Why I Keep Harping On Gerrymandering

I’m sure many of you are getting tired of my repeated posts about gerrymandering. Sorry, but it’s important to detail all the various, terrible effects of this practice. (I can promise you that, if and when the Democrats retake control of the federal government and pass the John Lewis Act–which would outlaw gerrymandering among other desperately needed reforms–you will get a reprieve.)

In most of my past posts on the subject, I’ve detailed numerous negative results of the practice. Gerrymandering is the antithesis of democracy, because it allows representatives to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. It suppresses the votes of whichever party is the “loser” in that state. It increases political polarization by turning primaries  into the actual elections, virtually ensuring that Republicans will move to protect their right flank and Democrats their left. Etc.

What those past posts haven’t adequately described, however, is how the practice of partisan redistricting affects the legislative performance of those who owe their positions to the practice.

In one of his daily letters, Robert Hubbell provided an excellent example: he focused on a California Congressman named Kevin Kiley. Kiley represents one of the districts that was targeted by California’s mid-decade redistricting. When that redistricting occurred, he found himself left with a district that is no longer safe for the GOP. And suddenly, Hubbell reports, “he has found the courage to stand up to Trump.” Hubbell also notes that Don Bacon, who represents a competitive Nebraska district, frequently breaks with Trump. As he observes, “Funny how representing a competitive district gives Republicans the backbone to stand up to Trump.”

It isn’t just Washington.

Indianapolis Star columnist James Briggs recently pointed to the effects of gerrymandering on the Indiana legislature, where Republicans from safe districts that they’ve drawn revel in their super-majority and have become increasingly arrogant and entitled. As Briggs notes, the Republican House speaker, Todd Huston, controls what happens at the Indiana Statehouse. “Want to pass a bill? You need Huston. Want to stop a bad bill? Good luck without him.”

And how does an “entitled” Speaker perform?

Briggs reports on a recent, particularly egregious example. During the current session, Democrat Mitch Gore sponsored a bill that would have kept state officials from using taxpayer money to buy luxury cars (think Secretary of State Diego Morales’ GMC Yukon Denali and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s $90,000 SUV.) The bill had passed out of committee unanimously and was ready for a floor vote. 

But Gore had evidently used his social media account to mock the Republicans who’d bought those luxury vehicles with Hoosiers’ tax dollars. As Briggs points out, the posts were well within “fair game” political territory–but Huston was evidently offended. He refused to bring the measure–which had substantial bipartisan support– to the floor for a vote.

So a good bill died.

As Briggs notes, this wasn’t the first time that Huston felt safe in jettisoning a bill for petty partisan reasons. As he writes, “Ideally, the Indiana House speaker would not be that petty. But if he is, that’s his prerogative, and Indiana Democrats need to figure out how to deal with a Statehouse kingpin who can strike them down at any time, for any reason.”

What Briggs (accurately) calls “pettiness” at the state level, is mirrored by what frustrated citizens call spinelessness at the federal level. These behaviors are all enabled by partisan redistricting–by gerrymandering. Representatives who believe they don’t have to worry about the approval or disapproval of their constituents feel free to ignore the common good in favor of  perceived personal political advantage, or just pique. They are less likely to hold town halls, or take the opportunity to find out what the folks they (theoretically) represent really think or want, and far–far–more likely to toe extremist partisan lines.

Good bills get deep-sixed. “Oversight” of corruption is limited to examination of members of the other party (see James Comer and the Epstein files.)

Without competition, good government takes a back seat to “what’s in it for me.” As Independent Indiana insists, competitive elections lead to better leaders and a stronger state.

The current crisis in America isn’t simply the result of electing terrible people. It’s a result of a practice–partisan redistricting aka gerrymandering– that virtually guarantees that terrible people will be the ones deciding who gets elected. You can call that systemic flaw many things, but democratic isn’t one of them.

Comments

Parental Rights– And Wrongs

One of the thorniest issues in American law involves “parental rights.” On the one hand, the law recognizes the primacy and importance of parenthood, acknowledging the right of parents to inculcate (or at least try to inculcate) their children with their own values and religious beliefs.

On the other hand, the law makes exceptions for behaviors that abuse or endanger children. Courts have long intervened when parents have tried to deny their children life-saving medical care in favor of “praying the illness away,” no matter how sincere such religious beliefs may be. Child welfare departments are supposed to intervene in cases where parents are physically or sexually abusing their children.

In other words, the law attempts to balance respect for the rights and prerogatives of parents with the safety and well-being of children.

