A Gross Plate of Garbage

Dear Reader (including those who enjoy peculiar ice cream flavors),

I have been trying to figure out why I dislike the Texas gerrymandering story so much. The best analogy I can come up with is that it’s like I’m a professional food taster and the bosses have put a giant platter of garbage in front of me. “Eat it and tell us what it tastes like. It’s your job.” 

Some of the garbage is old stuff that, if fresh, would be good or at least palatable. But the tuna in the sandwich remnants has started to turn, and the mayo has gone yellow. Some of the refuse is fresh, but horribly over-seasoned or weirdly prepared. And everything else, the good, the bad, and the gross, was contaminated by being slushed around in the garbage bag juice before it was decanted into the platter. Coffee grounds and orange peels in the Dinty Moore beef stew dregs. That kind of thing. 

On the stale side are the generic fights about gerrymanders, which Kevin does a good job reviewing on the site today. His headline says it plainly: “Gerrymandering is Normal.” And, as he goes on to explain, it’s as American as any political thing American politics does. “How long has gerrymandering been a part of U.S. politics?” Kevin asks. “Consider that the man who gave the strategy its name wasn’t some conniving Lee Atwater-style operative from the 1970s—he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”

Indeed, in the punditry game, gerrymander controversies are like fights over Supreme Court nominations, the War Powers Resolution, or the budget. Pay attention long enough, and all the arguments are so familiar you could write the scripts for either side. 

What makes them tedious is that the arguments for and against switch sides depending on who stands to benefit from the contest. This makes the passion, real or pretend, of the combatants fairly exhausting. It’s not that the arguments are bad or wrong, just that they line up with political interests in ways that make charges of hypocrisy or inconsistency unavoidable. 

Fights over the Senate filibuster are a perfect example. When Team A is in power and the filibuster gets in its way, Team A denounces it as an undemocratic relic while Team B insists filibusters are an essential and indispensable tool, part of the glories of our system of checks and balances. When Team B gains power, the two teams exchange arguments like a couple of softball teams without enough gloves to go around. After every inning, they hand off the gloves and take each other’s positions. 

Republicans are absolutely right to say that Democrats are raging hypocrites in their newfound opposition to gerrymandering. It’s pretty funny to watch Texas Democratic legislators running to Illinois, the most egregiously gerrymandered state in the Union, to decry the outrageous assault on democracy in the Lone Star State. It’s downright hilarious to hear the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, hosting Democratic legislators and talking about how Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has “left us no choice” but to gerrymander, too. “We want our constituents represented. We want our voices heard. Whether you vote for me or not, I want your voice and your vote to count. Unlike Greg Abbott, who doesn’t want your voice to count, your vote to count … they leave states with no choice!” 

Alas, Massachusetts doesn’t have any Republican districts to gerrymander away. 

In fairness, that’s probably defensible since 80 percent of the congressional votes cast in ultra-blue Massachusetts went for Democrats in 2024. But in heavily gerrymandered Illinois, nearly half of the votes cast (47 percent) were for Republicans, but they got only three of the state’s 17 congressional seats. I wonder how that happened. 

One last bit on the stale garbage. Democrats are trying hard to paint Texas’ power play as racially motivated. Gene Wu, chair of the Texas House Democratic caucus, insists Republicans are using a “racist, gerrymandered map.” “This is about racism. This is about taking Black folks back to before we had voting rights and before we had the Civil Rights Act,” according to Texas Rep. Jolanda Jones. 

I don’t dispute that the Republican effort has a disparate impact on black representatives, and if you want to call that racist, knock yourself out. But that’s the thing, Democrats desperately want to call it racist because they’re still hung up on the idea that anything bad for Democrats must be about racism. But it just seems pretty obvious that if Greg Abbott could deliver five seats to Donald Trump, like a pliant golden retriever dropping a slobbery tennis ball in his lap, just by screwing upscale white, Subaru-driving Democrats, he’d be perfectly happy. 

And that brings us to the new garbage. What bothers me about this unusual—not unprecedented, but definitely unusual—mid-decade redistricting is that Republicans, led by Trump, aren’t even trying to hide the fact that this is a naked power play. Trump wants to keep Congress. He thinks he can squeeze five seats out of Texas. That’s it. 

