The “Confederate states” were all Democrat, and that label has been inapplicable for many decades. Newsom’s lie is exactly why the Supreme Court has properly determined that the 1965 Voting Right Act is fatally anachronistic in 2026. Question for the Governor: why should that map on the right make citizens more “angry” than the the nine blue states that have no GOP reps? Moreover, his own state locked in an equally rigged map to eliminate Republican districts.
Newsom is the last person with standing to protest gerrymandering.
Never mind: PBS News Hour host Amna Nawaz thought Newsom had a valid point, and asked fake conservative pundit David Brooks and former Washington Post dim bulb Ruth Marcus if Republicans are “rigging the system.” Quoting Newsom’s tweet, she said, “He listed states that now have new Republican-leaning maps, pointing out there were no votes here in Tennessee, in Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas. He ends with this: ‘Virginia’s voter-approved maps are thrown out. MAGA has rigged the system.’ David what do you make of that? Are Republicans rigging the system?”
[Point of order: Virginia’s voters approved not the Democrat-rigged map, but a deceptively worded referendum that characterized eliminating all the Republican-leaning districts as “fairness.”]
Proving once again that he has deteriorated into a predictable Axis mouthpiece, Brooks answered, “Well, he’s got a lot of company, I would say. You know, this is a classic case of how democracy decays. People have always been doing gerrymandering. It started getting worse in the 2010s, 2020s, when you had states like North Carolina, Maryland, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. These had totally rigged maps.”
Funny, Brooks didn’t mention all the New England states, Delaware and Hawaii. I guess that was good rigging. And like the CNN hack, Brooks solution was: “And so this is just how democracy ends. And what we need—Ruth, my constitutional lawyer, will tell us how to do this. We need some sort of constitutional amendment, so this is taken out of the democratic process. Like the Federal Reserve, let somebody else do it. Let Jerome Powell come in and redistrict. But we can’t live with this system.”
Marcus, on cue, responded, “This was a terrible week for democracy…we are stuck in this terrible cycle. Nobody should feel good about what Virginia did. Nobody should feel good about what California did. But Texas went first. Texas went first, at the urging of Donald Trump. And we have a situation—and it’s crazy to ask Democratic states, which have tried to get the partisanship out of districting, to just sit on their hands while the system is being rigged by the other side….We have now unleashed this never-ending and constant now, as you say, because we don’t wait for a new census cycle of retribution, and not just retribution, but assault on democracy, because the fundamental point of democracy is that voters get to decide who represents them. No longer.”
Texas went first, its all Trump’s fault, and Democrats have tried to get partisanship out of redisctricting! Ruth you ignorant slut...
Here is another fake narrative being peddled by the Axis and its allies:
Duh. Those Republican states do not require a vote by the public to redistrict. Virginia’s Constitution does, but there is a required process, which Virginia Democrats ignored. Oh yeah? Here’s another contrived complaint, from Bulwark anti-Trump pundit Will Salatan:
It’s right in the decision. Who criticizes a court ruling without reading it? Oh, only almost everybody, but Salatan is supposed to be smarter than the average Facebook knee-jerk. Behold:
We are witnessing the Axis of Unethical Conduct at its devious, hypocritical worst.
Ethics Alarms 
I would nitpick that Hawaii is not gerrymandered. It only has two districts. There is NO map that even comes close to getting a 50/50 split of the districts. The only place that has a Republican tilt is Molokai, with a population around 6K.
I’d definitely include Illinois, Oregon and Washington on the list of states with significant gerrymandering tilt to the democrats even if they do not have 100% democrat districts. The wild shaped districts in all of those states net a significant tilt towards the democrats.
I think there is one possible amendment that could address the gerrymandering. Make a rule about the permissible perimeter of a district cannot exceed a certain multiplier over the square root of the area of the district. It estoppels long fingers that are used to reach groupings of strongholds to tie them together.
Of course this would greatly benefit the Republicans in some cases. Tennessee is a great example. The proposed redistricting turns the state into a bunch of rectangles. The current districts have to have fingers to meet the requirements of ethnic makeup. Tennessee is overall red enough that simple squares makes every district republican.
Matthew B’s proposal does not address the gerrymandering problem at all, as it does not address the math, or simply makes easy assumptions about math. E.g. in a rectangular state which vote 55% D and 45% R where the voters are evenly distributed by party across the state (e.g. no concentration of voters of one party in a rural or metropolitan area) it is easy to create 20 congruent rectangles all with a 55% D and 45% R of voters, resulting in 20 D’s being elected and zero R’s. Let’s assume that all D’s live at one side of the state, and all R’s at the other side of the state, then you can also gerrymander the state in 10 congruent rectangles with 11 D and 9 R representation.
The Wikipedia article below explains all the variations and strategies behind gerrymandering really well. As long as districts exist there is no true way to make the system honest and game proof.
