Tag Archives: politics

Gerrymandering

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It’s time to ride this horse again, this time due to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on racial gerrymandering, Texas, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which sought to balance minority access to electing government representatives with majority access (itself an unconstitutional unequal treatment law IMNSHO).

The op-ed centered on Texas’ move to redraw its current Federal House of Representative districts and “liberal” beefs that Texas’ current districts already disadvantage Hispanics is, here, irrelevant; it’s that unequal treatment that matters.

The second clause of the first Article of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution makes the matter crystalline.

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

Gerrymandering on the basis of race is clearly unconstitutional, and that VRA should have been struck down long since—the latest opportunity having come when the Supreme Court released the Southern States from government oversight regarding their voting laws. Beyond that, one of the central privileges of a citizen of the United States is the ability to vote in an election (in this post, a national election) and have his vote count as much—neither more nor less—than the vote of any other citizen of the United States.

The concept—equal protection of the laws—extends easily to political parties: gerrymandering on the basis of political party also plainly denies us average Americans our equal treatment by limiting the value of our votes in some districts and artificially increasing the value of our votes in other districts solely on the basis of political stance.

The clear, constitutional, equal treatment solution to this is to draw our Congressional districts without regard to political belief, race, or any other criterion other than our status as American citizens (and citizens of the State in which we reside, as the first clause of that Article specifies), but strictly within (or as practice has overcome the explicitly stated requirement) within the spirit of equal population requirement stated in Article I, Section 2 of our Constitution:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand….

Thus: beginning with the geographic center of the State, draw the districts as squares, with the only deviation from a straight line being at a State’s boundary with an adjacent State. Otherwise, the number of districts must equal the apportionment of Representatives the State’s total population allows, and each of the districts must be geographically sized so that each of the districts has substantially equal populations of citizens.

We’re all Americans, and so we’re all equal under law. Race, political position—religion, etc—are wholly irrelevant to this.

My Sympathy Meter…

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…is flashing Empty. On a note related to another post of mine, there’s this out of Tucson, AZ:

Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), based in Tucson, Arizona, is reportedly facing financial and enrollment struggles after universal school choice passed in the state in 2022.
A TUSD official told KGUN that approximately 4,000 students used vouchers to either go to private schools or homeschool.
The trend of parents overlooking TUSD cost the school district about $20 million. TUSD’s Chief Financial Officer, Ricky Hernandez, told the local outlet that TUSD is “preparing for continued declines in enrollment as a result” of vouchers.

This, after TUSD as a whole had these test score outcomes, as of the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years:

In Tucson Unified District, 28% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 23% tested at or above that level for math. Also, 27% of middle school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 19% tested at or above that level for math. And 48% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 42% tested at or above that level for math.

Here’s a thought—bear with me on this; it’s a strange concept for many—maybe the TUSD managers and teachers should do a better job of teaching the children in their educational charge the basics and advanced principles of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with budgeting, finance, and economics added in for the district’s grade schools, junior highs, and high schools, respectively. Room in the school day for that last, especially, could be made by eliminating the claptrap of DEI, “flexible” gender, pornographic books in grade school libraries, and other Woke ideologies.

A Clear Choice

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The recently passed OBBBA has Federal funding for private school tuition in the form of tax credits—private schools being, primarily, charter and voucher schools. States must opt into the program, though; the tax credits won’t be available automatically.

As The Wall Street Journal headline put it, Blue States Face Big Decision. And then,

Now comes a protracted debate at the state level. Progressives and public-school groups object to funding private schools and say the new program will hurt public education. Supporters say the money will give families options outside of their neighborhood school.

The thing is, though, public schools are already beyond increases in hurting, especially in blue States—pupil test scores are bad and falling (rising recently only against the prior Wuhan Virus Situation school lockout steep drop), and public school’s pupil test scores especially lag those private schools’ student outcomes, as well as the test scores of homeschooled students.

A clear choice, indeed, and over the coming months we’ll see very clearly just how opposed to school choice and children’s education are Progressive-Democrat politician-run States and municipalities, and just how far in thrall are those politicians to teachers unions.

A Thought on Autopens

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There’s a kerfuffle in progress over ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) extensive use of the autopen to sign a plethora of Presidential edicts, nominations, and especially pardons. That kerfuffle has spilled over into questions of who actually was in charge of the White House given Biden’s mental capacities, but I’m concerned here only with the autopen.

The purpose of the autopen is to sign documents that are time sensitive and need to be signed right now, but the President is out of the office and cannot get back within the time available. That’s a perfectly fine purpose.

However, as we’re seeing now, it’s far too easy for person or persons unknown to abuse the autopen, especially in the absence of any sort of logs memorializing each use, who actually manipulated it, and who authorized its use. So: get rid of the autopen altogether.

Replace the autopen with a Remote Pen that has the pen connected to the President’s hand over the Internet (via a secure connection that authenticates both the President and the White House end). The President can use a suitably designed connected pen (a proper item in the Internet of Things) to sign a blank piece of paper (to be subsequently destroyed), with that personal signature aped over the Internet connection by the Remote Pen passing over the document to be signed. That has the President personally signing the document(s) he needs to sign, rather than a functionary independently manipulating an autopen and document.

Aside: given the number of witnesses “testifying before the House regarding who was running the White House autopen and the White House in general, I do wonder: what crime(s) do these personages think they might be charged with?

Credulous Editors

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are in a tizzy over the Senate Judiciary Committee having voted out to the Senate floor the nomination of Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, having done so after the Progressive-Democratic Party’s committee members staged another of their toddler temper tantrums and stormed out of the committee meeting because they couldn’t get their way. Especially, though. the editors are upset because the Republican majority on the committee chose to ignore a so-called whistleblower’s beef about Bove.

At a March 14 meeting, discussing the possibility that a judge could block those removals [illegal alien deportations], “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.” That’s according to a “whistleblower” letter by a former government lawyer.

And

The Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority dismissed this evidence as “completely devoid of context.” That sounds like an argument by plausible deniability. The whistleblower made specific claims, and isn’t his account context?

That also sounds like an argument for facts and specifics rather than anonymous claims. It’s telling that the editors chose one interpretation while completely ignoring another, much less identifying that other and explaining their logic in choosing the one interpretation over the other. And, no, the person’s account isn’t context; it is itself shorn of context: for instance, to whom was his letter written, what are the relationships between the letter writer and the letter’s recipient with Bove?

And this: the editors never even identify the whistleblower, whose name as the protected person that all whistleblowers are, should be a matter of public record. There’s also a reason that the editors put their characterization of whistleblower inside those euphemism quotes. Maybe that’s because the person isn’t actually a whistleblower, but a leaker with an axe to grind. What proof—what evidence, even—do the editors have that the person exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues before he chose to leak? Too, if the whistleblower isn’t actually one, but a leaker, why do the editors not worry about that leak context?