Masks were necessary, especially in schools, to prevent mass deaths. Or so we were told, at great and tedious length–until suddenly, in the last 10 days, they weren’t.
The Democratic governors of Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut and California followed the lead of the newly installed Republican governor of Virginia and revoked mask mandates.
Let’s pivot now to another subject on which liberal commentators were raising alarms. Getting rid of gerrymandering, they claimed, was necessary to preserve democracy and prevent its overthrow by the forces of repression and one-party dictatorship.
It turns out that those alarms are suddenly, to borrow a Watergate word, inoperative. The turning point may have come recently when David Wasserman, the Cook Political Report’s ace redistricting honcho, tweeted that his state-by-state accounting showed Democrats with a two- to three-seat gain in U.S. House redistricting in the cycle following the 2020 census.
So much for the lamentations, coming from Democrats such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, that Republican redistricting would guarantee one-party control for another decade or even, according to left-wing tweeters, forever.
Republicans control legislatures and governorships in states with more House districts than Democrats. But they are failing to make the redistricting gains they did following the 2000 and 2010 censuses.
Why haven’t things been panning out that way?
One reason is that Democratic redistricters have been more ruthless than Republicans, starting with Illinois and its early filing deadline on March 14. Democrats drew “bacon-strip” districts heading 100 miles out from Chicago wards to the open prairie and downstate districts that stitch together small factory or university towns along highway rights of way. They increased Democrats’ edge from 13-5 to 14-3.
New York Democrats did even better. Their edge went from 19-8 to 22-4, thanks to a plan that linked conservative Staten Island with Brooklyn’s trendy Park Slope and gave House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler a district that snakes from the palisades of upper Manhattan to the beaches of Bensonhurst.
In contrast, the Republican-majority Ohio Supreme Court has overturned a partisan Republican map based on similar provisions. Texas Republican legislators concentrated on strengthening Republican incumbents rather than ousting Democrats.
You see similar inconsistency in interpreting the Voting Rights Act. Black politicians and Republican strategists long argued that it required maximizing the number of majority-Black districts, which resulted in electing more Black members and in strengthening Republicans in adjacent districts.
Democrats taking that view prevailed in federal court in challenging Alabama’s districts, a decision stayed last week pending full review by the Supreme Court.
But in other cases, Democrats have argued that the act requires only a large percentage of Black voters, an arrangement that tends to elect more Democrats. It’s possible that the Supreme Court in the Alabama case may clear up the muddle of current Voting Rights Act jurisprudence that has been exploited by both parties.
The creation of purportedly nonpartisan redistricting commissions–a favorite proposal of those few liberals, like The Washington Post editorialists, who lament partisan redistricting–doesn’t end partisan gerrymanders. Democrats have succeeded in gaming supposedly neutral commissions this cycle in California (52 districts), Michigan (13) and New Jersey (12).
Those who have lamented that partisan redistricting means one-party control do have some historic precedent for their argument. As I documented in successive editions of “The Almanac of American Politics,” Democrats’ partisan redistricting helped them maintain majorities in the House of Representatives from the Supreme Court’s one-person, one-vote decision in 1964 through 1992.
That hasn’t worked for Republicans. Starting in 1995, neither party has maintained majorities over a 10-year intercensal period. Political realignments have frustrated even the most ruthless redistricters and may do so again.
The waning prominence of Donald Trump may turn some affluent districts who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 Republican again. Or the post-Biden emergence of someone like the 1992 Bill Clinton may turn some populist Trump 2020 districts once again Democratic. Or voters could start splitting their tickets again.
My prediction is that by 2030, masking of schoolchildren will be seen as a vestige of a remote and superstitious past, and that the partisan redistrictings of political parties and “apolitical” commissions alike will have been rendered useless by the voters.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.
I pray come Election Day voters remember the China flu did not make businesses go belly up, mandate kids wear masks all day long knowing the Spanish flu epidemic killed many because of wearing dirty masks, force unproven vaccines on citizens, create unnecessary 7.5% inflation in a year or allow criminals and illegals to roam freely on the streets while we try to stay safe in our homes this all compliments of the Democratic Party and nothing else!
The Treasonous, Dishonest, disgraceful, Socialist Democrat Party game plan is to lie, cheat and steal in order to take total control of the American people,
increase Taxes on everything and bring American commerce and economy to its knees and to promote Socialism.
Then access power and retain it by any means available –
no matter the costs to the people, the government or the nation.
This treasonous, dishonest, corrupt, unethical, immoral, socialist Democrat Party is our country’s most destructive and deadliest ENEMY!
Unfortunately since many dem voters, seem too bLIND to the truth, i am unsure if they will ever wake up, and smell the roses AND VOTE OUT THE DEMS..
Why not just take a squared checkerboard overlay of the entire USA for districting, totally ignoring what party now controls what race, gender benders, or political machines now rule the nation, and let the cards fall where they fall. Demand either squares or rectangles to untangle the current corrupted mess where criminals can lock themselves into power for generations to come. Taking census readings and designing districts based on race is racial in its very intents and should be declared by the courts as illegal. Not even the Supreme Court should be able to socially recreate pre-patterned results based on anything but numbers of people in each district, equally divided and ever -hanging only by the movements of the populations, not the movements of the thoughts of corrupted political minds.
THAT IS WHY i have long said, WE NEED TO STOP REDRAWING THE Districts, after every damn election!
Dems have it tough, don’t they? They have to constantly work overtime in order to maintain one-sidedness in everything—and all of the propaganda they have to put out to deceive people into thinking they are so honest and above-board. Having to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure those shifty Republicans aren’t resorting to their dirty tricks and trying to emulate them.
But on the bright side, they have Conservatives they can always point their finger at and disparage at every turn.
The Democrats, one party rule, one party corruption, one party cancer.
That is why WE NEED TO treat them like a cancer, and CUT THEM OUT of society.. PERIOD.