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      ‘Putin-style democracy’: how Republicans gerrymander the map

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      Republicans believe they have a great chance to win control of the US House of Representatives in 2022, needing a swing of about six seats to depose Nancy Pelosi as speaker and derail Joe Biden’s agenda.To help themselves over the top, they are advancing voter suppression laws in almost every state, hoping to minimize Democratic turnout.But Republicans are also preparing another, arguably more powerful tool, which experts believe could let them take control of the House without winning a single vote beyond their 2020 tally, or for that matter blocking a single Democratic voter.That tool is redistricting – the redrawing of congressional boundaries, undertaken once every 10 years – and Republicans have unilateral control of it in a critical number of states.“Public sentiment in 2020 favored Democrats, and Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives,” said Samuel Wang, a professor of neuroscience and director of the Princeton gerrymandering project. “[But] because of reapportionment and redistricting, those factors would be enough to cause a change in control of the House even if public opinion were not to change at all.”While redistricting gives politicians in some states the opportunity to redraw political boundaries, reapportionment means there are more districts to play with. After each US census, each of the 50 states is awarded a share of the 435 House seats based on population. States gain or lose seats in the process.The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute today than it has ever beenOwing to population growth, Republican states including Texas, Florida and North Carolina are expected to gain seats before 2022, although the breakdown has not been finalized, with the 2020 census delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.Republican-controlled legislatures will have the power to wedge the new districts almost wherever they see fit, with a freedom they would not have enjoyed only 10 years ago, owing to a pair of controversial supreme court rulings.“The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute today than it has ever been because of the combination of an abandonment of oversight by the courts and the Department of Justice, combined with new supercomputing powers,” said Josh Silver, director of Represent.us. The non-partisan group issued a report this month warning that dozens of states “have an extreme or high threat of having their election districts rigged for the next decade”.“Frankly,” Silver said, “what we’re seeing around gerrymandering by the authoritarian wing of the Republican party is part of the Putin-style managed democracy they are promoting – that combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering.”Rules for who controls redistricting vary from state to state. The process can involve state legislatures acting alone, governors or independent commissions. Maps are meant to stand for 10 years, although they are subject to legal challenges that can result in their being thrown out.The new Republican gerrymandering efforts are expected to focus on urban areas in southern states that are home to a disproportionate number of voters of color – meaning those voters are more likely to be disenfranchised.In Texas, mapmakers could try to add districts to the growing population centers of Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth without increasing representation of the minority and Democratic voters who account for that growth. In Florida they might add Republican voters to a growing Democratic district north of Orlando. In North Carolina, where the Democratic governor is shut out of the process, Republican mapmakers might seek to add a district in the Democratic-leaning Research Triangle, in a way that elects more Republicans.Republicans could also seek to repay voters of colors in Atlanta who boosted Biden to victory and drove the defeat of two Republican senators in special elections in Georgia in January, by cracking and packing those voters into new districts.“Republicans could net pick up one seat by rearranging the lines around Black people and other Democrats in the Atlanta area,” Wang said.Racial gerrymandering – or using race as the central criterion for drawing district lines, as opposed to party identification or some other signifier – remains vulnerable to federal court challenges, unlike gerrymandering along partisan lines, which was declared “beyond the reach of the federal courts” by the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, in 2019.A separate decision by Roberts’s court, in Shelby County v Holder from 2013, is seen as adding to the likelihood of gerrymandering. The ruling released counties with acute histories of racial discrimination against voters from federal oversight imposed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That means that in 2021, some southern legislators will draw district boundaries without such oversight for the first time in 50 years.‘Much more national awareness’Potential legal challenges aside, the success of Republican mapmakers is not a given. Turnout in future elections – higher or lower – could foil expectations based on historic patterns. The partisan mix of voters in any district can change unpredictably. And stretching a map to wring out an extra seat could leave incumbents vulnerable.Public awareness of such anti-democratic efforts has grown, said Wang, since a 2010 Republican effort called Redmap harvested dozens of “extra” seats.“There’s much more national awareness of gerrymandering,” Wang said. “And citizen groups are now much more in the mix than they were 10 years ago.”Silver said the gerrymandering threat has redoubled the urgency of advancing voting rights legislation that passed the US House but has stalled in the Senate.“This is why we have to pass the For the People Act, which is federal legislation that with one pen stroke by the president would create independent commissions in all 50 states, end voter suppression and restore representative democracy in the United States,” he said.“We have to stop gerrymandering, or there will be no representative democracy in America, period – only preordained and symbolic election results.” More

