Will the Release of the Epstein Files Matter? Sort of. Maybe.

The top stories of the last few days all revolve around the “Epstein files.”  Well, them and the myriad frenzied attempts by 47 and his minions to get us to focus on literally anything else: the bullshit deployment of National Guard troops to DC to pick up trash and spread mulch, threats to do the same to New York, Chicago, and New Orleans despite court decisions that such missions are illegal, the unquestionably illegal destruction of that Venezuelan ship that may or may not have been carrying narco-terrorists…  Those distractions have failed bigly, not least because it’s all over but the final score.  The names will come out, and we have GOP Congresscritters Massey and Greene (yes, really!), among others, of course, to thank for it.

More to the point, anyone paying the slightest bit of attention has now determined that the likelihood that the President of the United States is not merely a con artist and an authoritarian bully but also a pedophile and rapist has moved out of “preponderance of the evidence” territory and into “beyond reasonable doubt.” 

Few criminals have ever acted more guilty.  The Trump administration can’t even keep its lies consistent.  The files were on Pam Bondi’s desk, but they don’t exist.  The whole thing is a Democratic hoax, but Bill Clinton’s name appears.  Curmie’s recent appreciation of Luigi Pirandello notwithstanding, anyone with the analytical skills of the dumbest kid in kindergarten knows that all of those statements can’t be true at the same time.  The only question is whether any of them are.

Certainly, moving Ghislane Maxwell to Club Fed was sufficient evidence of rampant corruption to convince all but the well and truly brainwashed, and asserting that survivors’ testimony at the press conference is “irrelevant” or that Republican legislators who exhibit even enough backbone to want the truth to come out are “hostile” certainly should have clinched the issue even for the stragglers who hadn’t long since come to that conclusion.

Of course, those who drank deep of the MAGA Kool-Aid don’t care, and those of us who dare suggest that Dear Leader is anything less than a literal godsend will continue to be called Trump Deranged, irrespective of evidence, even by people who know better (or ought to).  But the hard-core MAGAs seem to be losing at least some of their suasion in the Republican party: when you’re revealed as too big of a sicko for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the proverbial writing is on the wall.  Special elections are showing huge gains for Democrats: breaking the state legislature’s GOP super-majority in Iowa by gaining an easy victory in a district that voted for Trump by double digits a few months ago is but one example.

And that’s significant.  Curmie may find the political stances of the current crop of GOP pols more problematic than those of their predecessors of a few decades ago (yes, they’re considerably worse than Nixon or Reagan), but there are relatively few of them outside of the Manchurian Cantaloupe’s appointees who could legitimately be described as evil.  There are some, of course: Mike Johnson (aptly described by Curmie five years ago as “a hitherto unknown little turd”), Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton come to mind.

Most, though, are simply amoral (as opposed to immoral), cowards.  Some, like Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Lisa Murkowski, will occasionally offer a bit of token resistance before ultimately capitulating every damned time to whatever whim takes shape in what passes for a brain in the Mad King of Trumpistan.  These people cannot be trusted, full stop. 

But others—those who may not have a lot of core beliefs but sure would like to be re-elected—are beginning to recognize that servile obeisance to POTUS just might cause more problems than it solves.  The Astroturf support of billionaire mega-donors is nice, no doubt (or at least Susan Collins thinks so), but the disillusionment of the citizenry is real.  Distancing oneself from a party leader who is underwater on literally every issue, and on some of them even among Republicans, comes a little easier under those circumstances.

Curmie isn’t celebrating an imminent return to power for the Democrats, at least not yet.  The GOP’s willingness to be completely forthright in their declarations that they have no interest in representing their constituents, only in maintaining their party’s control of the government, is concerning.  The leftie press is suggesting that the Trumpsters wouldn’t be so openly seeking to gerrymander if they weren’t afraid of the results in a fair election.  Whether that’s true or not is, of course, a matter for conjecture.  It could be that the GOP seeks a supermajority, or that they’re confident in victory (remember Trump’s almost-admission that Elon Musk had manipulated the 2024 election?), anyway.

