Blake, Senior reporter
Yesterday at 10:02 a.m. EST

Donald Trump made it abundantly clear on Jan. 6 that he wasn't exactly broken up about his supporters violently storming the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn an American election — and indeed that he might well have approved of it.

And the evidence has only grown that the latter, specifically, is true.

A new development Friday morning is one of the most shocking to date. We knew Trump didn't show much regard for his vice president, Mike Pence, during or after rioters stormed the Capitol chanting for Pence's hanging. And it turns out Trump viewed it as part of a rational enterprise.

In an interview for his new book, ABC News's Jonathan Karl pressed Trump on the scene in a way we haven't seen yet. And Trump not only didn't denounce his supporters, he said what they were doing was "common sense."

A brief transcript:

KARL: Were you worried about him during that siege? Were you worried about his safety?

TRUMP: No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape. No. Because I had heard he was in very good shape. But, but, no, I think —

KARL: Because you heard those chants. That was terrible. I mean —

TRUMP: He could have — well, the people were very angry.
KARL: They were saying, "Hang Mike Pence."
TRUMP: Because — it's common sense, Jon. It's common sense that you're supposed to protect. How can you — if you know a vote is fraudulent, right — how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress? How can you do that? And I'm telling you: 50/50, it's right down the middle for the top constitutional scholars when I speak to them. Anybody I spoke to — almost all of them at least pretty much agree, and some very much agree with me — because he's passing on a vote that he knows is fraudulent. How can you pass a vote that you know is fraudulent?

While the way Trump spoke about this is remarkably callous, it jibes with plenty we already knew about the situation. The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker reported that Trump didn't call Pence for days afterward, for instance, despite the danger his VP faced.

It's also become evident that the effort to lean on Pence didn't go away after the riot began. Reporting has indicated Trump was still pushing for Congress to overturn the election even after the riot. And a Post investigation last month revealed that, when Pence went into hiding, Trump lawyer John Eastman told a Pence aide that he blamed Pence for the riot, given Pence had declined to help overturn the election using his historically ceremonial role. Afterward, Eastman tried to use the fallout from the riot to get Pence to throw the process into question based upon a technicality involving timing.

It all fills out a picture that seemed rather obvious in real time but, thanks to Trump's often unclear and mostly suggestive comments, allowed his allies to suggest perhaps it wasn't all it seemed.

To wit:

Trump tweeted attacking Pence even after the riot had begun.
Trump's response to the Capitol riot was slow — slow enough that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) floated Congress censuring him for it. And when Trump did urge peacefulness, he often layered it with sympathy for those who stormed the Capitol — i.e. "Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!" and "Go home. We love you."
Trump tweeted the evening of Jan. 6, "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long."
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) has stated that Trump was "walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren't as excited as he was."
Of the calls we know Trump made to lawmakers during the riot, they generally went to those who agreed with his effort to challenge the election results, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.).
Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) submitted evidence during Trump's impeachment that Trump told McCarthy during the riot: "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are."

That last one is key. It landed late in Trump's impeachment trial, during which Democrats called no new witnesses and didn't dwell upon new evidence beyond never-before-seen videos of the riot.

The impeachment trial was about Trump's alleged incitement of the rioters — not so much what he did after it began. But this spoke to a separate but very related issue: the idea that he relished the scenes of his supporters violently trying to overturn an American election or, at the very least, felt it was justified. If you don't approve of that or at least see value in it, you don't say such things. But Trump said them — repeatedly, including long afterward.

Even many Republicans who voted against Trump's impeachment or his conviction acknowledged that what Trump did was bad. They disagreed about whether it was impeachable, including by citing the legal standard for incitement and the fact that Trump was no longer in office. But since then, the party has largely moved on and suggested this isn't worth looking into that hard — evolving more and more toward a giant shrug at the situation.

Yet here is the person who could very well lead their party into the 2024 elections stating after the fact that a historic insurrection based upon his own false claims of election fraud that resulted in multiple deaths was, to some extent, "common sense." And it should now be much more difficult for his party to turn a blind eye to that or dismiss the idea that such things could happen again.

[Karl Henning]

When Blake writes, And it should now be much more difficult for his party to turn a blind eye to that or dismiss the idea that such things could happen again, I fear he is too sanguine. The sycophantic GQP enablers are highly practiced in turning blind eyes.

[SimonNZ]

The Atlantic: the story of the guy who was promoted from being Trump's Coke-bringer to head of government personell:

THE MAN WHO MADE JANUARY 6 POSSIBLE
The story of Johnny McEntee—the "deputy president" who rose to power at precisely the moment when democracy was falling apart

[...]"I want to put Johnny in charge of personnel," the president told Mulvaney.