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      Republican ‘attacks’ on corporations over voting rights bills are a hypocritical sham | Robert Reich

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      For four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits.The deal has proven beneficial to both sides, although not to the American public. Campaign spending has soared while corporate taxes have shriveled.In the 1950s, corporations accounted for about 40% of federal revenue. Today, they contribute a meager 7%. Last year, more than 50 of the largest US companies paid no federal income taxes at all. Many haven’t paid taxes for years.Both parties have been in on this deal although the GOP has been the bigger player. Yet since Donald Trump issued his big lie about the fraudulence of the 2020 election, corporate America has had a few qualms about the GOP.After the storming of the Capitol, dozens of giant corporations said they would no longer donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to the certification of Biden electors on the basis of the big lie.Then came the GOP’s wave of restrictive state voting laws, premised on the same big lie. Georgia’s are among the most egregious. The chief executive of Coca-Cola, headquartered in the peach tree state, calls those laws “wrong” and “a step backward”. The chief executive of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer, says they’re “unacceptable”. Major League Baseball decided to take its annual All-Star Game away from the home of the Atlanta Braves.The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much aliveThese criticisms have unleashed a rare firestorm of anti-corporate Republican indignation. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, warns corporations of unspecified “serious consequences” for speaking out. Republicans are moving to revoke MLB’s antitrust status. Georgia Republicans threaten to punish Delta by repealing a state tax credit for jet fuel.“Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations and antitrust?” asks the Florida senator Marco Rubio.Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton gave when asked why he robbed banks: that’s where the money is.McConnell told reporters corporations should “stay out of politics” but then qualified his remark: “I’m not talking about political contributions.” Of course not. Republicans have long championed “corporate speech” when it comes in the form of campaign cash – just not as criticism.Talk about hypocrisy. McConnell was the top recipient of corporate money in the 2020 election cycle and has a long history of battling attempts to limit it. In 2010, he hailed the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate political donations, on the dubious grounds that corporations are “people” under the first amendment to the constitution.“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” McConnell said at the time. Hint: he wasn’t referring to poor Black people.It’s hypocrisy squared. The growing tsunami of corporate campaign money suppresses votes indirectly by drowning out all other voices. Republicans are in the grotesque position of calling on corporations to continue bribing politicians as long as they don’t criticize Republicans for suppressing votes directly.The hypocrisy flows in the other direction as well. The Delta chief criticized the GOP’s voter suppression in Georgia but the company continues to bankroll Republicans. Its Pac contributed $1,725,956 in the 2020 election, more than $1m of which went to federal candidates, mostly Republicans. Oh, and Delta hasn’t paid federal taxes for years.Don’t let the spat fool you. The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much alive.Which is why, despite record-low corporate taxes, congressional Republicans are feigning outrage at Joe Biden’s plan to have corporations pay for his $2tn infrastructure proposal. Biden isn’t even seeking to raise the corporate tax rate as high as it was before the Trump tax cut, yet not a single Republicans will support it.A few Democrats, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, don’t want to raise corporate taxes as high as Biden does either. Yet almost two-thirds of Americans support the idea.The basic deal between American corporations and American politicians has been a terrible deal for America. Which is why a piece of legislation entitled the For the People Act, passed by the House and co-sponsored in the Senate by every Democratic senator except Manchin, is so important. It would both stop states from suppressing votes and also move the country toward public financing of elections, thereby reducing politicians’ dependence on corporate cash.Corporations can and should bankroll much of what America needs. But they won’t, as long as corporations keep bankrolling American politicians. More

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      Georgia governor claims MLB All-Star voting rights move hurts Black voters