None of this is new, of course.  Curmie remembers a dozen years ago when Greg Abbott, then the Attorney General for Texas, cheerfully declared in a court document (!) that of course their most recent gerrymandering was designed specifically to increase the power of the Republican Party, but, you see, it wasn’t racially motivated (note: it was, of course), so it was OK.

And no, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not pretending that the Democrats aren’t perfectly willing to play the same game.  Indeed, they have.  But as the New York Times’s Sam Wang wrote about the 2012 election, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.”  And, of course, Democrats voted 220-1 for the 2021 “For the People Act,” which would have required non-partisan commissions rather than state legislatures to establish Congressional districts; Republicans opposed the bill 209-0, with two not voting.  It was then blocked from even receiving a vote in the Senate by Mitch McConnell.

But this piece isn’t about gerrymandering… although we may return to that topic in the future.  What matters here is the extent to which the Epstein affair matters.  The answer, Curmie suspects, could be anywhere on the continuum from “a lot” to “not much.”  As noted above, everyone already knows that Trump will be implicated if that material ever becomes public.  The only question is how significantly.  But knowing in one’s brain and one’s heart that such evidence exists and being unable to deny that evidence’s existence are two different things.

Still, Trump’s boast early in the 2016 campaign that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose voters” may be a little more true than we’d like to believe.  Certainly, anyone who ever would have actively supported Trump—as opposed to despising him less than the other candidate—is indeed sufficiently lacking in morality (or even humanity) that the only thing that would make such a person change their mind would be for Trump to stop being a racist, sexist, anti-intellectual, plutocratic homophobe.

Still, whereas such people are willing to excuse his lies, his felony convictions, his open grifting, and his incoherent bluster… they might just draw the line at raping junior high girls.  The MTGs of the world will tell the tale.  At the moment there’s a trickle of dissent.  If it stays that way, we’ll have to wait until at least next year’s midterms to see how things play out.  But even one or two significant defections could open the floodgates. All bullies—and Trump is unquestionably in that category—are cowards.  If he stops scaring people, he’s powerless, because he’s too fundamentally stupid and narcissistic to convince anyone to come around to his point of view without at least an implicit threat. 

There is another possibility, of course: that we have the distraction backwards.  If, hypothetically, the files reveal that Trump was less complicit in the Epstein/Maxwell sexual exploitation ring than we had believed, then all the attention given to the files was itself the distraction from other illegal or unethical activity.

Ultimately, though, there is one central question: will the Republicans whom Curmie once disagreed with but respected stop bowing and scraping to the Grifter-in-Chief?  It’s possible.  After all, Trump has already secured the title of Most Corrupt President in US History.  He’s not only won the race, he’s lapped the field, leaving Nixon, Harding, and Grant looking at each other wondering how to even compete with that.  But the average GOP Congresscritter demonstrates, shall we say, invertebrate tendencies. 

Will the courageous and patriotic survivors of Epstein, Maxwell, and Trump who addressed the world this week save the country?  They just might.  Unfortunately, they could be our only chance.

 

The Overlooked Element in the Government Shutdown

Anyone who pays even a little attention to the news knows that there has been a substantial if incomplete shutdown of the federal government, precipitated by a temper tantrum thrown by John Boehner, who dances subserviently at the behest of everyone’s favorite foreign-born chauvinist, Ted Cruz. The allegedly left-leaning press has contorted itself into knots too complicated for the Boy Scout Handbook in order to appear impartial, suggesting that “there’s plenty of blame to go around,” and similar twaddle. Fact is, this debacle is 100% the result of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ falling well short of the maturity level of a particularly bratty 2nd-grader. Whereas there is little doubt that the Obama administration is playing this situation for political points rather than engaging in anything resembling statesmanship, the GOP—intentionally or otherwise—bear all of the responsibility for the shutdown.

