Democrats should fight fire with fire!!
Fuck that, we should be fighting fire with God damn napalm.
Kyle had a fantastic segment on this : https://youtu.be/QnOu0kDW-Kw
So gerrymandering good if it’s Our Team™?
As a general rule, gerrymandered district is only “safe” from partisan rivals. What we’ve seen in GOP gerrymandered districts is some hotly contested primaries - even primaries against incumbents - that produced a strain of conservatism that is less interested in national partisanship and more interested in appeasing the district’s primary voting base.
If you think Dem primary voters are frothing fascists who need to be bottled up and kept away from positions of power, then Prop 50 is bad news for democracy. But if you think Dem primary voters are reasonable and rational, with the wisdom to select leadership that can effectively govern and improve the country, then Prop 50 is good news.
In the same way that killing someone who is about to kill you is good.
In this case, unfortunately, yes. It also cancels after the next census in 2030 and control is handed back to the committee. The expiration date is the only reason I voted yes.
They did it first and the only way to fight it is to do the same with this type of thing. We will have no democratic power if we don’t fight election rigging
So you’re fine with “find me more votes” trump asking for conservatives to redraw maps out of cycle, for the explicit reason to materialize out of thin air an advantage for the next election?
I’m not. There’s a reason why this is expected to give the exact number of seats as the new map of Texas.
No, it’s not good. But we’re past caring about that.
Prisoners dilemma, but in this case we’ve already seen how the other prisoner (Texas) has acted. Should we take 3 years while they go free? Or make it 2 and 2?
It’s not good, but at this point, the President is pushing Republicans to redrawn districts to explicitly favor Republicans, which is explicitly illegal. He should be impeached for this, along with any Republicans who go along with it. But… With Republican control of all 3 branches of government, he will never be impeached and removed. At this point, fighting fire with fire is the only option left.
So no, it’s not good, it would just be way worse not to do it
Imagine the ketchup all over the new marble and gold…
Because disenfranchising people is the solution to disenfranchising people. But who knows - this may be the least bad option.
They’re welcome to leave and move to a red state. I left a red state and went to a blue one last year. They can do it too.
Useful idiot response.
I don’t think anybody sane wanted to go there, but the reality of the right-wing’s willingness to stoop to whatever absurd thing it takes to ensure their power-grab is built to last has left little other option but to fight fire with fire.
I think you’re probably right, in the sense that not doing this would probably be even worse, but we’re destroying the town to save it, as the saying goes. Win or lose, there won’t be much left of a very important norm.
It’s the difference between having a destroyed town and letting it be taken over by fascist that will use their power to both destroy the town and remove any opposition, leading to a situation where you have no power to even fix the town for decades into the future.
At least this would give us a chance to rebuild it. If we don’t, we may never have the opportunity. If things settle again, these are the people who would agree to creating some rules around gerrymandering and even consider eliminating it across the country so it can never be used again to try and consolidate power.
But if we let the Republicans do so without challenge, they will enshrine it and it will never go away.
How is it “destroying the town” when the measure explicitly returns redistricting control to the independent commission in 2031? It’s temporary by design to address the moment we are in.
Things intended to be temporary often end up permanent, especially when it is in the interest of the party in power to make them permanent (and gerrymandering is always in the interest of the party in power, because that’s the party that does the gerrymandering).
With that said, the intent to revert this gerrymandering is the intent to rebuild the town, but even if the town will be rebuilt someday, it’s still being destroyed now. California Republicans have a right to representation, and the Democrats are deliberately depriving them of that right because of something that totally different people in Texas are doing.
I’ll extend the war metaphor: sometimes military necessity dictates a course of action that will cause civilian casualties, but even then we should still acknowledge that there are civilian casualties and that that’s bad.
Disadvantages of Gerrymandering:
- the number of representatives for each party elected do not match the population’s actual preferences.
- reduced competetion between political parties means the population’s needs receive less attention.
Disadvantages of a one party dictatorship:
- The number of representatives for each party elected do not match the population’s actual preferences.
- Absent competetion between political parties means the population’s needs receive no attention.
- no checks and balances means no bill of rights exists.
- no checks and balances also means no regulation to protect the population’s needs.
- possible human extinction in nuclear winter.
