(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . So Much Talk About 'Threats to Democracy'. Why Is Apportionment Abuse Not A Part Of That Talk? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-01 General Milley, just-retired JCOS chairman being threatened with physical harm by MAGA President to the extent he has to hire private security. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), seconding the MAGA ex-president, saying General Milley should be ‘hung’. (His ‘crime’? The ‘woke military’.) Trump & MAGA minions looking to gut the civil service upon reinstatement of the ‘Schedule F’ executive order (rescinded by President Biden on his first day in office). Trump & MAGA minions wanting to ‘defund’ and politicize the FBI and the Pentagon. Shay Moss and Ruby Freeman, poll workers, forced into hiding after numerous MAGA threats to their lives. Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, held hostage by a MAGA supporter and then attacked with a hammer upon arrival of the police. These are just some of the recent victims and perpetrators of political violence, of either the rhetorical or physical variety — or both. Daily, we wring our hands and ask ourselves, “Who are these people promoting, enabling, or carrying out such violence? Where do they come from? What do they want, and how are they able to stay in power with such un-American ideas and motivations?” Is it just the cult of Trump? Is it the permission structure? Is it the culture? Our history with racism? These are the questions chewed over ad nauseam by the msm — for years, now — without resolution. But beyond the speculation, there actually are objective, data-driven, answers to those questions. Some of which I’ve gone into in past diaries, here and here, along with innumerable comments among countless DKos diaries by others over the past nine years I’ve been a subscriber. These are not hidden answers. They’re not unknowable answers. They’re just not being discussed by the Fourth Estate (ie the Press) with anything approaching any regularity, despite their criticality to the electoral process! The last reporter I can recall consistently talking about, reporting on, and questioning how we administer elections in the United States, is Bill Moyers. And he’s unfortunately not even considered ‘mainstream’ anymore. Case in point: from WaPo columnist, Jennifer Rubin: In a Post Opinions essay on Thursday, Costa reported on a planned gathering of [Republican] insiders next month. “It is the latest slapdash scheme in a long search for a standard-bearer and a portrait of the powerlessness so many Republicans feel as Trump plows ahead, shrugging off criminal indictments and outrage over rhetoric they fear is growing dark and dangerous.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 2015, establishment Republicans never came up with an effective means of shoving Trump out of the way or finding a viable alternative. One Post headline: “Plan A for GOP donors: Wait for Trump to fall. (There is no Plan B.).” Those pesky voters, inflamed by right-wing media and encouraged by desperate Republicans masquerading as populists, don’t seem to be interested in the views of establishment Republicans. [emphasis mine] — Rubin, Jennifer, WaPo 10-1-23 This late in the game, fully 12 years after the public announcement in the WSJ, subtitled “He who controls redistricting controls Congress”, of the nation’s first ever national strategy to gerrymander state legislatures and the Congress, called “REDMAP Strategy 2010” (since updated to 2020), I’m simply gobsmacked that we are talking, seeing, and feeling, the threats to the Republic, our Democracy, our way of life, yet we so rarely discuss the Mechanism that has brought the nation to this place in our history. Jennifer Rubin, like so many in the msm, identify all of the major characteristics of the intransigent MAGA Republican voter on those poor ‘establishment’ Republicans. Let’s go down the list: 1 — the fact that they’re voters. Check. 2 — they’re ‘inflamed by rw media’. Check. 3 — their representatives are ‘desperate’, and ‘masquerading’ as populists. Check. 4 — and MAGA voters don’t. seem. interested. in the views of establishment Republicans. What did Ms. Rubin — that msm avatar of ‘experienced reporting’ leave out? Can anyone guess? It’s only the most important and consequential aspect of our electoral system, and why Republican leaders across the country are ‘desperate’! What is that most important and consequential aspect? 5 — MAGA are victims beneficiaries of APPORTIONMENT ABUSE! aka ‘gerrymandering’. And trust me, Jennifer Rubin isn’t the only one. Pick any msm reporter on any network, and you’ll be hard put to find them spending a millisecond of airtime or a dot of ink on the subject of Gerrymandering. Even my personal favorite media sources fail miserably to account for the structural abuse of the apportionment privilege that’s causing these threats to our Democracy and public officials. They’ll wax on and on, for hours, across all the major networks, asking the same ‘o same ‘o questions: Who are they? Where do they come from? Why are they so angry? What do they want? What can we do about them? Blah, blah, blah... Rubin had the perfect paragraph, describing today’s ‘inflamed’ Republican voter; who is encouraging them; and that those voters don’t care what the larger Republican universe thinks about them. The obvious question would appear to be, Why? Why don’t they care? Now, we can psychoanalyze them as a cohort to our heart's content but still miss the actual reason — the Mechanism — for how that cohort is able to influence the politics of a nation — and potentially the world — but with only, at most, 30% of the entire Republican congressional conference — representatives, each of them — representing a gerrymandered, MAGA, district. Those MAGA voters don’t care because they’ve been chosen to occupy a district for the sole purpose of demonstrating a partisan ‘loyalty’ that makes them immune to any thing, person, or subject, that might put that loyalty into question. So many of us seem to nod our heads in understanding what the word ‘gerrymander’ means. I know I’ve personally seen a huge increase in the number of people who know what I’m talking about when I use the word ‘gerrymander’, compared to when I first understood it’s potential for