Hat tip to those in Michigan who swung into action - to demonstrate that the people still can make a difference in this tattering democracy.
Excellent! My best friend has spent weeks collecting signatures and knocking on doors in SE Michigan for this.
Gotta go call her and congratulate!
Hats off for all their hard work! My husband and I signed one of those petitions.
Seconded. Well done, Michigan.
Action doesn’t always succeed, but it always helps.
One down and 49 more to go. But remember that it took nearly 200 years for South Carolina to official do away with slavery and we still haven’t passed the ERA.
My sister-in-law said today that she’s so fed up with old white men doing so much harm while telling women they are not smart enough to do anything. Just look how smart Trump has proven he isn’t. The old white patriarchal male system has now led to the second Third Reich complete with concentration camps. It’s time for a new and different perspective on how this nation is run and by whom. Way past time.
Now the work starts.
The conservatives on the supreme court may yet regret having refused to address this issue.
It is great that Michigan wants to eliminate gerrymandering, packing districts, etc. It will be difficult with the 14 congressional disricts it has with approximately 700,000 per district. The districts were never meant to be so large and there size makes it easy to gerrymander. The problems lies within the number of congressional districts. More disricts makes it harder to gerrymander.
We need to do this in all 50 states, plus get Puerto Rico the vote, too.
We should definitely offer Puerto Rico statehood, and buy its debts like we bought Texas’s when it joined.
Not quite 49. CA has a redistricting commission that has worked well, and I believe there are a few other states that have gone this route already.
We did this in California. It was one of the good things that the Governator helped do, back in olden times when not all Republicans were 100% evil.
That’s why Issa will not be coming back to Congress—he got ungerrymandered.
Hawaii also has a bipartisan redistricting commission with 2 members each selected by the Speaker of the House, the President of the Senate, the Senate Minority Leader, and the House Minority Leader. It seems to work pretty well. But it’s running into an issue now because there are no Republicans left in the state Senate. One of the last House Republicans had an op-ed recently basically demanding that some districts be gerrymandered in order to preserve Republican representation, like blacks in the South.
I like the idea of Republicans being an endangered species. But for now, they are an infestation of vermin animals.
Unfortunately, a side effect is that we really do have an epidemic of DINOs. Some are typical conservadems; others literally switched from the Republican party because you can’t get elected with an R next to your name, but didn’t change any of their policies.
The result is that the real election is in the extremely low turnout primary where there’s little information about the candidates’ views, and the Republicans are reduced to a rump of whackadoodles. The legislature is run based more on corruption than partisanship.
And they wrote that with a straight face?
Poor Republicans. Centuries of enslavement, decades of Jim Crow, being denied the right to vote, being threatened if they registered, poll taxes, literacy tests, anti-Republican gerrymandering… the list goes on and on (and all at the hand of Democrats, too). Yeah, just like blacks in the South.
Part of me wants to read that op-ed, for the comedy value. Part of me doesn’t want to throw up in my mouth.
They have no morals, no values, no honesty, no decency, no shame.
I misremembered it a bit, it was more whining about how Republicans are so unpopular that they can’t win a single Senate seat and therefore the redistricting commission won’t be evenly balanced. But the title is Democracy Soon To Be Gutted By Gerrymandering, and that was kind of the logical conclusion - they’ve been wiped out even with completely fair districts, and to get one Senate district that’s likely Republican, you would have to go through some serious geographic contortions. They do regularly get about 35% of the vote in statewide races, but the vote is pretty evenly spread. There are only a few small pockets where Republicans are a majority, mostly high-income whiter areas, plus the mostly Mormon town of Laie which is too small to have its own district.
Even in the House, with smaller districts, there are only five Republicans out of 51, and one of them will probably get booted or quit and join the Dems soon for being strongly anti-Trump and not very conservative. Although the Senate district covering most of two of those Rs is represented by Mike Gabbard, Tulsi’s homophobic father who is one of those former Rs who switched parties but not opinions.