Tag: gerrymandering

Obama caught insisting gerrymandering is wrong when Republicans do it, but it’s ‘democracy’ when Dems take advantage

It’s unfair, it’s wrong, it’s “gerrymandering” when Republicans do it.

But it’s “democracy” when the perpetrators are Democrats.

That odd bit of hypocrisy is courtesy Barack Obama, who this week joined in an orchestrated campaign by Democrats to condemn a redistricting proposal in Texas.

It would, if fact, give GOP members a higher probability of winning some seats, analysts have said.

Obama wrote, “We can’t lose focus on what matters – right now, Republicans in Texas are trying to gerrymander district lines to unfairly win five seats in next year’s midterm elections. This is a power grab that undermines our democracy.”

However, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pointed out the two different definitions of redistricting, or gerrymandering, Democrats, including Obama, trot out.

Democrats “only call it ‘gerrymandering’ when it’s in a Republican state,” he explained. “When it happens in Illinois, they call it ‘democracy.’”

A report on the politicking by Obama, in Twitchy, cited a 2012 article in the New Yorker in which Obama confessed that his own national political career “was launched with the assistance of gerrymandering that Barack had a personal hand in helping with.”

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Redistricting Isn’t A ‘Threat To Democracy,’ But These 4 Dem Vote-Rigging Tactics Are

For a party that never stops lecturing Americans about “defending democracy,” Democrats sure spend a lot of time trying to undermine its outcomes. Whether it’s weaponizing the legal system to sideline their opponents, overturning voter-approved ID laws, or trying to scrap the Electoral College entirely, Democrats treat every election loss as a problem to be solved — by changing the rules. But let Republican voters in Texas elect lawmakers who — in compliance with a recent DOJ directive — draw new district maps and Democrats clutch their pearls. But it’s not redistricting that threatens “democracy” (in actuality, our constitutional republic), it’s Democrats’ never-ending crusade to manipulate the election rules until they guarantee permanent power.

Fifty-seven Texas House Democrats abandoned the state on Sunday and headed to Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts to protest a new redistricting proposal. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to vote on new maps that would fall in line with both a recent Department of Justice finding that four districts were unlawfully gerrymandered on racial grounds as well as a Fifth Circuit Court ruling.

Democrats decided to flee the state to avoid voting on the maps.

“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said in a statement on Sunday. “We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent.”

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said “everything” is on “the table” to “fight back,” and that this is “about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said “this is what fighting for our democracy looks like.” Newsom called it a “five-alarm fire for democracy in the United States of America.”

But for all the screeching the left does about “democracy,” they sure have had no problem upending it when it delivers outcomes they don’t like.

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Texas Dems ripped for ‘cartoonishly dumb’ strategy to flee to blue state notorious for gerrymandering

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is rolling out the red carpet for Democratic state lawmakers who fled Texas as they push back against a move by President Donald Trump to add five Republican-controlled congressional seats in their state.

“I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that they’re welcome here, that they have the ability to stay as long as they need to and want to,” Pritzker, a Democrat, said on Sunday evening as the lawmakers arrived in Illinois.

The lawmakers fled Texas in order to prevent the quorum needed in the Republican-dominated state legislature to vote on Monday on the new redistricting maps, which passed a committee vote this past weekend along party lines.

The redistricting push in Texas is part of a broader effort by the GOP across the country to keep control of the House and cushion losses elsewhere in the country, as the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats in midterm elections.

But veteran Republican strategist Matt Whitlock argued that the decision by most of the Democratic lawmakers to head to Illinois – with a few others decamping in two other blue states, New York and Massachusetts – was “cartoonishly dumb.”

Tom Bevan, the RealClearPolitics co-founder and president, wrote on X, “The idea that Texas Democrats would flee to Illinois, a state where Dems have abused gerrymandering to comical levels, is perfection.”

“To protest ‘partisan gerrymandering’ Texas Democrats are fleeing to…Illinois,” Republican Missouri Senator Eric Scmitt wrote on X. “You can’t make this up.”

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Kathy Hochul says NY ‘exploring every option to redraw our state congressional lines’ to counteract Texas’ new map

New York Governor Kathy Hochul hosted Texas Democrat lawmakers at the State Capitol on Wednesday, after the lawmakers fled their state in order to deny Republican lawmakers the quorum needed to pass a redistricting proposal. During her speech, Hochul said that she and other New York lawmakers were exploring options to conduct redistricting in the state to counteract redistricting in Texas.

“I have a news flash for Republicans in Texas. This is no longer the Wild West. We’re not going to tolerate our democracy being stolen in a modern-day stagecoach heist by a bunch of law-breaking cowboys. Americans don’t want a system that’s stacked against them. They believe in fairness; it’s fundamental. And I’ll tell you this: they’re done with the chaos, they’re done with the cruelty, and I would say they’re ready to vote Republicans out of power in Washington, certainly in the upcoming 2026 elections.”

“Republicans know this. They’ve seen the polls. They know they’re sliding downhill because Americans are rejecting their policies, so this is why they’re fighting. They know they’ll lose the elections, but to subvert the will of the people, they’re hell bent on rigging the system.”

She said that “rigging the system is un-American,” and Congressional districts “are never redrawn mid-decade,” but “here they are flagrantly breaking the rules so they can hold onto power, and with that power they’re going to inflict even more pain, and they’d rather eliminate fairness in the system than to proceed knowing they’re going to lose. They’d rather silence voters than serve them.”

Hochul later added, “what Texas and Republican states are doing at the direction of Donald Trump, I say, is nothing short of a legal insurrection against our Capital—legal meaning they’re using the legal process, does not mean it’s legal, and it must be stopped. If Republicans are willing to rewrite these rules to give themselves an advantage, then they’re leaving us no choice, we must do the same. There’s a phrase, ‘you have to fight fire with fire.’ That is a true statement of how we’re feeling right now.

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