The word a couple of weeks ago was that DC GOPers were less than thrilled at CA Gov. Arnold Schwarzennegar’s redistricting reform ballot initiative, on grounds that the current system nationally is helping keep Republicans in charge, and they’d just as soon leave things as they are.Well, the odds of letting sleeping dogs lie on this subject just went way down, as Republican legislators in my poor home state of Georgia started a re-redistricting of Congressional Districts aimed at zapping a couple of Democratic incumbents. Their model, of course, is the Great Texas Power Grab of 2003, the re-redistricting engineered by Tom DeLay which ultimately produced a net gain of five House seats for the GOP, reversing what would have otherwise been a loss of seats in 2004 (Republicans in Colorado tried the same stunt, but were overruled by the courts citing a state constitutional provision limiting redistricting to once a decade). But in a way, the Georgia gambit is worse. In Texas, the fig-leaf justifications for the Power Grab were that (a) the Dem majority in the House delegation did not reflect recent partisan results in statewide elections, and (b) the map they were throwing out was drawn by judges, not legislators. In Georgia, (a) the current 7-6 GOP advantage in House districts is a pretty fair reflection of recent election results, and (b) the map they are throwing out was duly drawn by the legislature, signed by the Governor, pre-cleared by the Bush Justice Department, and upheld by the courts. In other words, the Georgia Republicans are undertaking this outrage, well, because they can. The new GOPer map is apparently aimed at snuffing two white Democratic House members, Jim Marshall, who represents a central-west central GA district, and John Barrow, who just beat a Republican incumbent to represent the Athens-Augusta-Savannah district. They aren’t going after the state’s four African-American House Members (John Lewis, Cynthia McKinney, David Scott, and Sanford Bishop) because that would raise an unmistakable Voting Right Act issue. But in any event, the GA Power Grab may wind up biting the national GOP in the butt. News of the latest Power Grab led (according to the subscription-only Roll Call newspaper) House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer to put in a few phone calls to Democrats in the three states where their party has taken over total control of the executive and legislative branches since the regular redistricting cycle prior to 2002: Illinois, New Mexico, and Louisiana. Illinois is a potentially ripe target for a retaliatory re-redistricting, since GOPers hold nine seats, and because the new chairman of the DCCC, Rahm Emanuel, is from that state. Moreover, one of the Illinois Republicans who could find himself in sudden trouble is a guy named Dennis Hastert. Personally, I hate all this re-redistricting crap, and the whole system of partisan and incumbent-protection gerrymandering that has reduced the People’s House of Congress to a vast rotten borough where politicians choose voters rather than the other way around. But if Republicans continue to game the system, they can’t complain if Democrats retaliate where they can, and maybe the whole spectacle can build support for a truly national drive for comprehensive redistricting reform. Maybe those Georgia Republican jokers will smell the coffee and call off the dogs before their own party’s House speaker finds himself hunted as well.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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About Ramaswamy’s “Democrat Governor Playbook” Smear of Newsom
Vivek Ramaswamy is too young to remember George Wallace. I remember him well, which is why Ramaswamy’s snarky effort to compare Gavin Newsom to him drove me to a refutation at New York:
The last time tech bro turned politician Vivek Ramaswamy waded into American political history, he was touting Richard Nixon as the inspiration for his own foreign-policy thinking, so to speak. Unfortunately, he betrayed a pretty thorough misunderstanding of what Nixon actually did in office, not to mention somehow missing the Tricky One’s own role model, the liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson.
Now the freshly minted candidate for governor of Ohio is at it again with an analogy aimed at Gavin Newsom that nicely illustrates the adage from This Is Spinal Tap that “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” He made this comparison on social media and on Fox News:
“I actually like Gavin Newsom as a person, but he won’t like this: there’s another Democrat Governor from U.S. history that he’s starting to resemble – George Wallace, the governor of Alabama who famously resisted the U.S. government’s efforts at desegregation. In 1963, JFK had to deputize the Alabama National Guard to get the job done, just like President Trump is doing now: – George Wallace fought against federal desegregation; Gavin Newsom now fights against federal deportations. – George Wallace wanted segregated cities; Gavin Newsom now wants for sanctuary cities. – George Wallace blocked school doors; Gavin Newsom blocks ICE vans. It’s the same playbook all over again: dodge the feds, rally the radicals, & do it in front of the cameras to pander to their base to carve out a lane for their presidential goals. And mark my words: Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions will end the same way George Wallace’s did – in the dustbins of history.”
Putting aside for a moment Ramaswamy’s dumb little quip about Newsom and George Wallace representing the same “Democrat governor playbook” (it would take all day simply to list the wild differences between these two men and the states and state parties they governed), his facile comparison of their stances toward the exercise of presidential power doesn’t bear any scrutiny at all. When George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to block the enrollment of two Black students at the University of Alabama, he was defying a nine-year-old Supreme Court decision, an untold number of subsequent lower-court decisions, and ultimately the 14th Amendment, on which Brown v. Board of Education was based. He wasn’t opposing the means by which the federal government sought to impose desegregation, but desegregation itself, and had deployed his own law-enforcement assets not only to obstruct desegregation orders, but to oppress and violently assault peaceful civil-rights protesters. That’s why President John F. Kennedy was forced to either federalize the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama or abandon desegregation efforts altogether.
By contrast, Newsom isn’t standing in any doors or “blocking ICE vans.” The deportation raids he has criticized (not stopped or in any way inhibited) are the product of a wildly improvised and deliberately provocative initiative by an administration that’s been in office for only a few months, not the sort of massive legal and moral edifice that gradually wore down Jim Crow. And speaking of morality, how about the chutzpah of Ramaswamy in comparing Trump’s mass-deportation plans to the civil-rights movement? Even if you favor Trump’s policies, they represent by even the friendliest accounting a distasteful plan of action to redress excessively lax immigration enforcement in the past, not some vindication of bedrock American principles. No one is going to build monuments to Tom Homan and Kristi Noem for busting up families and sending immigrants who were protected by law five minutes ago off to foreign prisons.
As he made clear in his speech last night, Newsom objects to Trump’s federalization of Guard units and planned deployment of Marines on grounds that they are unnecessary abrogations of state and local authority transparently designed to expand presidential authority as an end in itself. George Wallace made defiance of the federal government under either party’s leadership his trademark. John F. Kennedy wasn’t spitting insults at him as Trump is at Newsom; he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, negotiated constantly behind the scenes to avoid the ultimate confrontation with Wallace. There’s been nothing like that from Trump, who has all but declared war on California and then sent in the troops to run Los Angeles.
Beyond all the specifics, you can’t help but wonder why the very name “George Wallace” doesn’t curdle in Ramaswamy’s mouth. If there is any 21st-century politician who has emulated the ideology, the tactics, the rallies, the media-baiting, the casual racism, and the sheer cruelty of George Wallace, it’s not Gavin Newsom but Donald Trump. I understand Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t old enough to remember Wallace and his proto-MAGA message and appeal, but I am, and there’s not much question that if the Fighting Little Judge of 1963 was reincarnated and placed on this Earth today, he’d be wearing a red hat and cheering Trump’s assaults on what he described as the “anarchists … the liberals and left wingers, the he who looks like a she” and the professors and newspapers that “looked down their nose at the average man on the street.”