Dreamed Up

The state Republican Party in California has apparently given up on attempting to support Red states in their efforts maintain/expand their majority in the House of Representatives, and are walking away from their opposition to Proposition 50, which would suspend the bipartisan commission in charge of drawing the state's Congressional districts.

California is a Blue state, a Republican message that effectively comes down to, "Yes, hold on your ideals while our compatriots in the rest of the nation use them against you," was doomed from the start. Why anyone bothered with opposing Proposition 50 in the first place is beyond me; it was clearly going to win, especially given that President Trump has been going from one Red state to another, demanding that legislatures alter their district boundaries to shore up Republican chances of retaining control of the House of Representatives. And Republicans as a whole are no better than anyone else about holding onto ideals once they become even slightly expensive; see how their commitments to state's rights have evaporated. What message they were going to use to appear to the political middle was never clear.

The problem of gerrymandering, however, isn't one that lies with politicians; it's one that lies with the public, and it always has. The term "gerrymander," after all, dates back to 1812. Which means for nearly the entire history of the United States, politicians have realized that there were people whose votes they could count on, and who wouldn't protest the efforts that they would undertake to make those votes more important than others. As long as there's no wrong way to get to the right outcome, this is going to be what happens.

And it's worth pointing out that there's little that anyone could have done to prevent this current race to the bottom. Even if Congress had, at some point in the past, passed anti-Gerrymandering legislation at the Federal level, it's unlikely that the the current Republican-controlled Congress would have resisted calls from the President to repeal, or at least suspend it. There's no viable way to protect legislation from legislators, and there never will be.

President Trump's political instincts demand that he always insert himself into conflicts, and as Blue and Red America become more hostile to one another, the President is just as much beholden to that conflict as he's an instigator of it. Whether it was due to his own temperament or the wishes of his voter base, President Trump seems to have gone out of his way to implement policies that would divide the nation into "for" and "against" camps. It's possible that he feels a need to implement the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 in the most divisive way possible. It's clear that he understands that it's alienating people; otherwise, there would be no need for this gerrymandering project in the first place. The California GOP pretending that the state's Democratic voters are unaware that the President plans to use a Congressional majority to punish them was never going to work.