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GELFAND’S WORLD - The Republicans play dirty, and it's up to Democrats to start fighting back. We've seen an inkling of that in Gavin Newsom's action in redistricting California to counteract what's been going on in Texas. Yes, it was unfortunate that California had to jettison a fair and honorable way to do its districting, but without the new approach, the Republicans were about to solidify their unethical takeover of the congress in a near-permanent way.
It's way past time that Democrats expand and escalate the fight, because if they don't, they are going to get buried. It would be useful if other Democratic states such as New York and Illinois begin the redistricting process just in case some other Republican state tries to pull its own Texas.
The bad news/good news is the economy. What's going on with the tariffs and the national debt is terrible, but there may be a ray of sunshine eventually -- but only after a lot of black clouds.
Here's why. Everything that Trump and his congressional cronies do is bad for the economy. Just say those two words, "the tariffs," and you've said most of it. It's true that the tariffs will turn out to be a sales tax on all Americans, and not just a 5% or 10% tax like we've come to accept. It's a whopping great, huge and ugly, massive tax of 20% or 30% or more. When you think about the overall effect -- to increase prices massively all at once -- the tariffs are more like a dollar devaluation than just a sales tax. Everyone's net worth suddenly became significantly less, since the buying power of your dollars has been decapitated. (Remember how Richard Nixon did this back in the '70s?)
The thing is, all these Trumpian attacks on the American economy will continue to percolate through, month after month. They may manifest themselves in the form of empty shelves in stores everywhere between here and Oklahoma, and they will surely manifest themselves in the form of a recession. That recession may appear slowly over the next 6 to 12 months, but it's hard to imagine that this massive national sales tax won't suppress economic growth, employment, housing starts, retail sales, and all the other economic indexes that signify the health of the economy.
The problem for Trump and his Republican supporters is that the recession will develop during the runup to the November, 2026 general elections. We can expect that the voters will have had enough of Republican economics by then, just as they had enough of the George H.W. Bush economy back in 1992. The price of eggs is going to be a small part of the hurt in late 2026.
But in the meanwhile, Republican dirty tricks continue on a day to day basis. The latest, as of a few hours ago, is the attack by Donald Trump on NBC and ABC, with a call for license revocation. Apparently, Trump doesn't believe in the idea of freedom of speech when it is applied to him.
Where all of this comes to a head is in all those acts of revenge that Trump is attempting, running from Adam Schiff to various mayors and governors. It goes beyond simple vengeance, extending to all those attempts to save a few federal dollars by crushing NPR and disaster areas, not to mention science and the whole university system.
It's up to Democrats to point out to Republicans -- and particularly those in the Senate, that a governmental system based on vengeance (as this one is) is subject to turnabout.
If the red states and their captive political party want to carry on this Cold Civil War against all things moderate and liberal -- and they make no bones about their desire to do this -- then it is critically important that the other side (that's all the rest of us) warn them that there will be attempts to repair the damage when the Democrats return to power, and part of that repair will involve taking actions to punish the wrongdoers.
That's the only way to convince them that they don't get to commit these acts without a response. In another context we refer to this as tough love. The Democrats and moderates need to mete out some of that tough love to today's perpetrators before the whole experiment in Constitutional democracy is destroyed.
There is even something that the D's can do in the absence of a Senate majority. Under Trump and the DOGE attack on government, critical agencies were crippled by cuts in staffing and funding. Some of those cuts involved support for disaster preparedness, hurricane prediction, and even disaster responses. The Republicans asked for these, and the Democrats in the Senate should not help them to undo the damage when it happens. The red state governors won't admit (at least officially) that global warming exists. So be it. The next time that they get hit by consecutive class 4 hurricanes, let the Democrats in the Senate insist that they admit that global warming has exacerbated their problems. And make sure that the Republicans in the Senate make a few concessions. Mainly, make sure that the Republicans understand that for every outrage they commit against their opposition, that the opposition will be keeping track and will eventually even the score.
Or, the Republicans in the Senate could consider that come the recession, they are going to lose control of the legislature and that political balancing will occur. They can minimize the damage to their own party and to their own states by starting to act like civilized people. They can start this week by defending freedom of speech (NBC and ABC) and opposing the tariffs.
Addendum: A word about redistricting
The Constitution commands that we do a census each decade. From that census, the U.S. figures out how to apportion the number of House of Representatives seats among the states. Every state, no matter how small its population, gets at least one representative. But additional representatives are paid out according to the relative populations of the individual states. California, with the most people, gets the most representatives, with large states such as Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois getting their share. But how the states lay out their voting districts is another matter entirely.
Here is how and why. Suppose there is an area that has a lot of Republicans, but it is surrounded by wide areas which have lots of Democrats. There are several different ways of dividing that state into congressional districts. Here is one way that would benefit the Democrats: Create voting districts that each include a small chunk of the urban Republican area, but make sure that each district includes another area that is heavily Democratic. Maybe make the district 55% or 58% Democratic, so that there are at most 45% Republicans. Most such districts would be a lock for a Democrat in the next election.
Here is a way to draw the districts that would benefit the Republican Party:
For each of the districts, reduce the size of the Democratic population to 45% of the total and increase the Republican population of each district to 55% of the total. Each such district would be highly likely to go Republican in the next election.
By the way, what do you do with areas that are left over? For example, there will likely be substantial parts of the desert and central valley that have a lot of Republicans. What do you do with those areas? If you are trying to help the Democrats, you build districts that are as Republican as you can possibly make them. In this case, instead of creating a district that has 100,000 Republicans (and would be an easy Republican win) you create a district that has 180,000 Republicans. You have, in effect, wasted 80,000 Republican voters, and you have wasted very few Democrats, who will be put in a more competitive district.
So that's the essence of the gerrymander: Waste as few of your own party's voters as you can, and waste as many of the other party's voters as you can. You will win a bunch of districts that are created to have a 55% to 45% majority while the other party will win fewer seats, but they will be in rock crusher districts with 80% majorities.
There are limits to what you can do. Districts can't be built of different areas that are not connected. The term for this is that districts have to be contiguous. But the courts have allowed a lot of latitude to states in everything else they do, as long as the districts in any state have approximately the same population.
So here is the first point: Gerrymandering still occurs, and the census occurs, but we have traditionally had redistricting done for the next general election after the census results are completed. This has meant that within a couple of years after the completion of the census, we knew what the House electoral map would look like for the next decade.
But over the past couple of decades, the Republicans have enjoyed violating the norms and traditions of American government and politics. One outrageous example was when the Republicans in control of the Senate refused to allow Obama's nomination to the Supreme Court come up for a confirmation vote. In effect, the Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat.
Donald Trump's move to push Texas into a mid-decade redistricting is beyond the usual order. In effect, it is an attempt to steal the next several House elections.
It is not only an outrage, but also -- if allowed to succeed -- a blow to American democracy, because the Democrats might very well take back the House of Representatives should they be allowed to compete on an honest basis. The Republicans in Texas make no bones about their motivation, which is to steal back the national majority that otherwise they might very well lose.
As an aside, Trump's efforts to steal the House through the Texas gerrymander simply reinforces the general consensus that he was doing much the same thing through the January 6, 2021 riot. Each was just an extra-Constitutional effort to gain governmental control.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
