One nation divisible?

Jamelle Bouie points out that the only rational response to the GOP attempt to eliminate the Democratic party as a viable political entity to the extent possible is to do the same to the Republican party:

“For too long, Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee wrote on X last week. “The General Assembly’s constitutional redrawing of Federal Districts affirms a foundational truth: Tennessee must be represented by Tennesseans, not socialist democrats.” . . .

It is not, to look back to Ogles’s comments, that Tennessee voters are represented in the House and many of them happen to be Republicans, but that Tennessee is Republican. The delegation must match the supposed general will of the state, even if large parts of the voting public back the other side.

Democrats may not believe the same of the states they lead, but they have followed suit, regardless. To do otherwise would be to put themselves at the mercy of the Republican Party as it uses extreme partisan gerrymandering to give itself a durable structural advantage in the House of Representatives. As my news-side colleague Nate Cohn notes, Republicans could eventually give themselves a roughly four-percentage-point advantage in the House, meaning that Democrats would need to win the national House popular vote by at least four points to win a bare majority in the chamber.

The effect of this arms race is a House that looks something like the Electoral College. If you can win control of a state capitol, no matter how narrow the victory or how slim the majority, then you can immediately redraw congressional and state legislative maps to lock your party in power. Republicans will lose representation in blue states, Democrats in red ones. It is true that, in theory, a Republican lawmaker could represent a majority-Democratic city just fine. In practice, not so much; rigid partisanship does not usually select for the kind of person who might try to represent the entire community.

A system in which political parties can rewrite the rules to keep themselves in power indefinitely — a system in which, barring a tsunami of opposition, they cannot lose — is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. But that is where the United States is headed, if it’s not already there, thanks in large part to Roberts and his majority, which has enabled the worst tendencies of their co-partisans in the Republican Party. For his part, Roberts sees his work as fundamentally apolitical. “We’re not simply part of the political process, and there’s a reason for that, and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate,” he said last week. . . .

It is also important to consider the way this state of affairs might heighten the sense that red states and blue states are fundamentally different — separate countries, really — forced together in a crumbling marriage.

The Democrats do seem to be waking, if only slowly, from their dogmatic slumbers about bipartisanship and comity, but whether they will do so quickly and forcefully enough remains to be seen.

I’m troubled by the memory of Joe Biden’s handling of Donald Trump’s literal return to the White House. This is not really a criticism of Biden per se as it is of the entire mentality of establishment Democrats as little as 16 months ago, despite everything that had already happened. Nevertheless:

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government after an election in which seven million more Americans voted for his opponent than for him. He then spent the next four years loudly declaiming that the current administration was illegitimate, the product of what he insisted continually and continues to insist today was a stolen election. He absolutely should have been barred from running for president again by a proper interpretation of the 14th amendment, which categorically bars seditionists from holding federal office.

After all this, the reaction of the Democratic party’s leadership, from Biden on down, was to pretend that none of that had actually happened (Recall that Trump refused to even be in Washington when Biden was inaugurated).

This is or hopefully was completely asymmetrical warfare. It’s a big part of the reason. for why we’re in the mess we’re in today. It’s a big part of the reason why two thirds of the votes on the Supreme Court are reliably for a white nationalist authoritarianism that insists America is a “Christian nation.”

To what extent has the Democratic party leadership awoken, after sixteen months of Trump II, to what was obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear sixteen months ago, and indeed long before then? We are going to find out.