What’s unusual about this is that normally politicians try to hide their nakedly partisan ambition. There’s not a lot of pretending here. Trump knows that a Democratic House would make his life more difficult. So, he wants to prevent that, and so do his defenders. As I said, the defenders have good reason to mock Democratic hypocrisy about gerrymandering, but that mockery is being used to hide the fact that Trump is proudly trying to do precisely what Republicans say is bad when Democrats do it. 

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” can be a legitimate form of argumentation, but if your position is that what the goose does is bad, it would be nice if you weren’t so smug about doing it too. “But Hannibal Lecter gets to eat people!” is not a powerful defense. 

Now, there is an affirmatively novel argument being deployed by Trump and the GOP in defense of their naked power play. It’s hard to see at first, but it sits like a thick, oily film on the surface of this trash banquet. And its stench assaults the nostrils like a broken bottle of Sex Panther.

It’s a pungent three-ingredient sauce coating my rubbish repast, like the rancid blue cheese dressing, Mr. Pibb backwash, and hot dog water that had accumulated at the bottom of the garbage bag. In uneven proportions, those ingredients are mandate malarkey, parliamentary perfidy, and monarchical mania. (Sorry, dyspepsia breeds alliteration).

“We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats. … And I won Texas,” Trump explained on CNBC recently. “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”

Now, this is a typical lie from Trump. By my count, Trump’s victory ranks as the 15th best in Texas history for a presidential candidate. In the 20^th century, George W. Bush did better twice. So did Woodrow Wilson. Reagan in 1984 got 63 percent of the vote, and so did LBJ in 1964. Nixon came in second place with 66 percent in 1972, and FDR crushed it with 88 percent in 1932 (his worst performance was in 1940, and he still got 81 percent). 

But because of the personality cult-induced moral relativism coursing through Republican politics, we’re not supposed to care about such mundane mendacities. Take Trump seriously not literally, yada yada.

Even if Trump were right, the problem would be the same. Readers know that I think one of the main contributors to our political dysfunction is that too many people and politicians think we live in a parliamentary democracy and vote and behave as if we do. 

Trump thinks he’s “entitled” to five more seats from Texas because he won in 2024.

And so does Abbott. In an NBC interview he said, “A lot of people who voted Republican, who voted for Donald Trump, were trapped into Democrat districts,” Abbott said. 

So what? This has been true in every presidential election in American history. I’ve never lived anywhere where my vote wasn’t cancelled out at least 5-to-1. 

This is constitutionally and politically illiterate. Sure, presidents are typically the head of their party, but not in the way prime ministers are party leaders. In a parliamentary system, you elect a party, and the party selects a prime minister. Congress is an independent branch of government—a superior branch for what it’s worth. And Texas, by the way, is a sovereign state in our system, and so the idea that a governor and state legislature should be cravenly taking orders from the head of the federal executive branch should be seen as an embarrassing humiliation, given the Lone Star State’s usual bluster about its independence and states’ rights.

But the real point is this: The fact that Texans voted for Trump does not create an entitlement to more Republican representatives. In that election where Nixon won 66 percent of the vote, Texas elected five Democrats for every one Republican they sent to Washington. The idea that Texas should have redistricted itself to send more Republicans to Congress in 1974 to accommodate Nixon’s “mandate” would be greeted with extended laughter, including from Nixon (if he hadn’t resigned already).

Speaking of mandates, every day I hear people say that Trump can do this or that, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, good or bad, legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional, because “America” or “we” voted for Trump. But that’s not how our Constitution works. Every elected official has a “mandate”—to do the job they were elected to do as defined by law and the Constitution. That’s it. Senate and House Democrats were just as elected as Trump was, and they are not violating the will of the people by opposing Trump. They’re doing the jobs, for good or ill, that they were elected to do.