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      The Republican governor of Georgia stepped up his attack on Major League Baseball on Saturday, over its decision to pull its All-Star Game from the state in response to a new voting law.“It’s minority-owned businesses that have been hit harder than most because of an invisible virus, by no fault of their own,” Brian Kemp said. “And these are the same minority businesses that are now being impacted by another decision that is by no fault of their own.”The Fox News host Sean Hannity thundered this week that MLB “has now cost the people of Georgia almost $100m in revenue”.“Every person in Georgia should be furious,” he added.But experts dispute that losing the All-Star game will have so heavy an impact.Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, told the Guardian this week: “There is some loss, so it’s not zero, but it’s a whole lot closer to zero than the $100m number Atlanta was throwing around.”On Saturday Kemp spoke alongside the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, also a Republican, at a seafood restaurant miles from the stadium in the Atlanta suburbs where the game would have been held. He said he didn’t think the business was minority-owned.The game will now be played in Denver. Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, has claimed the city will receive an economic boost of $190m.Matheson said: “There’s no real reason that you should believe economic impact numbers that are commissioned by people who are made to look good by big economic impact numbers.”Kemp noted that Denver has a much smaller percentage of African Americans than Atlanta.Critics say the Georgia voting law will disproportionately affect communities of color. Aklima Khondoker, state director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said Kemp’s news conference was an attempt to deflect from that as he gears up to try to win a second term.“He’s pivoting away from all of the malicious things that we understand that this bill represents to people of color in Georgia,” she said.Elsewhere in the state, about two dozen protesters turned out near Augusta National as the Masters golf championship continued, holding signs that said “Let Us Vote” and “Protect Georgia Voting Rights”.The MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, has said he made the decision to move the All-Star game after discussions with players and the Players Alliance, an organization of Black players formed after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, and that the league opposed restrictions to the ballot box.On Saturday an MLB spokesman said the league had no immediate additional comment.Several groups have filed lawsuits over the Georgia voting measure, which includes strict identification requirements for voting by mail. It expands weekend early voting but limits the use of ballot drop boxes, makes it a crime to hand out food or water to voters waiting in line and gives the state election board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to replace local officials.That has led to concerns the Republican-controlled board could exert more influence over elections, including the certification of county results.The rewrite of Georgia’s election rules – signed by Kemp last month – follows Donald Trump’s repeated lies about electoral fraud after his loss to Joe Biden. The Democratic candidate won Georgia, before two Democrats won Senate runoffs there in January, tipping control of the chamber.Democrats have assailed the Georgia law as an attempt to suppress Black and Latino votes, with Biden calling it “Jim Crow in the 21st century”. Carr and Kemp blasted that comparison.“This made-up narrative that this bill takes us back to Jim Crow – an era when human beings were being killed and who were truly prevented from casting their vote – is preposterous,” Carr said. “It is irresponsible, and it’s fundamentally wrong.” More

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      Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw ‘virtually blind’ after eye surgery

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      The Texas Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Saturday that he had undergone eye surgery and would be “effectively blind” for a month.Crenshaw, 37, is a veteran of the elite navy Seals force. He lost his right eye and sustained damage to his left eye in Afghanistan in 2012, when a bomb exploded.“The blast from 2012 caused a cataract, excessive tissue damage, and extensive damage to my retina,” Crenshaw said in a statement. “It was always a possibility that the effects of the damage to my retina would resurface, and it appears that is exactly what has happened.”Crenshaw said the retina to his left eye was found to be detaching after he went to an ophthalmologist because of dark, blurry vision, and that he underwent surgery on Friday.“The surgery went well, but I will be effectively blind for about a month,” according to Crenshaw.Crenshaw, a staunch conservative who has stoked controversy on the national stage, was re-elected in November representing Texas’ 2nd district, in the Houston area. More

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      ‘Truth will prevail’: Matt Gaetz takes break from scandal to speak at Trump club

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      The Florida congressman Matt Gaetz insisted on Friday “the truth will prevail” over allegations of sex trafficking and illegal drug use which have pitched him into the centre of a congressional scandal.Reaching for Trumpian rhetoric at the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, the Republican told an event organised by Women for America First: “I know this. Firebrands don’t retreat, especially when the battle for the soul of our country calls.”Women for America First helped stage a rally near the White House on 6 January where Donald Trump told supporters to fight to overturn his election defeat. A crowd attacked and breached the US Capitol. Five people died, including a police officer.Gaetz supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the election and offered to resign from Congress and defend the former president in his subsequent impeachment. The offer was not taken up and Trump was acquitted.The New York Times reported this week that in the final weeks of the Trump administration, Gaetz sought a blanket pre-emptive pardon. It was not forthcoming.Late last month, Gaetz floated retiring from Congress after a third term and entering conservative TV. That prospect seems to have receded.Multiple reports have linked the 38-year-old to an ally indicted on a federal sex trafficking charge and for other offences. Gaetz is reportedly being investigated for paying women for sex, for possibly trafficking a 17-year-old girl and for sharing nude images of women with colleagues in the US House. His ally, former tax collector Joel Greenberg, is reported to be nearing a deal with prosecutors.On Friday, the House ethics committee said it was opening an investigation. In a statement, the committee said it was aware of allegations Gaetz may have engaged in “sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.”Gaetz denies all allegations and has claimed he is the victim of attempted extortion. He has hired lawyers who have defended Trump and Eric Schneiderman, a New York state attorney general who stepped down amid allegations of violence towards women.Speaking to a small crowd on Friday, Gaetz said: “Big government, big tech, big business, big media – they’d all breathe a sigh of relief if I were no longer in the Congress fighting for you.”That was Republican boilerplate but most Republicans, including Trump, have stayed silent on the affair. Gaetz has attacked Republicans who do not support Trump. On Thursday Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois representative who voted to impeach the former president, called for Gaetz to resign.In Florida, Gaetz said the media “lie about me because I tell the truth about them, and I’m not gonna stop. So when you see the leaks and the lies and the falsehoods and the smears, when you see the anonymous sources and insiders forecasting my demise, know this. They aren’t really coming for me. They’re coming for you. I’m just in the way.”He also said he would not “be intimidated by a lying media … The truth will prevail.”The New York Times said: “A number of current and former congressional officials have described … occasions when Mr Gaetz smelled of marijuana on the House floor or shared videos and images of women with whom he claimed to be having sex.” More

