Asked whether two “unconstitutional” acts make a right as Democrats look to counter GOP redistricting efforts, Ken Martin said, “In this case, I would say yes.”
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin defended California’s redistricting efforts while criticizing Republicans’ own efforts as unconstitutional.
“If they’re going to do this and continue doing this nonsense, which is unconstitutional and illegal, we’re going to be forced to do it ourselves in other states,” Martin said in an interview with NBC News, referencing GOP redistricting efforts.
Asked whether two unconstitutional acts make a right, Martin said, “In this case, I would say yes.”
His comments come as Californians will decide Tuesday whether to approve the state’s Prop 50 ballot measure, which would allow the state to redistrict to favor Democrats in the midterm elections. The move came in response to Republicans’ redistricting efforts in Texas to favor the GOP, which sparked redistricting battles in state legislatures across the country.
Now it’s your dad’s Democratic party that still rolls over, with very few exceptions.
Rolling over is rolling over. Which generation does it does not matter.
Haha, yes it is.
It’s the same people still 😂
They pushed David Hogg out, and replaced him with a guy that’ll be dead soon.
No, my grandfather’s Democratic Party instituted the New Deal. The Democratic Party that “just rolled over” was you just a few months ago.
They weren’t doing what you wanted. You were mad. Now they’re doing what you wanted. You’re still mad.
I’m not mad. I’m glad they’re showing some semblance of backbone for once. I just think it’s a poorly chosen cliche for him to use the “your grandfather’s Democratic Party” bit, when the party of the past didn’t have the cowardice issues that the current one has had this very same year.
We hold the Democrats to a higher communications standard because - reasons, so I think what was happening was a weak attempt to attach it to a “known phrase” such as “not your grandfather’s [insert thing]” to be “catchy” and “memorable”.
Instead we can rightfully point out all the ways that’s wrong.
No this isn’t them doing what I want. I want democrats to use there power to stop Trump from bombing and abducting whoever he wants. I don’t want them entrenching there power for the sake of power. I want them to explain how they’re gonna use there power to stop fascism to justify them taking away people’s democratic power over disrricting.
I’ll give them props for holding out on the shutdown for Healthcare subsidies people need, that’s standing up for your constituents, but this redistricting is just a power grab.
The Democrats are in the minority for all three branches of government. It will stay that way unless they can make gains in the midterms. With further gerrymandering in Texas (the rigging everyone fears), they’ll probably not get a majority. So, they’re fighting back by playing dirty.
with further gerrymandering in Texas, they’ll probably not get a majority
The gerrymandering in Texas is expected to give the gop 5 seats and they currently have a 6 seat majority, so the dems would have to flip 11 seats, that should be dead easy in a midterm with an unpopular president to play off of. For reference the dems flipped 41 seats in the 2018 midterms.
The reason the democrats are worried is because they know they’re polling at 30 year lows in approval and that will counteract the inherent advantage of the opposition party in a midterm. Playing dirty with the Republicans will only make them more unpopular while obfuscating that unpopularity with a couple more house seats for bland centrist dems.
It’s just like the dems taking billionaire pac money and pointing to the Republicans doing the same and saying they wouldn’t be competitive without it. When really they could turn down the money and run on a campaign of getting money out of politics and gain way more voters than they’d get from running more TV ads.
I disagree. Taking the high road is an option which has failed spectacularly against an opponent which will use any means to stay in power, including sending US troops into opposition-run cities.
I’m not saying to always take the high road, play dirty when it actually helps people and will make you more popular. Pack the courts to reinstitute roe, deschedule Marijuana with an executive order, release the epstein list and start prosecuting trump for his connections to it, prosecute and fine the oil billionaires funding the GOP.
Taking billionaire pac money and redistricting just to win elections isn’t popular, at best people view it as a necessary evil, at worse people become apathetic and view both parties as corrupt and not worth there vote.
I hope in the future, we will adopt better laws binding both sides. Political gerrymandering divides us into extremes and ensures a lot of voters—in many cases, such as Texas, a majority—disagree with their leaders without any means of effective redress. It’s unhealthy for the nation long term.
But for the time being, you have to fight with the tools you have in order to give the future the chance to do the right thing.
I agree. Im not much for the crowd that says dems should do things things like trump and maga do them but this is quite clearly self defense.
