“If you share the maps with people, they will have the ability to comment. And Republicans know that. And that’s why they don’t want to share the bad maps that they are undoubtedly going to try to draw,” says former Attorney General Eric Holder, discussing the fight to end gerrymandering.
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#MSNBC #Republicans #Gerrymandering
Get to the Republican idea of freedom. Where the same people we are trying to rescue from Afghanistan are not wanted here by those same Republicans.
@Whicker Don’t know. What is Fox, or Facebook telling you ? Personally, it’s none of my business. Last I heard it was a free country built by immigrants. My dad was Airforce, my mom German. Dad’s dad was in WW1. Mom’s in the Nszi army in WW2. I’m an American. Born in Atlanta Ga. I grew up during the Vietnam War . Was 15 when it ended. I work with 25 Vietnamese guys painting yachts. Well,I watch they paint. Regardless, who am I to suggest where these people go ? I grew up here in Tampa rght next to MacDill airforce base. Actually, I just ate a Cuban sandwich, near the end of the runway. I’m just not a racist. Supposedly these people helped us in our longest war. What would you suggest? Screw em ? I’m not for keeping troops in Afghanistan. I’ve heard people try to make an equivalency out of Germany, Japan, and Korea for staying in Afghanistan. Apples, and oranges I say. We get along fine with Vietnam, yet we don’t occupy the country. The difference between Germany, which worked out well for me, and the others is,they don’t want us out. The Afghans do. I say, if they get stupid, send the drones. It’s a hot mess. You figure it out. I’m sure you have ideas. I’m not here to hold your hand. Be scared,or not. Entirely up to you. Capt.Bob (Sailing Vessel) 27th Chance, Tampa Fl.
Let’s be honest, these Afghans who worked for the US military are certainly more secular and share more western values than Evangelicals.
@Piotr Trebisz likely true. I’m not overly impressed with our Evangelical right. Right to life ! Can’t tell me I have to take a vaccine. It’s my body ! Well,which is it ? If we can’t make a person take a shot, how can we tell women what they can do to their body ? The irony is all over this one.
@robert caldwell Our german far right is completely different to the american right.
@M Brower 👍👍🖖
The GQPis really going to have to ramp up the gerrymandering to make up for their base dropping dead or getting crippled by Covid. What a perfect time to restrict mail in ballots, whoops… 🤭
If we got rid of the electoral college then it would be purely popular vote.
@Keith Johnson – Shelby GT500 you’re so full of it
@R. Foersom it’ll never happen Republicans are power-mad and they cheat
@V for Wombat From Wikipedia:
The Compact Clause of Article I, Section X of the United States Constitution states that “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State”
I’m no lawyer, so I can’t tell you how this would actually play out, but that’s the piece of the constitution that could potentially be sticky business.
@Jeffrey Heinze Fry ” could potentially be sticky business.””
mmm.
states get to decide how they award electors.
two constitutional principles butting up against each other.
they’d have to be loose with their definition of agreement or compact tho, since the law only sets conditions for awarding electors,it doesn’t actually enter into any agreement with other states.
but if texas turns blue and passes the law, that’ll probably be enough to trigger it, which means lawsuits.
otoh, if texas turns blue, then the electoral college will swing to almost always electing democrats.
@V for Wombat The agreement is that the compact only goes into effect if the states signed on total 270 or more electors. So basically, if these states agree to do it this way, we do as well. So, not that loose a definition.
Although, that then leaves open the option of signing onto this principle without depending on other states. If all of these states are willing to “honor code” the agreement and just sign on, that will work. But then if a state changes back to the old method, that kind of breaks things and makes it a mess.
Also, a state doesn’t need to turn blue to pass the law. It’s mainly blue states that are on board right now, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Texas also isn’t required by any means. All of the pending states plus say… Arizona, Florida, North Carolina or Virginia would do the trick. Or even multiples of those, and skip some pending states.