political weaponization, in the second half of the 1990’s, at the dawn of ‘consumer computing’. [I still remember heated debates with my father about it’s electoral significance.] Yet, we spend our days, almost 30 years later, gagging at the institutional vandalism of our public institutions — just a few days ago, 9-28-23, holding hearings on the impeachment of President Biden without any evidence — while the gerrymandered MAGA caucus insists on blackmailing their own, establishment members, preventing them from keeping the Government open by forcing them to choose between Party (run by MAGA) and Constitution (currently, and publicly, upheld by Democrats), upon pain of being assigned ‘RINO’ status, doing the bidding of a President-in-waiting, already now vandalizing our judicial institutions in an attempt to outrun 91 felony charges across 4 indictments in 3 different states, encompassing financial fraud, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Here’s the sad truth: Rubin can keep her ‘inflamed electorate’. She can finger right wing media, in bed with a psychopath, yet profiting from his celebrity, as the cause of that inflammation. We can have a discussion about the social psychology that permits the acceptance of political violence in our public rhetoric. All of these things could continue to exist as they are today. But none of it would threaten our Democracy the way its being threatened today, without the Mechanism of Apportionment abuse to provide the actual political power to challenge norms, sow distrust, and vandalize the way our public institutions function! America experienced a wave of political violence in the 1960s and 70s, but it was never echoed at the ballot box. No leaders of either party were elected to publicly condone or support political violence or vandalize American government institutions in the name of an angry electorate that also trafficked in anti-government rhetoric. Contrast that with today. What makes that difference? It’s not the times, our brains, our emotions, our financial status, or even whatever racist views we hold in our hearts. It is the mechanism of partisan redistricting; Apportionment abuse — gerrymandering. It has become weaponized in the age of cheap computers and software that didn’t exist before 1995, and certainly didn’t benefit from the fine-tuning of the gerrymander into a national strategy to disenfranchise the Democratic Party, as was done by the partisan operative and strategist, Thomas Hofeller, between 2006-2008. And as mentioned above, the Republicans even have a plan to execute, called REDMAP Strategy 2010 (since updated to 2020), announced in the msm without shame or embarrassment. As if it were ‘just politics’. Like the Jan-6 insurrection was just ‘political discourse’. But go ahead and find a msm reporter that isn’t named Bill Moyers that ever did a story on that election ‘strategy’. You can’t. Because other than a few brief mentions in 2010, they didn’t. Until American society, it’s media punditry, it’s legal system, recognizes the centrality of political apportionment in legislative and congressional districts to our system of government, and how the abuse of the apportionment privilege is directly affecting the increasingly radicalized nature of American politics and social discourse, we will never make sufficient progress in turning back the threat it has become to American democracy. The persistence of private capital to support this still-legal ‘edge’ in winning elections virtually guarantees success over the finite energies and organizational resources of an electorate that doesn’t have the benefit of manufacturing a purpose-built base of support. Why? Because the Republican party cheated first, locking out state legislatures and congressional seats before Democrats understood that Republican donors were no longer interested in supporting a political party that was going to limit itself to respecting voters enough not to manipulate them and their districts. Apportionment abuse, or gerrymandering, is fundamentally about politicians picking voters — like gang leaders choosing their gang members — in order to support the politician that has already identified them as a ‘preferred voter’. Partisan loyalty becomes more important than the transparent administration of public resources. Public resources become beside the point for those that care more about demonstrating that loyalty to the world, rather than any loyalty to the Law or the Constitution. The sad fact is, we cannot shame our way out of a situation that wouldn’t exist but for the abuse of the apportionment privilege. And we also cannot interpret our way out of lawlessness by simply declaring that Justice is blind to it. Apportionment abuse is an administrative reality that must be faced by everyone interested in preventing the lawlessness that comes from empowered fanatics becoming elected representatives on the basis of being chosen to exercise extreme partisan ‘loyalty’. It must be faced by voters, who too often are unaware of how they are placed in the districts they vote in. It must be faced by political leaders, who take public service, accountable governance, and the words of our (current) Constitution seriously. It must be faced by the msm — and reported on consistently — if they expect the public to understand the threat facing American democracy and the critical role an unintimidated Press plays in that democracy. And it must be faced by our jurists and law schools, who should have an interest protecting and enforcing the Law as represented by those public institutions that are constitutionally-mandated to create those laws, by recognizing a Government interest in protecting the integrity of the state-level administration of our electoral system. The legal system should not allow the leveraging of that administration for the purpose of a partisan advantage that seeks to administratively disenfranchise the opposition. Sadly, our current Supreme Court does just that (see Rucho v Common Cause, 2019). Until voters become knowledgeable; until laws or constitutional amendments are passed; or until the legal system recognizes a role in representing the integrity of the voting process; American democracy will continue to suffer the consequences of Apportionment abuse. 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