<![CDATA[Democrat Party]]><![CDATA[Gerrymandering]]><![CDATA[Hakeem Jeffries]]><![CDATA[Redistricting]]><![CDATA[Supreme Court]]>Featured

Having Lost the Game, Democrats Now Want to Change the Rules – HotAir

President Trump has been taking shots from the media for his aggressive stance toward Iran. Make a deal or your civilization could end. Meanwhile, Democrats are working along similar premises only the civilization they are threatening to destroy is our own.





But let’s start at the beginning. 

Democrats initially resisted redistricting, going as far as leaving the state of Texas and fleeing to Illinois to avoid a vote on new maps. That effort failed and Democrats changed course and embraced redistricting everywhere as a way to counteract the Republican effort. Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom became the faces of this phase two response and initially it seemed that was going to work out pretty well. When they passed new maps in Virginia, they were pretty smug about it.

And then the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Virginia hit Democrats with a double-whammy. Suddenly, it seemed clear that Republicans were going to win the redistricting battle, creating a buffer of 10 or more GOP-friendly districts before the midterms.

Democrats had been fine with redistricting so long as they thought they might come out ahead, but once it was clear they were going to lose, their tone changed. Now, redistricting is, once again, an outrage.

Democrats are changing their redistricting strategy — again.

Just two weeks after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised to invoke “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” his side has been forced to shift drastically into a defensive posture thanks to a pair of court rulings that moved the House map toward the GOP…

“Given the highly unfavorable political environment confronting House Republicans, the extremists will not meaningfully benefit from their scandalous gerrymandering scheme,” Jeffries said in a Monday “Dear Colleague” letter. “Quite the opposite. Democratic enthusiasm and resolve have grown more intense.”





We wanted to lose this fight because we’d rather have the issue to campaign on. That’s the new take.

In order to encourage that wave of anger they hope will carry them to control of the House, Democrats are suddenly offering to go all in on various extreme measures to remake the American political landscape. David has an upcoming post about the trend later today. Jamelle Bouie was pushing this same trend yesterday. Democrats aren’t just threatening to take their ball and go home, they are threatening to smash everything that stands in their way, including the “souls” of their opponents.

Democratic lawmakers said this week they are gearing up to play political hardball in the wake of stunning court losses on redistricting — potentially for years to come.

“We will beat the far-right extremists,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday. “We’re going to win in November, and then we’re going to crush their souls as it relates to the extremism that they are trying to unleash on the American people.”

And since it was the courts who really handed Dems this defeat, it’s the courts they are focused on remaking.

Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-Md.), who has introduced legislation to term-limit the justices, said in an interview that the ruling was “a straw that broke the camel’s back.” And Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) said there are tools to “kneecap” the Supreme Court that Congress has never used, such as stripping their power to review lower court rulings.

“I think everybody from the top of our caucus to the bottom are saying we have got to push back on them,” Casten said.





Congress does have some limited power to decide which lower court ruling the Supreme Court can take up, but it’s unlikely anything like that could pass unless Democrats have a supermajority and eliminate the filibuster.

In any case, demonizing the courts is something the Democrats have been doing for years but that effort is about to hit another gear.

Here’s Hakeem:

It’s likely to get worse before it gets better.


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