Today’s edition of CQPolitics has a sobering article entitled “CQ Ratings Show South Remains GOP Firewall Against House Election Disaster.” According to the staff-written post, “Democrats’ opportunities for more Southern gains in 2008 are very limited.” The CQ study sees NC-8 and FL-13 being the Dems’ best shot at House pick-ups, with slim pickings beyond those two seats and Dems struggling to hold several of their southern seats.
Puzzling that Dems can’t do better in Southern House races, especially considering that Democrats currently hold majorities of both houses of the state legislatures in LA, MS, AL, AR, NC and WV, and one House each in TN and KY. One possible explanation: As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, “nearly half the region’s House seats are in three super-gerrymandered states, Texas, Florida and Georgia.”
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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February 6: Democrats Have Wised Up and Stopped Trying to Cooperate With Trump
This has been quite the chaotic week or so, and one of the byproducts of the nihilistic conduct being displayed by Donald Trump and his allies has been a decided end of Democratic cooperation, and I welcomed that development at New York:
Following the time-honored ritual of giving a new president a “honeymoon,” a good number of prominent Democrats made friendly noises about their nemesis after Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, like Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, seemed inclined to cross the partisan barricades whenever possible, praising Trump’s dubious Cabinet nominations, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, and even joining Truth Social. Others, notably Bernie Sanders, talked of selective cooperation on issues where MAGA Republicans at least feigned anti-corporate “populism.” Still others, including some Democratic governors, hoped to cut deals on issues like immigration to mitigate the damage of Trump’s agenda. And one congressional Democrat, the normally very progressive Ro Khanna, promoted cooperation with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, at least with respect to Defense spending.
This made some sense at the time. After all, Democrats, having lost control of both Congress and the White House, didn’t have much power of their own, and there was always the chance that having achieved his improbable comeback, Trump would calm down and try to become a normal chief executive in his final term in the job.
Now it is extremely clear that is not the case. The past chaotic week or so has convinced most Democrats that Trump has zero interest in compromise, bipartisanship, or even adherence to the law and to the Constitution. Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps are ravaging agency after agency without the slightest legal authorization; OMB is preparing its own unilateral assault on federal benefits that don’t fit the Project 2025 vision of a radically smaller social safety net; and congressional Republicans are kneeling in abject surrender to whatever the White House wants. Democrats are resigning themselves to the mission of becoming an opposition party, full stop, making as much noise and arousing as much public outrage as they can. They shouldn’t be credited all that much for courage, since the new regime has given them little choice but to dig in and fight like hell.
OMB’s January 27 memo freezing a vast swath of federal programs and benefits, inept and confusing as it was, kicked off the current reign of terror. It reflected (and was likely dictated by) the belief of Trump OMB director nominee Russell Vought that the president can usurp congressional spending powers whenever he deems it necessary or prudent. Yet Congressional Republicans went along without a whimper. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole, who would have gone nuts had a Democratic president threatened his role so audaciously, said he had “no problem” with the freeze. The federal courts stepped in because OMB’s order was incoherently expressed, but there’s no question the administration will come back with something similar. As a sign of belated alarm over OMB’s direction, Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted Vought’s confirmation vote in reaction to this challenge to the constitutional separation of powers. After Republicans gaveled him on through without a whisper of dissent, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talk-a-thon” to recapitulate past and present concerns about Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist and one of the principal authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a radically diminished federal government. He will be confirmed by the full Senate anyway.
Musk’s guerrilla warfare on the federal workforce and the programs they administer made the OMB power grab unfolding at about the same time look like a walk in the park. Even as his landing teams of 20-something coders took control of multiple agency IT systems and fired anyone who got in their way, Musk himself was on X making wild charges about the programs he was short-circuiting and all but cackling like a cartoon villain over his unlimited power. When Ro Khanna upbraided him for his lawlessness, he responded as you might expect, tweeting at Khanna: “Don’t be a dick.”
