The only way out of the mess is a nationwide solution

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos last Friday reported that Billy Long has been removed by the nasty guy as commissioner of the IRS. This is a bit stranger than what has become a typical government firing because Long was confirmed for the job less than two months ago. The confirmation vote was 53-44. Democrats voted no because of Long’s shady past. A link to a related post reminds me that Long was chosen to run the IRS because, while a member of Congress, he sponsored bills to get rid of the IRS. This article says it does not have a reason for Long’s dismissal. That prompted me to look for other sources. Martha Waggoner of The Journal of Accountancy posted a brief note on Monday that Long left the IRS because the nasty guy will nominate him to be ambassador to Iceland. I notice that announcement hasn’t been made yet. Nathan Goldman of Forbes wrote Monday that while waiting for the next appointment Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will act as interim. And Bessent becomes the seventh IRS commissioner this year. Under Biden the IRS got a $79.4 billion to modernize and hire more agents able to go after the rich who have been underpaying taxes. Some of that money has been rescinded. Not much has actually been spent. So the nasty guy and Congress can still play games with it. And the nasty guy will try to use the IRS to harass opponents or try to get rid of it entirely. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took another step towards making the vaccine situation worse. Biden had instituted a policy for giving incentives to doctors for giving vaccines. These are doctors with patients in Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Programs). This was done at a time when COVID was still deadly. Kennedy called the policy “immoral” and “coercion” and “has no place in a constitutional democracy or in a system that claims to protect children.” That screed comes shortly after HHS announced it will cut a half billion dollars in vaccine research. Yup, Kennedy was appointed to his position to cause death. Alex Samuels of Kos reported New York Attorney General Letitia James was the one that got the Trump Organization convicted of fraud. That case is under appeal while the interest on the fine grows. So, of course, the nasty guy’s Department of Justice has subpoenaed documents from James as the first step in retaliatory action. James also sued the top executives of the NRA in 2020 for financial abuse. Leader Wayne LaPierre was found liable for mismanaging millions and banned from the group for a decade. Samuels concluded:

The new attack against James isn’t about justice. It’s about Trump’s grudge—and now he has the full force of the federal government behind it.