Which brings us to a case in Texas. (Of course, it would be Texas…)

There’s a case pending before the Supreme Court of Texas that will test the reach of that state’s newly minted “parental rights amendment.” That state-level constitutional amendment, approved by Texas voters in 2025, declares that parents have the “inherent right to exercise care, custody, and control” over their children and to make decisions about their upbringing.” The measure provides that any governmental action found to “interfere” with those parental rights must be subjected to the highest level of judicial scrutiny.

Presumably, this stringent level of analysis is intended to protect parents whose conduct is ambiguous, or those who engage in parenting rooted in foreign cultural backgrounds. The record in this case is neither. As the linked article reports,

The conduct at issue includes food deprivation, beatings with a belt, forced wall sits that lasted hours, and prolonged kneeling on grains of rice—forms of punishment that most people would recognize as physical and emotional abuse. The question now being seriously entertained is whether the Texas Constitution requires courts to presume such treatment is protected parental decision-making unless the state can meet the nearly insurmountable burden of strict scrutiny.

That this argument is being advanced at all is chilling. That it is being supported by prominent right-wing advocacy organizations, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Family Freedom Project, should force a reckoning with what the contemporary “parental rights” movement actually is.

We are all familiar with the rhetoric. Public schools are “undermining” parents. (Usually, by acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist, or by teaching accurate history or science rather than creationism.) As the linked essay notes, the phrase “parental rights” has functioned as a euphemism—it isn’t aimed at parents’ right to raise their children in a manner consistent with their values, but intended to protect a parental right to control what “any child is allowed to know, see, or understand about the world.”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Even as Texas voters were told the amendment would keep the government out of family life, the state was aggressively inserting itself into families whose children needed gender-affirming care, going so far as to label supportive parents as child abusers and to threaten investigations and removals. Parental autonomy, it turned out, was conditional. It applied only when parents’ decisions are aligned with conservative ideology.

Parental rights advocates insist that parents should have a veto over school library books or pronouns, but that same movement is quick to override parents who seek reproductive health care or gender-affirming treatment for their children. Now, the Texas Supreme Court is being asked to rule that extreme corporal punishment and deprivation are protected  parental “rights.” As the essay says, such a finding would be tantamount to ruling “that a child’s right to bodily integrity is subordinate to a parent’s ideological claim of authority, even in the face of clear harm.”

That unthinkable result would confirm the actual intent of the modern parental rights movement. As the author asserts, the movement is not about freedom from government overreach in any principled sense. It is about allowing some parents to “enforce obedience, suppress identity, and inflict harm without meaningful oversight.”

A society that treats children as mere extensions of parental will, rather than as people with rights of their own, abandons one of the most basic functions of law: protecting those who cannot protect themselves. If “parental rights” can be stretched to cover child abuse, then the phrase no longer names a safeguard for families. It names a license—and a warning.

The lower courts had (properly) terminated parental rights in the case. Given those rulings and the copious record of abuse, the willingness to appeal–to argue that abuse is a “parental right”– is a chilling admission.

Comments

The Contrarian Has A List…

Nice Americans–okay, real Americans–increasingly issue anguished commentaries insisting that Trump’s America “isn’t who we are.” Much as I would like to believe that, it is clearly untrue (or at least an exaggeration). “We” rather obviously come in wildly different varieties–the racist MAGA cult, and the rest of us. Survey research suggests that some 37% of us are either MAGA or MAGA-adjacent, a far larger cohort than I ever imagined.

So who are the MAGA cultists who want to jettison the limits of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and trash the aspirations of the Declaration?

As regular readers know, I attribute MAGA’s support for Trump and the fascism of his administration to racism–to the resentments of White folks (mostly but not exclusively men) triggered by changes in the social order. White “Christian” nationalists and the “intellectuals” at places like the Heritage Foundation are reacting to a perceived assault on their status by those they insist are “lower”–Black and Brown folks, women, non-Christians. (Their fulminations always remind me of that song from Cabaret, where the emerging Nazis sing “The future belongs to us.”)

It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the rancid bigotries that motivate MAGA and Trump. In the wake of Trump’s most recent exercise–portraying the Obamas as apes–even the pathetic Republicans in Congress (who have assiduously avoided reacting to his multiple prior offenses) have been trying to distance themselves.

Can we spell “too little, too late”?

A recent post by Jen Rubin in The Contrarian addressed the numerous racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic actions of an administration that is increasingly and obviously fascist. Rubin blamed the mainstream press for failing to point out Trump’s racism–ignoring the racism of his accusations about Obama’s birth certificate, and his ride down the golden escalator and launching his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.