Khanna’s centrist Democratic colleague from Florida, Jared Moskovitz, had actually signed up for service on the DOGE oversight panel Mike Johnson created, despite its clear purpose as an ongoing pep rally for Musk. Now he’s out, as Punchbowl News reports:
“I need to see one of my Republican colleagues in the caucus explain the point of the caucus, because it seems that Elon doesn’t need them, because it seems what Elon is doing is destroying the separation of powers. And I don’t think the DOGE caucus at this moment really has a purpose … Whether I stay in the caucus, I think is questionable. I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”
Meanwhile, as all this madness was unfolding from the executive branch and its outlaw agents, congressional Republicans have been laboring through the process of putting together budget legislation to implement whatever portion of Trump’s agenda that wasn’t rammed through by fiat. Democrats are not being consulted at all in these preparations to produce a massive bill (or bills) that is expected to pass on a party-line vote and that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because of the immense leverage of the House Freedom Caucus over this legislation, the plans keep shifting in the direction of deeper and deeper domestic spending cuts at levels never discussed before. Per Punchbowl News:
“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.”
Democrats can’t really do anything other than expose the extent and the effect of such cuts in the forelorn hope that a few House Republicans in particularly vulnerable districts develop their own counter-leverage over the process. But whatever emerges from the GOP discussion will have to be approved by OMB, where Russell Vought will soon be formally in charge. There’s just no path ahead for Democrats other than total war.
They do have their own leverage over two pieces of legislation Trump needs: an appropriations bill to keep government running after the December stopgap spending bill (which Musk nearly torpedoed in an early demonstration of his power) runs out, and a measure increasing the public debt limit. These bills can be filibustered, so Senate Democrats can kill them. There are increasing signs that congressional Democrats may refuse to go along with either one unless Trump puts a leash on Vought and Musk and perhaps even consults the Democratic Party on the budget. If there’s a government shutdown, it couldn’t be too much worse than a government being gutted by DOGE and OMB.
Republicans hope that Trump’s relatively strong popularity (for him, anyway) will keep Democrats from defying him. But they may not be accounting for the 47th president’s erratic character. On any given day, he may do something completely bonkers and deeply unpopular, like, say, suggesting the United States take over Gaza, expel its population, and build a resort development.
Gerrymandering is a problem no matter whose ox is being gored. The way states handle redistricting is broken beyond repair.
There is one very easy solution: The states should combine their districts into big, three-member districts, open their general elections to the top three vote-getters from each party’s primary, and apportion seats to the top three vote-getters in the general election. This would make it much more difficult to gerrymander (because the states would essentially have fewer, bigger districts) and would be much more fair (because in most cases the districts would thereby elect two members from the most dominant party and one member from the lesser party, ensuring that the minority party still gets some say). There would have to be a few rules for the occasional one- or two-member district that would still come up in states whose congressional delegation was not a multiple of three, of course.
Of course, because this (a) makes sense, (b) provides the most meaningful way to elect centrists of both parties, and (c) threatens incumbents, Congress — which otherwise lets states handle redistricting however they want — has outlawed multi-member districts.
For many years the Southern Money Elite held the South in the grip of Fraud, Intimidation, and a wide variety of legality games and criminal enterprises.
The 1968 election overthrew that lock on the Democratic party, so the Southern Gang Of Pirates became Republican, but never lost their old ways. Rather they spread them across the country.
Now they need all the games to retain control, the loss of one could lose all. But Gerrymandering might be the biggest, and certainly the least understood.
By packing a few districts as 100% frequently voting Democrats (who are mostly black) into their own districts, they bleach the surrounding districts such that an area can vote 55% Democrat and still have that elect 4 Republicans and one Democrat to Congress. The Democrat wins by 95% without even trying and the Republicans win by 55%.
Until there are rules against Gerrymandering, or such voting districts are outlawed entirely, there will be little need to apply the other methods to House seats.
One of the reasons we will continue to have problems in South is that so many African-American males have been disenfranchised, in part because of crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparities and sentencing enhancements that were part of the Clinton 1994 Omnibus Crime bill.