Ending gerrymandering is as simple as doing the popular vote.
Popular vote doesn’t work for the House, which is intended to be local representation. It can be fixed by setting the number of representatives based on a set number of people per representative instead of having a max size and having a neutral third party draw the districts.
The president should absolutely be elected by popular vote.
t can be fixed by setting the number of representatives based on a set number of people per representative
That’ll make zero difference.
and having a neutral third party draw the districts
Which then moves the problem to preventing subversion of the supposedly neutral third party. See also: every other appointed regulatory body.
it actually could if you did it by party and they had a roster of who would be positioned up to winning the whole house. Its my understanding parliments work somewhat like this but I may not be understanding that correct.
Electoral lists are a feature of some parliamentary systems. They largely ensure that party apparatchiks can impose candidates on the voters by guaranteeing the lifers safe seats. That means you get to vote for a party but have no choice about the person.
Yes, if we had a completely different system it would be different.
That’s not really simple at all. Amending the constitution with both sides so divided is not just impossible, but likely to see Republicans gaining more ground than Democrats.
But what if I’m an unpopular ghoul who wants to use an elevated platform to commit crimes?
Then you should be good to go.
Finally! I’ve been wondering when a white man, such as myself, was gonna catch a break!
Edit: oh god, this needs an
/s, doesn’t it? Fucking hell, why do shit-assess like this actually exist?
We won’t. Both parties are fine with things as they are
We need new parties
The reality is the parties cannot be displaced or remade from the outside. They must be seized from within through primaries.
Republicans were already
Dems cannot be, I don’t think
Yeah, how’s the Whig party doing?
It fell apart due to the internal pressure of trying to keep together pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions while barreling toward a civil war over that very issue. It was destroyed from the inside, which backs up my point.
Big difference between falling apart and having something new arise from the remains, compared to the same organization continuing with minor internal changes.
Unless you can force them to fall apart, the difference is somewhat academic.
I think I got side-tracked on the “inside” vs “outside”portion of your statement.
What I’m saying is that “primaries” are not the only tool, and perhaps not the most effective. Not that there’s a lot of precedent.
What I think would happen is the party becomes irrelevant to its constituents and just kind of falls into irrelevance or effectively ceases to exist.
That’s very different from “seizing from within through primaries”, which can effect change but probably not the level of change which is the goal here.
Gerrymandering is utter bullshit. But in this case, I say all blue states should GM the FUCK out of their entire states. Fuck the GOP Nazi scum right outta their jobs.
Not that they’ve ever worked a day in their lives…
This redistricting nonsense is the most toxic development for democracy I’ve seen from the establishment ghouls in a very long time. Not good.
Why there isn’t a non-partisan committee that does this is a bit beyond me. Seems like a great job for AI tbh.
Bringing AI into redistricting would be a nightmare. AI is not objective, it’s trained on biased datasets and that bias is reinforced by the bias of whomever created it or wants to shape it to their will.
We already know how to do nonpartisan redistricting, and many states (including CA) already have a nonpartisan committee in charge of it. But since elections are managed by state and local governments, and explicitly not the federal government, it would take something like a constitutional amendment to make it required nationwide. That’s also why states like CA will temporarily use different maps this cycle (if all goes well tomorrow), because CA being fair and TX cheating doesn’t help the nation as a whole reflect its actual population. Might as well force the fairness by cheating like them. It’s a shitty stopgap, but they’ve left us no choice.
AI can’t even transcribe text properly. Pls don’t let it into government decision making. Just it being included in inputs is fucking us over.
AI is like a blender. If you put shit into the blender, that’s what you’ll get out.
Except unless you’re gonna train your own models, you really can’t avoid shit being put into it.
And as a personal rule, I generally avoid any blended cocktails with noticeable amounts of excrement in them.
You don’t need AI. There are computer algorithms to do it perfectly
Redistricting committees just obfuscates the politicization. You’ll have an “independent committee” full of Republicans, or the final vote for a redistricting map will be passed to the Supreme Court, encouraging the politicization of the judicial branch.
Just add ~5 at-large seats that are distributed to balance out to match the state-wide popular vote. That’s what they do in Europe. Then you can gerrymander all you want, but you’ll lose all the at-large seats if the local representatives don’t match the state-wide popular vote.