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      On the House review: John Boehner’s lament for pre-Trump Republicans

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      In October 2015, John Boehner abruptly vacated the speaker’s chair. Confronted by a hyper-caffeinated Freedom Caucus, the Ohio congressman announced his retirement singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. He walked before they made him run.By all indications, Boehner is happier on the outside – advising high-priced clients, pushing marijuana liberalization. The distance between Boehner’s unfiltered Camel cigarettes and Kona Gold is shorter than the chasm between the Republicans and Coca-Cola.Against the backdrop of the Trump-induced insurrection of 6 January, On the House delivers a merlot-hued indictment of Republican excesses and heaps praise on those who play the game with aplomb – regardless of party.Nancy Pelosi gets props for “gutting” the late John Dingell, a senior midwest Democrat, like a “halibut she found floating around San Francisco Bay”. Boehner posits that Pelosi may be the most powerful speaker ever.Likewise, Mitch McConnell receives a shoutout even after dressing down the author, saying: “I’ll never presume to know more about the House than you do. And trust me, you’ll never know as much about the Senate as I do.” Boehner offers no pushback.Boehner expresses contempt for Senator Ted Cruz and Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman who became Donald Trump’s final chief of staff. As for Flyin’ Ted, Boehner is unsparing: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourselfNot surprisingly, Boehner finds the Cruz-led government shutdown of 2013 to have been senseless. On the other hand, the GOP recaptured the Senate a year later. Regardless, one audio clip of Boehner reading On the House concludes: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”As for Meadows, Boehner campaigned for him, only for Meadows to oppose Boehner’s election as speaker, then offer a surprising, moist-eyed apology.“I wondered what his elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears,” Boehner writes. “But that wasn’t my problem.”On the House also serves bits of vaguely remembered history, like Boehner’s attempt to make the late justice Antonin Scalia Bob Dole’s Republican running mate against Bill Clinton in 1996. Boehner met with Scalia. Scalia was open to the idea but Dole picked Jack Kemp, a former quarterback, congressman and cabinet officer. The senator from Kansas did Scalia a favor. Dole lost badly.More puzzling is Boehner’s continued embrace of Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president and a former Wyoming congressman. In Boehner’s words, Cheney was a “phenomenal partner” for the younger Bush and the two made a “great team”. He makes no mention of Cheney’s role in the run-up to the Iraq war, though he does detail his own deliberations on voting to authorize the Gulf war under Bush Sr.By the time George W’s time in the White House was done, his relationship with Cheney had grown distant and strained. The marriage of convenience reached its end. Perhaps Boehner knows something Cheney’s old boss doesn’t.On the House offers a clearer assessment of Newt Gingrich’s skillset and foibles. Like Boehner, Gingrich was speaker. He was also responsible for ending decades of Democratic control of the House. But Boehner crystalizes Gingrich’s inability to help run a co-equal branch of government. Politics isn’t always tethered to bomb-throwing. Governing is about the quotidian. Gingrich couldn’t be bothered.The book acknowledges the visceral hostility of the Republican base toward Barack Obama. After Boehner announced that he believed that Obama was born in the US, he caught a blizzard of grief. The GOP’s embrace of fringe theories remains.Boehner describes his attempts to reach compromises with Obama on “fiscal issues” and immigration. On the former, he acknowledges Obama’s efforts. On the latter, he contends that Obama would “phone it in” and “poison the well” for the sake of partisan advantage.Based upon the 2016 election, Obama bet wrong. Open borders are a losing proposition. On the other hand, so is opposing the Affordable Care Act amid an ongoing pandemic and the aftermath of the great recession. Specifically, Boehner claims credit for dismantling Obamacare “bit by bit”, pointing to the rollback of the medical device tax. Incredibly, he claims “there really isn’t much of Obamacare left.”Really? Boehner definitely gets this wrong.The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of uninsured non-elderly Americans dropped from more than 46.5 million in 2010 to under 29 million in 2019. Also, about 9 million purchase subsidized health insurance with federal premium assistance.If the theatrics of the Trump administration and the Republican challenge pending before the supreme court teach us anything, it is that Obamacare is very much alive. When it comes to government spending, the Republican donor and voting bases don’t necessarily sing from the same hymnal.Like most people, Boehner’s relationship with Trump ended worse than it began. Early on, Trump reached out. Less so with the passing of time. Boehner chalked that up to Trump getting comfortable in his job but also surmises: “He just got tired of me advising him to shut up.”Days after the insurrection but before the Biden inauguration, Boehner said Trump should consider resigning. The 45th president had “abused the loyalty of the people who voted for him” and incited a riot.Boehner admits that he was unprepared for the aftermath of Trump’s defeat. The insurrection “should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity”. It wasn’t. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the congresswoman from QAnon, has amassed a $3.2m re-election war chest. “The legislative terrorism” Boehner had witnessed helped birth “actual terrorism”.Boehner is confident about Americans, “the most versatile people God put on earth”. As for the survival of the American conservative movement, he is less optimistic. More