It’s unconfirmed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller sleeps upside down suspended from a rafter, but it is well-established that he has Andrew Jackson’s and Woodrow Wilson’s view of the president as a kind of magically powerful official because, as he often says, the president is the one person voted on by the whole country. Much like the traditional Team A/Team B stuff I started with, Miller’s view of the presidency does not extend to Democratic presidents. When Democrats are in power, judges who stand in the president’s way are heroic defenders of the rule of law. When judges stand in Trump’s way, they are illegitimate rogue Marxists fomenting a judicial coup. 

Regardless, if this was the vision of the Founders, they might have said so in the Constitution or The Federalist Papers. But they didn’t. Instead, they wrote the Constitution the way they wrote it, and they didn’t even mention the word “mandate.” Because mandates are products of extra-constitutional wish-casting and special pleading. Trump is breaking the law every day he doesn’t sell or shutter TikTok. That would be true if Trump got 100 percent of the vote, and it would be just as bad and lawless. 

And this is where the monarchical crap comes in. Abbott is doing Trump’s bidding because the governor and many in his party think Trump should simply get what Trump wants. That’s it. If it’s legal, great—that makes it easier. If it’s popular or consistent with norms or the Constitution, that’s super convenient, too. But if it’s not any of those things, the answer seems to be “Well, we’ll still try our best to do your bidding.” 

And that, I think, is what bothers me the most about this gerrymandering brouhaha. The internal reasoning of the effort to deliver for Trump is simply gross and sycophantic. Worse, it feels like a downpayment on greater power grabs to come. Like his firing of the BLS chief, or the latest purge at the FBI, or his previous purges across the government, this feels like a prelude to an even greater concentration of power and more abuses by Trump. This, I think, is the real reason many Democrats are freaking out. And, as hypocritical and stale as many of their arguments may be, I don’t blame them.

Canine Update: Zoë seems almost completely recovered from her surgical and post-op trauma. She has started arooing again, and she’ll eat kibble too. We are so relieved that the Dingo endures. Oh, and speaking of Her Dingoness, a zoo in Perth, Australia, released some pictures of Australian Dingo puppies and the resemblance to puppy Zoë is uncanny. Pippa seems very happy that Z-Z is doing better. I’d like to think it’s all sisterly love, but I think the fact that everyone’s mood has improved and regular order has returned explains much of it. That, and the unseasonably tolerable August weather. Appeasement of Chester continues apace. But it doesn’t seem to detract from Gracie’s infinite capacity to slumber in ways that invite jealousy from bipeds. Pippa is good at that, too. Thank you again for all the kind words and encouragement during Zoë’s ordeal.

Owner’s Name: Tim Kroll

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: Became a fan of the G-File from Jonah’s National Review days and eventually signed up after Kevin D. Williamson moved over—best thing I’ve done for my political sanity. The podcasts, especially the flagship Remnant, are morning walk company.

Personal Details: As a conservative, I am grateful to have stumbled across Jonah’s writing and the wider Dispatch world it led me to.

Pet’s Name: Big dog is Echo, little dog is Pickles.

Pet’s Breed: Echo is a Heinz 57, Pickles is a chihuahua terrier.

Pet’s Age: Echo we think is 5-6 years old and Pickles is 2 ½.

Gotcha Story: My wife rescued Echo from the creek behind our house, starving and covered in mange. Pickles was a gift from our youngest son six months after our previous chihuahua (Squirty) passed away.

Pet’s Likes: Echo likes his hour-long morning walk and rolling in dew-covered grass at the end, and belly rubs. Pickles likes to chase squirrels and take naps behind someone on the couch.

Pet’s Dislikes: Echo’s major dislike is thunder, while Pickles hates bath time.

Pet’s Proudest Moment: For Echo, it would be the times the gate in the yard gets opened and he stays in the yard. He is a very Zen pup. For Pickles, it would be the numerous times she has chased and nearly caught various squirrels, birds, the neighbor’s cat, etc..

Bad Pet: Echo, who is so named because he rarely barks, does verbalize in an aroo whine in the morning to remind me it’s walk time and allegedly might have awoken some people. Pickles might have dug up some things better left buried; her cat curiosity knows no bounds, unfortunately.

Do you have a quadruped you’d like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.

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