Samuels also reported last Friday that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is trying to raise the stakes on Democrats who left the state to prevent his gerrymandering bill from having a quorum to pass. As part of his threats he said he will repeatedly call special sessions until the bill passes, so Democrats may need to stay away for years. And the longer they stay away the more Republican seats he’ll squeeze out of the map. One danger in squeezing out more Republican seats is that the Republican majority in each one gets smaller and easier for Democrats to flip. Republicans are also pursuing redistricting efforts in Florida, Ohio, and Missouri. Perhaps Indiana will join them too. So Abbott warns if Democrats don’t return and submit soon there may be a redistricting arms race. I think Abbott got it backwards. If Democrats do return and the bill passes that is what will set of a redistricting arms race. On Monday the NPR show 1A discussed gerrymandering and what Texas is doing. I heard a bit of it live and I’m working from the transcript (which has its issues, such as speakers are not identified by name). The hosts were Jen White and Todd Zwilich. The guests were Reid Wilson, Founder and Editor of Pluribus News, Ann Johnson, Democratic state representative, Texas' 134th district, and David Daley, senior fellow at FairVote and author of the books Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count, Antidemocratic, Inside the Right’s Fifty Year Plot to Control American Elections, and Unrigged, How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. The last one is a story of grassroots efforts to reinvent politics. The nasty guy called for Texas giving him more seats saying, “we are entitled to five more seats” based on the results of the last presidential election. No, that’s not how representation is decided. And the size of the win was actually minuscule. Reviewing the background: Redistricting is highly unusual. The first state to do it was Texas in 2003. Back then Democrats left the state, first the House, then the Senate. But the governor kept calling special sessions until they returned. The maps passed. Drawing district maps is inherently a political exercise (unless the state has turned the process over to citizens, like Michigan has). Those who draw the maps of course do it to benefit themselves and their party. So what Texas is doing is not new. Blatantly stating they’re doing it for extra seats is new. Caller Jack from Tampa identified this effort as fascism, part of a slow motion coup. The January 6 Capitol attack was also a part of this coup. Zwilich added that this is another sign that Republicans no longer want to compete in elections. While gerrymandering is done by both sides the nasty guy’s comment shows this situation is different. Evan from Wisconsin lamented the problem and wants to start over making maps that are more fair. Zwilich noted there have been bomb threats at the Chicago hotel were many Democrats are staying. Johnson said redistricting mid decade is actually a violation of the Texas Constitution. This special session was called to handle 18 items, one of them is a response to the central Texas floods. But only the redistricting bill has come up for a hearing. While flooding is the topic now, it wasn’t for the first two weeks of the session. This special session ends on August 19. Democrats intend to stay out of the state until then. Then whether another session is called is up to the governor. The threats by the governor, that a US senator is trying to call out the FBI to take them back to Texas, fines of $500 a day when the pay is $600 a month, all show how desperate they are. That all this is to rig the system to determine representatives before the vote. That is offensive to everybody. Johnson is grateful to spark a national conversation that we should do things differently, to eliminate gerrymandering. Brian Harrison is a Republican in the Texas House. He gave reasons for the push to redistrict mid decade: Supreme Court cases changed the way the law treats coalition districts (no explanation of what those are). The Census Bureau has admitted to massively undercounting Texas. Millions of people have moved to the state since the census. There have been significant changes in voter trends, such as Hispanics not voting for Democrats. My rebuttal: Massively undercounting the population of Texas would affect the number of seats Texas gets, not which party should claim them. That there is an influx of new residents gives no indication of where they settled. And those reasons are meaningless if the redistricting is using the 2020 census data. Changes in voter trends is not a valid reason for redistricting. Johnson’s reply is simple: Republicans are doing this because the nasty guy told them to. Beyond that the reasons are bogus. This real reason should scare us. Johnson said she has proposed several times that Texas adopt a citizens redistricting commission. It never gets a hearing. The only way out of the mess is a nationwide solution. Add campaign financing reform in there too. When states are not playing by the same set of rules, the result is not fair. Reid was asked about the nasty guy wanting to exclude noncitizens (I think he only wants to exclude undocumented people) from the next census count. Reid replied that the census is more than apportioning seats. It is also about how 680 federal programs are funded. A state’s population determines how much funding. The Constitution says the census counts residents and that is not affected by whether they are a legal or undocumented immigrant. Listener Francois of Kerrville, Texas (the center of the recent flooding) and a lifelong Republican thinks redistricting is an abomination, especially since this power grab is more important than flood warning systems. David Daley listed other Republican targets for redistricting: Missouri, Florida, maybe North Carolina, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Tennessee. Ohio is a special case because their process at the start of this decade was so flawed the map was allowed to stand for only four years. So it has to redistrict. But Republicans are again in charge and could pick up two seats. Over all the states the number of seats Republicans could get out of all this outnumbers the possible gains by Democrats. The consequences are a continued dwindling of competitive seats. In 2024 only 37 districts (out of 435) had one party ahead by five percent or less. That’s already a shockingly low number. That there could be fewer should frighten us. There is momentum heading toward reform. In 2018 several states across the political spectrum voted for a fair way to draw district lines. Voters across the spectrum hate gerrymandering. But this redistricting arms race has politicians trying to undo that independence. After that getting the reform process going again would be hard. Yes, in 2021 the For The People Act would have outlawed partisan gerrymandering. The Senate was split 50-50 on the issue and some Democrats thought preserving the filibuster was more important. Many saw this as a message bill, not a serious attempt. What Democrats should have done is break the bill into smaller pieces, with one piece being anti-gerrymandering, and try to get each piece passed. They didn’t. Democrats and Republicans are now playing by two sets of rules. Republicans are free to redistrict how they want. Democrats pushed these reforms and now have to work around them, tying their hands. Listener Peter said creating a computer program to draw Congressional districts means fair, tight, ungerrymandered districts without the legislative political infighting and do it better even than the bipartisan commissions. Daley mentioned the 2019 Supreme Court decision that prevents using federal courts to settle partisan gerrymandering claims. John Roberts wrote the decision and got a 5-4 vote. That decision signaled states could do their worst in drawing districts – and they did in 2021. That shows a limitation of the independent commissions because governors (and pretty much all are Democratic) can’t respond to a moment like now. So reform needs a national effort. Daley talked about proportional representation. It was proposed by Jamie Raskin and Don Beyer as the Fair Representation Act. Draw larger districts represented by multiple members. Do ranked choice voting in each district. Each is a swing district but it isn’t winner-take-all. The lines become less of an issue and everyone gets representation. How to get there is still an issue. Michigan has a way for citizens to initiate changes to laws and the state constitution. It was used to get the citizens redistricting commission. But 24 states don’t have such a mechanism. Then what? Also, when one state does a reform and another doesn’t the reformers look like a patsy. These states are not playing by the same rules. Then we’re back to needing a national solution. But Congress has failed to act (and won’t try again while Republicans are in power) and the Supreme Court refused, and instead is permitting worse gerrymandering. Which means it must be demanded by the people. Listening to and reading through this episode reminded me again how tired I am of the nasty guy having an ego so fragile that he constantly must try to rig the world around him to prop it up. That billionaires and racists pushed for him to be president to carry out their agenda, that he was able to convince voters to vote for him, and that he was able to bully the part of the Republican Party that didn’t already support the billionaire agenda is the biggest tragedy in American history. On the lighter side... Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet by Geoff Green. He asked OpenAI for a chart of all US presidents since Herbert Hoover with pictures, names, and years in office. The results show why one cannot trust the large language models like OpenAI. It got only four of the names right – with “Richard Ninun” and “Dwight D. Efeezhswer” among those it got wrong. The only years it got right were for Nixon while among the wrong dates was Johnson serving 1963-1588. And the pictures are definitely wrong though with a vague resemblance. I wonder if they are all really modeled on the same face.