Tag Archives: ethics

Gerrymandering

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The subheadline laid it out.

Rep. Steve Cohen’s long career is evidence that the motive is partisan.

Which is a big so what. Partisan gerrymandering perhaps ought to be as illegal as racial gerrymandering, but it isn’t.

The editors partially addressed the so what at the end of their piece:

The Tennessee gerrymander is simply a GOP effort to divide a compact, populated area into multiple stringy districts for partisan gain, which is precisely what Democrats did in Virginia. It’s bad for competitive elections, but it isn’t racist.

The rest of this story is that there’s no “ought to be” IMNSHO regarding the legality of partisan gerrymandering. It’s a violation of the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal protection of the laws. Competitive elections can occur only when that gerrymandering loophole is closed also.

Another Progressive-Democratic Party Disregard for Law

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The Virginia Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated State legislature tried to amend the State’s constitution to redistrict itself from a 6-5 majority in its Representative delegation to the Federal House of Representatives to a 9-1 majority. The proposed amendment was originally passed four days prior to its State-wide elections for its State government, and the new legislature, on taking office the next January, repassed the proposed amendment, supposedly as constitutionally required. The referendum then passed, narrowly, in the State’s voter referendum on the amendment.

Virginia’s Supreme Court, though, struck the amendment as unconstitutionally enacted, violating as it did the State constitution’s Article XII, Section 1; ruled the subsequent referendum irreparably tainted by that violation; and invalidated that referendum. The outcome is that the State’s prior districting, with its 6-5 Progressive-Democrat-majority of districts, remains in effect for the coming 2026 elections and the primaries beforehand.

The Court’s ruling gave a detailed, multi-page explanation of the constitutional failure, but their explanation boils down to this bit from the ruling:

In this case, voting in the general election for the House of Delegates began on September 19, 2025, and ended on Election Day, November 4, 2025. The General Assembly voted for the first time to propose the constitutional amendment to the electorate on October 31, 2025. By that date, over 1.3 million votes had been cast in the general election, which was approximately 40% of the total vote for that election cycle.

The Court also took note of the State’s argument regarding those 1.3 million voters which was centered on the premise that it was too bad to be them, so sad. The Court waved the BS flag at that argument, and it did so in gruesome (for the State’s arguers) detail.

The Progressive-Democrats making that tough luck argument while overtly disregarding the plain text of their own State’s constitution is a clear and present demonstration of Party’s utter disregard for any law or constitutional requirement that is inconvenient to their push for power.

The Virginia State Supreme Court ruling can be read here.

Pick One, Ace

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) had this to say on the Supreme Court’s nearly total elimination of racist racial gerrymandering with its Louisiana v Callais ruling:

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities. And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

Our voting rules can explicitly favor one group of American voters over other groups of American voters, which favoring can come only at the direct expense of those others, explicitly deprecating those voters’ votes as such favoritism does.

Or our voting rules can, finally, recognize that all American voters are just that—American voters—and so entirely equal under law, even voting law.

As Obama said as the Democratic Party’s keynote speaker at its 2004 National Convention,

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

That includes voters in America.

This sort of duplicity is all too typical of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

No Records Kept

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Minnesota has a process whereby prospective voters lacking identification or proof of residency

can bypass the requirements by having another registered voter from the same precinct vouch for the voter wanting to register or signing a proof-of-residence oath in front of an election judge, which is attached to the voter’s registration application.

America First Legal filed FOIA requests with the State’s Secretary of State seeking documentation regarding those completed vouchers, and the State’s SecState answered No data responsive. At all.

Records? We ain’t got no records. We don’t have to show you any stinking records.

This is Minnesota actively permitting anyone to vote, citizen or not, legally present or not, in the State’s elections and in the State’s national-level elections.

The Rogue United Nations

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opened their Friday editorial with this:

[Y]ou can always count on the United Nations to rehabilitate a rogue. So it did on Monday by granting the Islamic Republic [of Iran] a leadership role at a conference on nuclear nonproliferation.
You can’t make this up, and with the UN you never need to.

 The leadership role?

The global body chose Iran as one of the 34 vice presidents to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

I’ll elide the idiocy of a committee so large and so bloated with feel-good title inflation as to have 34(!) vice presidents.

The larger matter is this. While the editors are correct to characterize Iran as a rogue nation, they’ve missed the beam in their own eye: the UN is, itself, a rogue entity, no longer serving to work toward/preserve peace and comity among nations as it was—however naively—created to do. Instead, it routinely gives high level voice to the very kind of political entities it was intended to corral.

In the end, the only reason to continue the expense of providing facilities in New York City for the UN’s headquarters is the wisdom of the old adage of keeping one’s enemies closer.