The director of presidential personnel is responsible for vetting and hiring everybody, including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries, and top intelligence officials. McEntee had never hired anybody for anything. Now he was going to be in charge of perhaps the most important human-resources department in the world?

Mulvaney called his top deputy, Emma Doyle, who oversaw the current director of personnel, into the meeting. "Mr. President," she said, "I have never said no to anything you've asked me to do, but I am asking you to please reconsider this. I don't think it is a good idea."

Doyle had spent a lot of time around the president, but she had never seen him as angry as he was about to become.

"You people never fucking listen to me!" Trump screamed. "You're going to fucking do what I tell you to do."

A few hours later, Doyle was on Air Force One, along with McEntee, en route to a Trump rally in New Hampshire. She asked him about his interest in the position.

"People have been telling me I should do that for a long time," McEntee told her. "I didn't feel ready before, but I am 29 now and I'm ready." He added, "I'm the only person around here that's just here for the president." [...]


I'd head parts of this story elsewhere, but this bit was new:

"McEntee's underlings were, for the most part, comically inexperienced. He had staffed his office with very young Trump activists. He had hired his friends, and he had hired young women—as one senior official in the West Wing put it to me, "the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls."

"It was the Rockettes and the Dungeons & Dragons group," the official said.

In fact, one McEntee hire was literally a Rockette; she had performed with Radio City Music Hall's finest in the 2019 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The only work experience listed on her résumé besides a White House internship was a stint as a dance instructor. McEntee also hired Instagram influencers. Camryn Kinsey, for example, was 20 and still in college when McEntee gave her the title of external-relations director. In an interview with the online publication The Conservateur, she said, "Only in Trump's America could I go from working in a gym to working in the White House, because that's the American dream." (Kinsey went on to work at the pro-Trump One American News Network.)

that last line again: "Only in Trump's America could I go from working in a gym to working in the White House.:

the latest episode of The New Abnormal podcast also has a fun interview with the author of that article, Jonathan Karl

[Christabel]

You all need to stop obsessing about Trump and being fearful of him.  I thought the Left wasn't the fearful cohort, but it happens that you all are. Terribly fearful.

Perfect antidote;  make lots of money and spend time counting cash.  Something tells me the vast majority of you haven't got any;  ergo your political leanings.

[SimonNZ]

You all need to stop obsessing about Trump and being fearful of him.  I thought the Left wasn't the fearful cohort, but it happens that you all are. Terribly fearful.

Perfect antidote;  make lots of money and spend time counting cash.  Something tells me the vast majority of you haven't got any;  ergo your political leanings.

So much nonsense in such a short post.

I thought struggling "economic anxiety" was believed the reason people voted for Trump rather than Biden or Sanders? I personally don't believe that - I think its all about the circus..

And making and counting money is the shallowest "goal" of life, so suggest something better.

As for the possibility of a second Trump term: as David Frum recently put it: the velociraptors have learned how to turn the doorknobs now.

[greg]

And making and counting money is the shallowest "goal" of life, so suggest something better.

The people who work nonstop to make money and have no hobbies are quite weird, aren't they?
But money is also super important, making enough of it is the one thing that prevented a lifetime of hopelessness and meaninglessness, and inability to do anything, for me. So it can't be underestimated, at least as a stairway to live meaningfully.

Perfect antidote;  make lots of money and spend time counting cash.  Something tells me the vast majority of you haven't got any;  ergo your political leanings.

I'd suspect more of a dependent mentality for people that are super economically left, usually. Money can come and go due to uncontrollable circumstances, usually political stances are less volatile. I could be wrong, idk, what do you think?

[T. D.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/us/politics/republicans-2022-redistricting-maps.html

Republicans Gain Heavy House Edge in 2022 as Gerrymandered Maps Emerge
On a highly distorted congressional map that is still taking shape, the party has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.

[Karl Henning]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/us/politics/republicans-2022-redistricting-maps.html

Republicans Gain Heavy House Edge in 2022 as Gerrymandered Maps Emerge
On a highly distorted congressional map that is still taking shape, the party has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.

That, alas, was expected. and one wonders where the Democrats have been while the "fix" was being applied.

[Fëanor]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/us/politics/republicans-2022-redistricting-maps.html

Republicans Gain Heavy House Edge in 2022 as Gerrymandered Maps Emerge
On a highly distorted congressional map that is still taking shape, the party has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.

The USA is verging on "managed democracy", (sometimes called "guided democracy").  Urban and minority populations are now underclasses whose wishes are systematically thwarted.

[Gurn Blanston]

That, alas, was expected. and one wonders where the Democrats have been while the "fix" was being applied.