As Rubin points out, there had been ample evidence of Trump’s abject bigotry for decades, including his insistence that the (exonerated) Central Park 5 should get the death penalty, and his “nonstop racist commentary about immigrants.”

His attack on DEI is rooted in this same racism, although the legacy media and timid politicians dare not call it that for fear of being labeled “woke.” Blaming the 2025 D.C. plane crash on DEI; taking down a tribute to Jackie Robinson; replacing MLK, Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday with his own at our National Parks; trying to write slavery out of the Smithsonian; and arresting Black journalists…are plainly efforts to demean and erase African Americans from our history.

Rubin quotes the ACLU’s description of the anti-DEI ideologues who have ferociously attacked inclusion efforts in and out of government. “These ideologues have weaponized the term ‘DEI’ to mean ideas and policies that address systemic racism and sexism.” These attacks are part of “a larger effort by right-wing foundations, think tanks, and political operatives to dismantle civil rights gains made in recent decades.”

Trump has turned the top ranks of civilian and military personnel into a virtually all-white boys club. He has restored the names of Southern slaveholders to military bases; while refusing to appoint a single Black woman to the federal bench in his second term. He has repeatedly hired neo-Nazis and elevated White Nationalist sympathizers. He selected primarily Black and Muslim countries to enforce restrictions and provoke adverse treatment on visas.

Furthermore, his constant insults directed at women — evidenced by the E.J. Carroll sexual assault verdict, or his ongoing mistreatment of female reporters — leave no doubt about his misogynistic venom. His compulsive dehumanization of immigrants and resorting to enabling White supremacists have been at the heart of his presidency. It is hard to conjure what more proof of deep-seated racism and misogyny would be sufficient to persuade those who feign inability to know Trump’s real motives.

Rubin is entirely correct when she says that the corporate/legacy media could–and should– examine the racist views of Trump’s voters and explain how his policies, however rationalized, are racist. They could point out that MAGA’s efforts to destroy the Voting Rights Act is intended to return America to Jim Crow politics, that his mass deportation crusade (and limits to immigration from “shithole” countries) is an effort to make America White again.  They could refuse to let feckless Republicans “scamper away” without addressing Trump’s most recent racist comment. And they could stop “pretending there are benign reasons for policies and personnel decisions that (wow!) just so happen to bolster white men at the expense of all those easily classified as others.”

MAGA and Trump are not who most Americans are–but most Germans weren’t initially Nazis, either. The resistance understands that we are currently choosing who we are–and how history will remember us.

Comments

Monetizing Everything

Could Indiana’s legislature be any more arrogant, or any more oblivious to what constitutes value? (That was a rhetorical question, since the correct answer is obviously “no.”)

The Indianapolis Star recently reported on yet another example in the General Assembly’s continuing war on education. The report described Senate Bill 199–which recently passed the Senate– as a “Frankenstein of technical education-related changes.” (The bill had originally included restrictions on social media access for minors, but that measure was stripped by the bill’s author on the Senate floor.)

It is possible that many of the legislators who voted for SB 199 were unaware of a single line, “buried in the middle of the bill and absent from the bill digest,” that would eliminate any public college degree if graduates holding that degree are found to earn less than those with only a high school diploma. As the Star noted, that provision is “yet another blow for the state’s higher education institutions less than a year after last-minute language from last legislative session led colleges to cut more than a fifth of the state’s degrees because of low enrollment.”

The bill ties the definition of a “low earning outcome program” to a section of federal law amended by President Donald Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That bill already restricts federal student loans from going toward such degrees, but the Indiana bill would go further by putting the degree programs themselves on the chopping block.

It’s unclear what programs could fall into such a category. Programs where the median earnings of its cohort surpassed the median earnings of Hoosiers between 24 and 35 with only a high school diploma — around $33,500 — would be unaffected by the bill.

If a university wants to keep a low earning degree program, it can appeal to the higher education commission. Without commission approval, the university would be mandated to eliminate the program.

According to the report, the bill still needs to pass the House and be signed by the governor to become law. Given the makeup of the House, and the cluelessness of the Governor, not to mention the fact that the bill contains numerous other–arguably reasonable–provisions, I don’t hold out much hope for a last-minute reprieve.

Where do I start with a critique of this ridiculous provision?

For one thing, it is yet another display of what might be called the legislature’s “overlord complex”–the evident belief that, by virtue of winning a (gerrymandered) seat in Indiana’s General Assembly, legislators have been endowed with the right to make all manner of decisions: controlling (i.e. overruling) municipal governments, school corporations, medical personnel…Our overlords deem themselves capable of deciding a wide range of issues that are arguably none of their concern–from whether local governments can ban plastic bags or puppy mills to whether doctors and medical practitioners can determine the medical necessity of abortions or provide gender care.