Every state should have independent commission
@R. Foersom Under your system, there would be multiple political parties represented in the Congress and state legislatures. Oh, that sounds good! The people who are most concerned about environmental issues would have members of the Green Party in Congress. True. But the only way you’d get anything passed in Congress is if coalitions were built around each issue and compromise returned to the writing of laws. Why would a Green Party member compromise with a Democrat from a state that is home to big business, like, say, Chuck Schumer, much less a Republican? The Green Party member represents only voters who cast votes for the Green Party under your system, those most fervently concerned about environmental issues. And the same for Libertarians or a KKK Party or a Peace Party or whatever narrowly defined party you want to imagine. Theoretically, this sounds wonderful, but we’re not dealing with theory, we’re dealing with real people, real American people not Norwegians or Germans. (It’s not like Angela Merkel is against national health insurance because she belongs to a more conservative party, but every Republican politician is.) If we were dealing with theory, then the Constitution would be working perfectly now, with the Congress, especially the House, acting like representatives of the people, not the lackeys of those in leadership positions. As I recall, 27 Senate Republicans voted for LBJ’s civil rights legislation 57 years ago, including their leader. But 6 Republicans bucked Dirksen and voted Nay. 21 Democrats bucked their leader and voted against the bill. It wasn’t lockstep partisan voting. That was a presidential election year and still 27 Republicans compromised with a Democratic president. It’s not hard to understand why Richard Shelby or Tom Cotton would vote against such legislation today, considering the opinions of the people they represent, even though it means they’ll never show up in a book called _More Profiles in Courage_ , but someone explain to me why Republican senators from Montana or Ohio or Indiana or South Dakota won’t. One reason: their voters would oppose the legislation simply because it was proposed by a Democrat, partly because they have been urged to think precisely that way by a succession of Republican politicians. Republicans good; Democrats bad. Easy to understand. Counterproductive for the future of the nation. I see the weaknesses in a two-party system, but they would be further exacerbated by a multi-party system in which there would be no political incentive for compromise, if voters are more concerned about ideology than the nation sliding further and further behind other nations. The country would just drift along with endless continuing budget resolutions and nothing more significant coming out of Congress than changing the names of government buildings and resolutions supporting Mother’s Day. We don’t need to change the system. We need to change attitudes. This is the same system that gave us 27 GOP senators voting for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. We didn’t get to the mess we are in now overnight. It took 40 years. We’re not going to get out of it in a couple of years, though electing Democrats and Republicans willing to work together and replacing the GOP leader in the Senate who revels in collecting $193,400 a year + perks for doing nothing useful, would be a good start. Unfortunately, his term doesn’t run out until 2026.
at first I thought it said “independent communism”
@Gnirol Namlerf proportional voting works pretty well. I’d rather live in New Zealand or Australia than the USA.a truly failed 2-party state apparently riddled with political corruption. Independent electoral commissions at federal level in both thos countries stop gerrymandering. Trusting the Southern US states to drawn clean maps is politically suicidal for democracy.
Should be done NATIONALLY by a federal electoral commission for uniform method in national voting. Sheer lunacy otherwise.
@Gnirol Namlerf Besides that in a multi-party system even the big parties don’t even come close to 50%. Angela Merkel’s CDU is currently the strongest with 33%. You ask how Greens and Conservatives could ever make compromises. Well, there is no ther way. If you have barely 33% and simply need the votes of the Greens to accomplish ANYTHING then they can dictate their conditions. In a multi-party-system being a small party is more fun than being a big party.
I don’t care what state you are from, you all regardless of political choice have the right to free and transparent elections without any jerrymandering or unlawful fooleries. Can there be laws for accountability this?
@Piotr Trebisz sounds fair to me
@Piotr Trebisz I keep holding a conversation with you and you’re ignoring me but I don’t care about that what I want to know is how do we as citizens of the United States change our political system because if we let Republicans have any power we will never get the power back again and they will turn this country into a fascist regime there is no doubt about it they’ve already tried
@Pat Doyle in what states is it illegal?
@Marcea Susanna Becerras
Colorado, Michigan, and I think Oregon, though there may be a couple more.
@Marcea Susanna Becerras You got that right!!I seethed through all 8 years of Pres. Obama’s tenure.
The big problem with Gerrymandering is that the Supreme Court has OK’d it
bc State’s Rights are enshrined in the Constitution. Makes me wonder just WHAT KIND of Democracy did the Forefathers have in mind?? (Only good thing is that this one cannot be Blamed on Women!😏)
Not sure what to do, but begin with finding out what’s legal in your state & get busy…🖖
Manipulation of the rules of the game because that goes to show how diabolical right-libertarianism is.
And how desperate they are. They are dinosaurs that don’t know that they are extinct yet. Their ideas are antiquated.
@Ray S Their ideas are antiquated because moving the goal post to score a political touchdown is antiquated. The right-wing to far-right, Trump-enabling, self-identified libertarian faction of the Republican Party are breaking the rules of elections because they are hellbent of alternative voting which I don’t know what is except they were thinking of the alternative vote system like they have in Australia and we don’t live in Australia. That’s the problem. Instant-runoff voting is another name for alternative vote. But still, this is the United States of America and we have single-member congressional districts that operates the same horse-and-buggy voting system. I think of the first-past-the-post voting system as the 100 meter dash in the track and field event in the Olympics. I still like the first-past-the-post voting system. Proportional representation in elections….Well, proportional representation voting allows the extreme fringes of politics got elected.
Trumpublicans would love getting the house back and go back to doing nothing 😷
AND NOW WITH THAT COMMENT YOU CAN SEE WHY YOU AND I HAVE TO TRY AS HARD AS POSSIBLE TO GET YOUR PEOPLE TO VOTE
They would do something – they would immediately impeach Biden for some trivial issue.
@Brian Wimberly did you know Trump dropped more bombs/drones per year in office than obama or bush?
@Brian Wimberly 600,000 dead. Nothing to be proud of.
@Brian Wimberly but he released the people that’s waging war now.. ironic
We need local TV stations to cover these hearings so the whole state can see what`s going on
Yes!
