Tag Archives: politics

Supreme Court Has the Louisiana Redistricting Case

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After the 2020 census, Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature

only drew one majority-Black congressional district when it redrew the boundaries for the state’s six seats in Congress. A group of Black voters, who make up about a third of the state’s population, sued the state in 2022, arguing that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, required lawmakers to add a second majority-Black congressional district.

Here’s the entirety of what that Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act actually says:

SEC. 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Drawing voting districts explicitly to favor one group of Americans over other groups in that same district is precisely what the CRA prohibits. However the Supreme Court rules in this case, it’s imperative that the Court finally recognize the truth of our Declaration of Independence and the foundational American law that’s before them in the form of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution, which says in pertinent part,

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

One of the most basic privileges accruing to us American citizens is our right to vote, and all of us voters are equal under law—regardless of skin color, or religion, or….

In fine, as citizens, as voters, we’re all exactly alike. Gerrymandering to create districts that favor one group over any others necessarily disadvantages those others—and it denies all groups, and more importantly, every individual regardless of group equal protection of the laws, and so it is unconstitutional.

As an aside, and one of the more favorable aspects of earlier times, the entire CRA fits within seven Word® pages, and contains less than 5500 words, at least as it is presented at the link.

“Pinned”

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Pinned? Really? As universities start to pay lip service to acting concretely against the bigotries and ideological indoctrination rampant on their campuses, there’s this comment by a news writer that lies at the core of the universities’ problem.

University leaders, pinned between liberal faculty and the Trump administration, are quietly trying to make friends in Washington amid widespread concerns about research budgets, student aid, and the White House’s quest to push academia to the right.

How is it possible that university leaders can be pinned between faculty—liberal or otherwise—and the Trump—or any other—administration?

The long and short of it is that it isn’t possible for such pinning to occur. Unfortunately, the “pinning” does exist, but it’s university managers who feel pinned; there are no to almost none actual leaders in today’s university administrations.

Faculty has no business being involved in the administration of a college or university; they’re employees of the institution, nothing more—and nothing less—than that. University managers who choose not to act as if they’re in charge, which they should be enforcing, are self-selecting for termination. That includes members of the institution’s “governing” board. Faculty members who won’t act like the employees that they are also are self-selecting for termination.

Only when incumbents act within their roles can colleges and universities go back to being institutions of learning, teaching, and research instead of the institutions of limited speech, limited academic “freedom,” indoctrination, and bigotry that they are currently.

A Real Progressive-Democratic Party Problem

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It’s not Party’s only problem, but it is a Critical Item problem, and it’s illustrated by an exchange between a constituent and Senator Michael Bennet (D, CO) at his recent town hall and by a Wall Street Journal newswriter’s assessment of the exchange. The constituent’s call:

A man who identified himself as Colin from Denver asked Bennet to consider the “dire times” facing the nation. “Schumer had no plan in the Democrats’ only moment of leverage against Trump,” he said. “When will you be calling for him to be replaced as minority leader?”

Bennett essentially responded with words to the effect that Schumer needed to go.

The writer’s assessment:

House and Senate members have publicly criticized Schumer’s handling of the matter in a remarkable public show of disunity at a time when they hoped to be unified against Trump.

Leverage against Trump. Unified against Trump. No plan for what Party thinks is good for our nation. No plan for how to achieve those Good Things. Not even any nascent ideas.

It’s No to Trump/Never Trump turtles all the way down.

That’s not good for our nation. Not good at all. All Party has, all Party seems interested in, is its toddler temper tantrum over not getting its own way.

Disingenuous Excuse-Making

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That’s what seems to be the case involving Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong and a variety of personages criticizing her decisions, or their lack, or their careful vagueness, regarding Columbia’s rampant antisemitic bigotry and overt support for “protestors” supporting terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank.

Armstrong’s waffling on those items already has cost her university $400 million in Federal grants and contracts, yet she continues to waffle.

Chief among her excuse-making supporters is Johns Hopkins Medicine International President, Charles Wiener:

She’s in a situation now where every minute, every hour, there’s no way she’ll be able to do anything that pleases everybody[.]

Armstrong isn’t there to please everybody; she’s not even there to please anybody at all. She’s there to do the right thing: put an end to the school’s antisemitic bigotry that exceeds the bounds of free speech by overtly denying others their rights to free speech and religion—even merely to attend class—and expel the terrorist-supporting “protestors,” including faculty members; have those “protestors” who are not students or faculty arrested for their trespass; and have those—student, non-student, or faculty—involved in stealing university buildings (which is what their “occupations” amount to) and vandalizations arrested and brought to trial for their criminal acts.

Full stop.

Then the newswriters of this WSJ piece offer their own shabby excuse:

Armstrong has walked a fine line between acknowledging that some aspects of the university need to change while also asserting the importance of the school’s academic independence.

No. There is no fine line here. There is no academic freedom in an environment where the school’s Jewish students are prevented by those terrorist supporters from speaking, prevented from getting to class, even physically attacked simply for being Jewish, much less speaking anyway.

Ans this:

If she cedes [sic] to White House demands over campus antisemitism allegations, she risks revolt from faculty fearing a loss of academic freedom.

More excuse-making. Faculty members who revolt over this are simply self-selecting for prompt termination. Getting them out of the way would both reduce the bigotry that so rampantly denies Jewish students their free speech rights and increase academic freedom by removing those who insist that academic freedom means being free to do things their way only.

Armstrong needs to stop waffling. Or she needs to be replaced by someone willing to make the hard decisions necessary to reduce the bigoted attacks on disfavored groups and get rid of the “protestors,” and to enforce those decisions.

Update (compared to when I wrote this): Columbia University has, finally, acceded to many of the government’s demands regarding curbing its antisemitic bigotry and support for terrorists.

A Simple Enough Solution

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Even if it isn’t necessarily politically easy to implement. But the political impediment is merely a lack of political courage in the same politicians who natter on about how expensive and abused is the system in question. I’m writing here about our nation’s Medicaid system.

Medicaid is broken, and Republicans in Washington and in state capitals have an opportunity to fix it. President Trump has pledged to protect the program, in part by cutting waste, fraud and abuse. The House budget target would reduce the growth of federal Medicaid payments over the next decade from $2 trillion to $1.2 trillion. That is a good start. Medicaid wastes enormous amounts of taxpayer money as states use it to reward politically powerful healthcare providers.

Instead of making this sort of namby-pamby tweaks around the edges, and masquerading putative reductions in growth as cuts, the simple enough solution is this.

Take the Medicaid-centered Federal transfers to each State in the current year as the baseline, and convert that amount to a block grant with no strings attached, other than the State must spend the block money on its Medicaid program. Then, each subsequent year transfer the Medicaid block grant, similarly without strings, reduced further each year by 10% of that baseline amount. In a short few years (I’ll leave the third grade arithmetic to the reader, rather than insult his intelligence), the block grants will reach $0.00, and the Federal government will, quite properly, be out of this aspect of the State’s business.

Notice that this solution also does not touch the heart of our nation’s Medicaid system, which is each State’s responsibility. On the contrary, it moves the system entirely into the States’ individual purviews, giving each State complete control over its own Medicaid program, free of Federal touching.