The original excuse for the Republicans’ juvenile display—the alleged horrors of “Obamacare”—was transparently mendacious from the start. Curmie was only reluctantly and tentatively brought around to the point of view that the Affordable Care Act was a net positive, and may change his mind in the future. But the claim, as Fox News asserted and GOP politicos obediently echoed, that the ACA had “failed” before it even took effect would have to take a step up in integrity to qualify as sophistic. More to the point, you never get everything you want in politics: that’s the way of the world. Inconveniencing millions of people and actually endangering lives in order to engage in a histrionic hissy fit to overturn a bill that was passed by the Congress, signed by the President, and upheld by the Supreme Court isn’t statesmanlike; it isn’t adult behavior; it isn’t even ethical.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about. I choose instead to discuss something the yammering classes have scrupulously avoided… how we ended up with a divided government. After all, it would be impossible to imagine a Speaker Pelosi furloughing workers and denying access to needed services in a fit of pique against the Obama administration. I doubt, in fact, that had the 2012 election turned out radically differently, she’d have done so to protest the overreach of a Romney administration… she might have, of course, but we’ll never know.

We’ll never know because President Obama cruised to re-election while the GOP maintained their majority in the House, even though they lost seats both there and in the Senate. Given the fact that the Dems actually followed Curmie’s advice (not that they actually paid any attention to Curmie, per se, but you know...) and ran as Democrats this time, embracing rather than running away from the signature achievement of Obama’s first term, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the electorate rejected the ACA. Rather, there is one word that accounts for the Republican majority in the House: gerrymandering.

The Democrats won the popular vote for the House of Representatives in 2012 by over 1.6 million votes, or 1.4 points (not a landslide by any means, but not close, either) and yet Speaker Boehner claimed affirmation because the GOP kept a 33-seat majority (over 7.5 percentage points). In other words, the disparity between the popular vote and actual representation differs by about 9 percentage points. That’s a lot.

There are plenty of analysts who attribute much if not all of the disparity to gerrymandering, and while there are those who disagree, the fact that in, say, Pennsylvania, the Democrats took a clear majority of the votes but got fewer than a third of the Representatives… that certainly suggests an inequitable distribution of voting suasion. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that the district lines were drawn intentionally to shift the balance of power from one party to the other, and there were in fact some states in which Democrats received disproportionate representation—Republicans took the popular vote in Arizona by 8.5 points but the Dems got 5 seats to the GOP’s 4, for example. So the above commentary isn’t intended to criticize only the Republicans. But, as Sam Wang wrote in the New York Times in February of this year, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.”

Moreover, there’s this: Texas Attorney General and (God help us) likely successor to Rick Perry as Executive Idiot Governor Greg Abbott actually brags about his gerrymandering chicanery, not in some backroom schmooze with campaign contributors like Mitt Romney’s unfortunate “47%” gaffe, but in public court documents (!). In a defense of Texas’s practice vis-à-vis the Voting Rights Act, Abbott argues as follows:

DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.

Seriously, he said that. You see, the attempt wasn’t to disenfranchise minority voters; it was to disenfranchise Democrats, and it’s just a concidence that a lot of Dems are minorities and vice versa. Paraphrasing only slightly: “Of course we cheated, but we’re not racists.” (A good many Texas Republicans actually are, of course, but that’s another matter.)

Most Republican legislators and other politicos aren’t as brazen as Abbott in privileging their own power over the actual will of voters, but you can bet that a lot of them had similar motivations. So when you contemplate the puerile antics of the Boehners and Cruzes of the world, remember this: there may be a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, but there isn’t in the population that elected them.

Is This Any Way to Run a Democracy?

There has been much in the news worthy of commentary in the far-too-long since I’ve written here: a number of worthy Curmie nominees, some political specifics (the Benghazi kerfuffle, the Hamas/Israel showdown, etc.). But most of all, there’s the election earlier this month. I’ll try to get to some of those other topics over the next few days or weeks, but I know where I have to start.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the results themselves, which could be described as a rather predictable but thorough ass-whipping by the party that has lost its soul over the party that has lost its mind… or, rather, over the party that has lost its mind as well as its soul. The Democrats put forward some pretty sketchy candidates of their own, but neither party has nominated a presidential candidate so completely mendacious and two-faced as Mitt Romney in at least my lifetime… still, who was the alternative?

Newt Gingrich, who is at best a caricature of the smart and savvy (utterly unethical, but smart and savvy) Speaker he once was? Rick Santorum, whose only saving grace is that he might actually believe some of the nonsense he spews? Ron Paul, who has a handful of good and interesting ideas but is from another planet on too many issues to be taken seriously as a contender? One-time leader Herman Cain, who was slightly less qualified to President than someone chosen random from the phone book? Certifiably certifiable Michele Bachmann? Or one-time “sure thing” Rick Perry, who proved to be too incompetent even for Republicans in any state where he doesn’t have a political machine beholden to him?