The only real solution is do with districts, and introduce proportional representation, like we do in the Netherlands. Proportional representation means that we have a list of D’s and a list of R’s at state level, and the top of the lists are elected in proportion of D and R votes. In our example that means 11 D’s and 9 R’s regardless of the distribution of the votes by district. Somebody at the tail of the list may be elected via preferential votes, without effecting the proportions of D’s and R’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
One benefit of doing away with districts is that it helps solve the problem of wasted votes. Under the district system a Republican voter in a baby blue district in Massachusetts has no incentive to vote at all, and will simply stay home.
You have your hypotheticals. I’ll challenge you: show me the actual district that is gerrymandered that is a compact shape. I doubt you can come up with more than a very small number. You premise is that states are uniformly, evenly spread peanut-butter of vote margins. Reality is vastly different.
The biggest is the rural-urban divide. Both parties use the same trick. If districts were rectangles, cities would sit with few districts. Instead, they draw districts that thread around the urban areas, running out to very rural areas. For blue states, it takes away rural districts that would be one of the few red districts. For red states, it takes away urban districts that would be blue by overwhelming it with enough rural votes.
I have to credit Christopher Patrick Kohls for the idea. (He goes under the youtube handle “Mr. Reagan”)
To paraphrase: we need to turn the progressive statement “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” back on them. Blacks have long enjoyed a privilege of extra voting power. Not only are whites denied this power, so are hispanics and asians. The striking down of special rules for drawing black districts was a privilege only they got. They’re now experiencing equality, and seeing it as oppression.
The fact that a state has no Democrat, or Republican, representation is not in itself proof of gerrymandering. It’s the contorted, contrived districts (like we have here in Maryland) that are the proof. It was amusing to read the actual argument which prevented even more extreme redistricting in Maryland: “if we make any more changes, a judge might force us to revert to a fair system. Don’t call attention to our current districts!” (The quotation marks are stylistic, not to represent the literal words of the argument).
I don’t quite understand why either party wants to be in charge when the manure hits the spreader.
That snippet from the Virginia Supreme Court opinion is delightful. I’m going to stop avoiding reading opinions. Plus, it makes me feel as if I’m back in law school and doing the only intellectually engaging thing on offer there.
I could have sworn that Virginia was a Confederate state 😉
Is Newsom too ignorant to know that, or too dishonest to include it in his whine? I’d like to say “both”, but don’t think that’s logically possible.
Never mind the absolute unspoken condemnation of Democrat voters that the DNC relies on when saying “the Virginia vote was the will of the people”.
Ok…
So you’re saying your progressive voting base is so depraved it actively wants to deprive its conservative opposition of a voice in government.
Duly noted.
“Tit-for-tat is unethical, except when a short-term response in kind to unethical conduct can force a truce where the conduct is voluntarily eschewed by both sides. This is what the Republicans are doing now, and it is proof of that party’s irresponsible torpor that it didn’t do it years ago.”
Tit-for-tat is a strategy in game theory (a branch in mathematics) with as goal to force the opponent into cooperative behavior. The game is cooperative, as the opening move is to cooperative, and as a rule each player mirrors the move of its opponent. If both players are completely predictable, each player will always cooperate. As tit-for-tat is basically an iterated prisoner dilemma this delivers a relatively good outcome.
The rule is not hard-and-fast, as a player may once in a while defect to test the opponents resolve. An opponent may also choose to have various responses (less forgiving, more forgiving) to defecting. This strategy is similar to bluffing in poker. Nate Silver explains in this book “On the Edge” that being too predictable may put a player at a disadvantage. Again, game theory provides math to suggest the percentage of moves that deviate from the rule of always mirroring its opponents move.
As in the prisoners dilemma the best outcome is when you defect or punish and the opponent does not defect, the worst outcome is that you cooperate or forgive and the opponent defects, the second best outcome is when you both cooperate or forgive.
What the Democrats have been doing for decades is to always defect. The Republican “strategy” has been way too forgiving and predictable, given the strategy of the Democrats. In other words, the Republicans have been playing a stupid and losing game for decades (e.g. in Indiana), and the Democrats know that and abuse the Republicans for the suckers they are.
This is not a matter of ethics in my opinion. Tit-for-tat is neither unethical nor ethical. It is a game strategy based on math. And as with poker you can only be successful if you know how to play the game, and how to read the playing style of your opponent.
Given the by now entrenched style of the Democrats, the Republicans can only win in the long term if they play for keeps with an unforgiving style until the Democrat playing style significantly changes to more cooperative.
Considering the recent violent enmity we’ve seen nationwide, perhaps this is a non-violent method to clearly recognize and act on the realization we no longer have one country anymore and haven’t for quite awhile.
Ethically this could be the least damaging way to more civilly separate and avoid further conflict. Let the partisan statehouses attract and chase away residents based on their political persuasion.
Imagine that Donald Trump ignored the edicts of Judge Boasberg and all the other activist judges, what would James Talarico (candidate for the Senate representing Texas) have to say?
Lefty means business, and they’re bringing in the BIG GUNS:
Harris Says Dems ‘RIGHTFULLY OUTRAGED‘ After Virginia Supreme Court Tosses New Map
PWS