Good luck with that 🙄. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that they never wanted a lockdown and then rushed to reopen? There were entirely too many people paying attention to what was going on around them. By not raising the minimum wage you will never have time to keep an eye on them😠🤬🤬
You are confusing “local TV station” with a national network of local TV stations.
I had never heard that the Supreme court voted that there is nothing that can be done about gerrymandering. Wtf, yet another reason we need to balance the court by appointing more justices to the Supreme Court.
CARVEOUT voting rights protections from the filibuster and pass it Now.
@ST7A Bad Karma Only in your QAnon fantasies.
Are all you who are replying even human… you all sounds like bots
@Breaking Geek This is MSNBC dude. Biden just gave the Taliban a list of Americans and they’re talking about Republican Districts.
A few years ago the SC ruled that gerrymandering for racial reasons is unconstitutional. In the same ruling they implied that gerrymandering for other reasons is OK, so now the stated reason is “it is political” so to ensure their party stays in power. That is constitutional. Go figure.
It was a liberal court that ruled that first. And they have a point. It’s like obscenity, you know it when you see it, but try describing it without including art. The SC has to be objective in this case, and no one has come up with an algorithm that works yet, but they are getting closer.
It’s called gerrymandering any wonder why the GOP doesn’t want it made public? Biden just needs to outlaw political mapping plain and simple.
It’ll be made public soon enough.
Biden can’t. Gerrymandering is state not federal.
Political mapping is a state function, not federal.
This only matters because we have an electoral college. What is a democracy when the majority vote can lose?
Says the wanna be tyrant. Sounds very anti US Constitution to me. Are you one of those anti-government extremists Biden told us to report?
I looked into the election system for the house of representatives and I found out that different states can use different systems to elect their representatives. Georgia, Mississippi, Alaska & Maine use other systems then the rest of the US.
In the german municipality (a county so to say) where I live our local parliament has 79 seats. In our municipality elections we have therefore 79 votes. The ballots are big with 14 different parties and over 200 candidates and we can assign our 79 votes all across the ballot. So I can vote 30% for party A, 20% for party B, 25% for party C and 25% for party D, like a menu with a million different options. The number of seats which a party gets is proportional to the percentage of the votes it gets. So even if you vote for a small 3rd party which achieves only 10% your votes are not lost.
California has the largest group of representatives (53). California could therefore elect its representatives WITHOUT districts (and therefore no gerrymandering) with the same system as my municipality where every Californian has 53 votes which can be assigned to different candidates from different parties. A party which wins 20% of these votes in California will then get approximately 10 seats in the house of representatives. Libertarians, Greens and all sorts of other 3rd parties would then make it into the congress.
I think OP knows the EC ‘is not relevant’ here, but rather was commenting on Gerrymandering being such a deathblow because we have other undemocratic mechanisms throughout the rest of the election apparatus as well, like the EC and the equal number of senators per state. Which begs the question of what is so important about the land inside an arbitrarily drawn line that we allow undemocratic mechanisms to give that land more voting power than actual people? In every national election? Gerrymandering for the House, the EC for President, and having the same number per state for the Senate. Each a separate kneecapping to democracy, together a death sentence.
@R. Foersom Thats how its done in my country of Canada too
@R. Foersom Exactly. In principle gerrymandering is possible in the UK. The only reason it does not happen is because the lines are drawn by a non-partisan committee that we trust. It can still produce an unfair result due to luck in the way the boundaries are drawn. But here in Scotland, for our own elections (equivalent of state elections in the US, but with no federal oversight), we have a system very similar to what you describe. It is not perfect, but it works pretty well. The number of seats is roughly proportional to the number of votes, regardless of where the lines are drawn. That is how it has to be in a fair system. Come on US and UK. Let’s have a voting system fit for the 21st century.
While we’re being fair, these “maps” should disclose the location of contracted prisons used to juice up rural populations. Just saying.
We are living the updated version of the 1983 movie: “War Games”.
I’m so over this bs and the rethuglicans party of cheating must be dismantled permanently
U musta been living n a cave the past 10 months. Was ur head somewhere it shouldn’t have been too?
The only reason anyone ever cheats is because they just aren’t good enough.
The word “talent” doesn’t exist in the GOP or its brood. Just a bunch of parrots.
@Ann Anderson are you saying democrats don’t cheat?
@bombastic attitude “My mind is made up; don’t confuse me with the facts.” Author Unknown👍👍🖖
@Wisconsin 1848 I would not say that.
Namely CHINA JOE BIDEN
When you hate democracy and want an out of touch elite group ruling us, this is how you go about gaining power.
Q: How do you learn about elections being rigged without hearing someone actually say “We’re going to rig elections”?
A: Listen to a republican politician talk about ‘redistricting’.
And this is why midterms matter. We’ve ignored it for decades.
For a group who scream about free and fair elections they do everything in their power to control the outcome of those elections. Gerrymandering has to end.
“This is a red state”. If it was a “red state” (or country) Republicans wouldn’t need to commit the voter fraud of gerrymandering.