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      Biden orders commission to study supreme court expansion and reform

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      Joe Biden on Friday ordered a study of adding seats to the supreme court, creating a bipartisan 36-member commission that will spend the next six months examining the politically incendiary issues of expanding the court and instituting term limits for its justices.The executive order fulfills a campaign promise to examine court reform, including expanding the number of justices or setting term-limits, amid growing calls from progressive activists to realign the supreme court after its composition tilted sharply to the right during Donald Trump’s presidency. Biden has not said whether he supports expanding the court, also known as “court packing”.Trump appointed three justices to the high court. One was a seat that Republicans had blocked Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, from filling. Despite arguing in 2016 that the seat should be filled by winner of the year’s presidential election, Republicans rushed to fill the supreme court seat vacated by death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg just weeks before the 2020 election.The result was one of the most ideologically conservative courts in modern times.Biden’s executive order directs the commission to complete its report within 180 days of its first meeting. But it was not charged with making a recommendation under the White House order that created it.The panel is composed of a “bipartisan group of experts” that includes constitutional and legal scholars; former federal judges; practitioners who have appeared before the court as well as reform advocates.The commission co-chairs are Bob Bauer, professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University School of Law and a former White House counsel for Obama, as well as the Yale Law School professor Cristina Rodriguez, former deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel at the US Department of Justice under Obama.The commission will hold public meetings appraising the “merits and legality of particular reform proposals”, according to the White House.The announcement comes after the supreme court justice Stephen Breyer warned this week that efforts to expand the court could erode public “trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics”.The remarks by Breyer, 82, the court’s oldest justice and a member of its minority liberal bloc, prompted calls for his resignation from reform advocates while Democrats still control the Senate and the confirmation process. Demand Justice, a progressive group focused on the supreme court, started an online petition calling for his retirement.“Tell Justice Breyer: put the country first. Don’t risk your legacy to an uncertain political future. Retire now,” the petition states.If an opening should arise, Biden has promised to appoint the nation’s first ever Black female justice.On Friday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters that Biden was not pushing for Breyer to retire.“He believes that’s a decision Justice Breyer will make when he decides it’s time to no longer serve on the supreme court,” she said.During his presidential campaign, Biden repeatedly sidestepped questions on expanding the court. A former chair of the Senate judiciary committee, Biden has asserted that the system of judicial nominations is “getting out of whack”, but has not said if he supports adding seats or making other changes to the current system of lifetime appointments, such as imposing term limits.The size of the court has been set at nine members since just after the civil war. Any effort to alter it would be explosive, particularly at a moment when Congress is nearly evenly divided. Changing the number of justices would require congressional approval.“With five justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, it’s crucial that we consider every option for wresting back political control of the supreme court,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group.“President Biden’s commission demonstrates a strong commitment to studying this situation and taking action.”Associated Press contributed to this report More