Our overlords’ zeal to redefine education as job training, and place a fiscal value on everything, is also burdensome and expensive. Some state functionary will be tasked (and paid) to assess the earnings of students who’ve chosen these “low value” degrees. Is that really where citizens want their tax dollars spent?

What happens when inevitable changes in the job market depress the earnings of people with degrees that previously escaped the ax?

And what do we tell the student who wants to major in art or philosophy or a similar subject–a student whose intellectual interests trump her concerns about earning potential? (For that matter, how do we factor in MAGA’s new “tradwife” focus–which, if it took off, would see female graduates taking “home ec” and then staying home with multiple children rather than earning anything at all?)

What really, really makes me livid, however, isn’t the legislature’s obvious inability to recognize the practical problems and jurisdictional breaches such measures represent. It is the constant equation of education with job training, legislators’ evident inability to recognize the value of intellectual inquiry.

A few days ago, I quoted passages from David Brooks’ final column for the New York Times. In that essay, he noted that the road to Trump and MAGA had been paved by the generations of students and their parents who fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, “driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.”

Indiana’s legislature has been drinking that Kool-Aid for years. It’s one reason Indiana is often said to be in competition to be the new Mississippi….

Comments

Preaching To The Choir

One of the regular writers who posts at Lincoln Square is a political science professor named Kristoffer Ealy. I’ve cited him before, because I have found his posts particularly perceptive, and a recent one especially so. 

The post is lengthy, and primarily focuses on the issue of celebrity endorsements–when they help and when they don’t. (As Ealy says, he’s done his research–not “research” like the MAGA vaccine “experts” “who’ve watched three YouTube videos, misread a Facebook meme, and now think they’re qualified to run the FDA.”) If that is a subject that interests you, his observations are well worth clicking through and reading.

But along with the discourse on proper deployment of celebrities and their endorsements, one observation really caught my attention and made me feel much better about this daily blog, which–as I have long understood–is an exercise in “preaching to the choir.” (Aside from a couple of intermittent trolls, virtually everyone who visits here is anti-MAGA and horrified by Trump. I haven’t changed anyone’s mind; I may at best have amplified the reasons for our common angst and anger.)

Ely writes:

My friend Reecie Colbert’s line belongs in marble: don’t underestimate preaching to the choir, because the choir sings.

People throw around “preaching to the choir” like it’s meaningless, like the only thing that matters is converting some mythical swing voter who spends weekends reading white papers and sipping tea. That is not how elections are won. Elections are won by the people who already agree with you actually showing up. The choir is not dead weight. The choir is infrastructure. The choir is the group chat that becomes a phone bank. The choir is the “did you vote yet?” text at 7:12 p.m. The choir is the auntie who makes sure everyone in the family is registered. The choir is the volunteer who knocks doors even when it’s hot and everybody’s mad and the vibes are rancid. The choir is the person who drives someone to the polls. The choir is the person curing ballots and checking signatures and doing the unglamorous democracy maintenance that never trends. (Emphasis mine…for obvious reasons.)

Ealy is absolutely correct to say that the most important job of a campaign is to energize the choir and increase its volume–to turn passive agreement into action. And as he points out, the real problem in politics is not persuasion, but behavioral follow-through.

People say they support you and then they don’t vote. They say they care and then they don’t register. They say they’re outraged and then they don’t show up because it’s raining. The gap between attitude and behavior is where elections go to die.

This blog speaks to commenters –and the “lurkers” I frequently encounter– about matters upon which we largely agree.

I have assumed that my writing and posting here is an extension of my twenty-one years in a university classroom: to explain, to interpret, to share information that many readers are unlikely to have encountered. Ealy disagrees. He says the purpose of preaching to the choir is to motivate concrete behavior.

Just as pastors and rabbis and Imams exhort their “audiences”/parishioners to act in conformity to their religious tenets, the job of those of us who “preach” politically is to turn opinion into action.

I pondered that insight.

There is research suggesting that people who make a public vow to take a specified action are more likely to follow through. Accordingly, I would be very appreciative if those of you who read these daily rants and agree with the need to reclaim the America we thought we inhabited would make some sort of public commitment–in a comment here, or on Facebook or Bluesky, Threads, or some other place or platform. Confirm your intent to vote, to attend protests, to register or transport voters, send postcards, volunteer for a campaign…whatever it is that you are prepared to do.

A flood of such public promises to turn opinion into action and increase the choir’s singing volume– would both confirm Ealy’s observations and make me feel much less useless….

Comments