Not to put too fine a point on it, when you are the minority party in most state legislatures, you can basically eat shit. Here in TX we fought against it in every possible way, but it happened anyway. The only upside is that in the new 'district', Louis F. Gohmert isn't my rep any longer. Life is good!

[Karl Henning]

Not to put too fine a point on it, when you are the minority party in most state legislatures, you can basically eat shit. Here in TX we fought against it in every possible way, but it happened anyway. The only upside is that in the new 'district', Louis F. Gohmert isn't my rep any longer. Life is good!

Ugh, mostly.

[Karl Henning]

Of course, the real catastrophe is that it keeps the very democracy in peril

Opinion: The Democratic Party's progressive wing is on a kamikaze mission


By Marc A. Thiessen Columnist
Today at 2:22 p.m. EST

The news for President Biden keeps getting worse. His approval has fallen to 38 percent among registered voters, according to a new Post-ABC News poll — nearly matching President Donald Trump's all-time low in the RealClearPolitics average. But unlike Trump, Biden began his presidency with almost 56 percent approval. No recent president has fallen from grace so far, so fast, so early in his presidency.

However, two findings in the Post poll stand out: Fifty-three percent of voters say Biden is not keeping his major campaign promises; and 62 percent are concerned Biden will do too much to increase the size and role of government in U.S. society.

They are right. As a candidate, Biden promised unity, moderation and bipartisanship. Instead, he was quickly captured by his party's progressive wing, which convinced him that he should be a transformational president. But voters didn't put him in office to be a transformational president. As Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) explained after Republicans turned her blue state red, "Nobody elected him to be FDR. They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos."

Even the New York Times [emphasis mine — kh] is warning Democrats they are veering too far to the left and must "return to the moderate policies and values that fueled the blue-wave victories in 2018 and won Joe Biden the presidency in 2020." Failure to do so, the Times cautioned, could lead to wipeouts of historic proportions in 2022 and 2024.

But while the Times and moderate Democrats might care about winning elections, progressives in Congress don't. They know they don't have a popular mandate for socialism — if voters wanted Biden to be FDR, they would have given him FDR-like majorities. Progressives know they have been given a brief window while Democrats have unified control of government to enact as much of their radical agenda as possible. Thanks to the Virginia election and Biden's collapsing numbers, they know that window is closing fast.

They also understand that government is a one-way ratchet — and that once a new entitlement program is created, it almost never gets dismantled. Just look at Obamacare. Early in his first term, President Barack Obama rammed Obamacare through Congress, even though it was deeply unpopular. Result? Though Obama was reelected, on his watch Democrats suffered the largest loss in power of any party since Dwight D. Eisenhower — a net loss of 12 Senate seats, 64 House seats, 13 governorships and 816 state legislative seats. And those defeats paved the way for Trump's presidency.

But a decade later, despite unified control of government and the appointment of three Supreme Court justices, Republicans have failed to repeal Obamacare or persuade the courts to strike it down. Now, Democrats are back in power — and Obamacare is still here.

The lesson for progressives is clear: When you have power, use it. Don't compromise. Don't moderate. Seize the moment to expand the size and scope of government as much as you possibly can. It might cost you power temporarily, but Republicans won't be able to reverse the progress you make. And when you get power back — as you inevitably will — you can pick up where you left off and continue the long march toward socialism.

In other words, the Democratic Party's progressive wing is on a kamikaze mission. Does Biden really want to go along for the ride? There is an alternative — the model that Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) forged with their bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Biden signed into law on Monday.

At that signing ceremony, Biden basked in the bipartisan glow and said "the bill I'm about to sign into law is proof that despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results." But Biden could have held that ceremony months earlier when he still enjoyed majority support — if he had not given his blessing to progressives to take the infrastructure bill hostage as leverage to pass a separate, Democrats-only multitrillion-dollar social spending monstrosity. Indeed, he could have had multiple ceremonies by now — to sign bipartisan police reform legislation into law, and bipartisan China legislation the Senate passed in June, but which has languished in the Democratic-controlled House.

Instead, the president cast his lot with the radical wing of his party, which sees him not as their leader but only as a means to their socialist end. That's why his approval is nearly at a Trumpian low, most Americans think he is incompetent, and he is about to face a historic drubbing at the polls next year.

[Daverz]

In other words, the Democratic Party's progressive wing is on a kamikaze mission. Does Biden really want to go along for the ride? There is an alternative — the model that Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) forged

Why are you wasting my time with this garbage?  Usually you paste in much better stuff, Karl.

[Karl Henning]

Why are you wasting my time with this garbage?  Usually you paste in much better stuff, Karl.

I agree that his take on Sinema & Manchin is way off.