The good news is that the likes of Romney and Allen West and Todd Akin lost. Indeed, there was a pretty good house-cleaning. And marriage equality won in four out of four states in which it was on the ballot, either positively (specifically legalizing) or negatively (refusing to pass a constitutional amendment against it). But Bachmann squeaked out a re-election and idiots like Tom Coburn and Louis Gohmert coasted to victory. And a fresh new crop of morons, headed by Texas’s own Ted Cruz, will be descending on Washington, DC and on state capitols over the next few weeks.

What I really want to consider, however, is not who won, but what it means. Specifically, do the Democrats have a “mandate”? Short answer: sort of.

Certainly November 6 was a better day to be a Democrat than a Republican. But President Obama’s re-election was hardly a landslide. Yes, a difference of over 100 electoral votes is pretty impressive. Candidate Romney took precisely one, one state (North Carolina) that anyone considered anything like a tossup two months before the election. He took one other state (Indiana) that Obama won in 2008. That’s it. And when the conservative pundits emerged from their fact-averse bunkers to assure the Fox News-watching sheeple that “their” candidate (whom they actually hated nearly as much as they did… you know… the black guy) would win by a “landslide” (here, here, and here, for example), they meant something precisely on the order of the 100+ EV victory Obama actually achieved.

Still, Mr. Obama barely eked out a popular vote majority. Votes are still being counted in some jurisdictions, but it looks like the President will get a little less than 51% of the popular vote to Mr. Romney’s 47.5% or so, with the remaining votes divided among Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, et al. Yes, that’s about a 4 million vote difference, but it falls well short of my definition of “landslide,” which would involve a 10-point difference. Obama’s victory margin was roughly a third of that.

Moreover, Obama lost ground in a host of states: he won by less or lost by more in 46 states and DC relative to his performance against John McCain four years ago. And whereas McCain was less than an ideal candidate and chose a certifiable idiot as a running mate, he was still more experienced, more intelligent, more principled, more charismatic, more populist, and in general less of a plutocratic jackass than Romney. That doesn’t exactly add up to a full-throated endorsement of President Obama.

What really did break for the Democrats was the legislature. Yes, the Republicans maintained control of the House. With a couple of races still up in the air, it looks like a comfortable 235-200 GOP advantage, give or take a vote or two. Trouble is, Democrats actually got more votes: about a half a million more votes, to be a little more precise. Why the disparity between the number of votes and the number of those elected? In a word, gerrymandering.

This isn’t (just) a screed against evil Republicans. The excellent analysis by Adam Serwer, Jaeah Lee, and Zaineb Mohammed at Mother Jones shows that Democrats aren’t above a little… erm… massaging themselves, as evidenced by Maryland and Illinois. But there’s relatively speaking more manipulation by Republican governors and state legislators than by their Democratic counterparts: a function of opportunity rather than relative perfidiousness, no doubt. The seven states highlighted in the Mother Jones piece that were gerrymandered by Republicans all voted for Obama at least once; six voted for him twice. Yet all have majority Republican House representation. Pennsylvanians, for example, cast about 60,000 more votes for Democratic candidates than for Republicans. Their Congressional delegation? 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Coincidence? Justice? Honest representation? I think not. Slimebag politicians more interested in their party than in their constituents? Oh, yeah.

In the Senate, the Democrats really cleaned up. Without equivocating about the two “independents” who caucus with the Democrats, the Democrats defended 23 seats compared to only 10 for the GOP. And the Dems actually gained seats. They replaced the squirrelly Joe Lieberman with “real Democrat” Chris Murphy, regained Ted Kennedy’s seat with populist favorite Elizabeth Warren, and—thanks to the GOP’s nomination of the moronic Richard Mourdock—flipped Dick Lugar’s seat in Indiana. Honest-to-God independent Angus King replaced retiring Republican Olympia Snowe. The only bad news for Democrats was Bob Kerrey’s inability to hold Ben Nelson’s seat in Nebraska… but Nelson’s was never a reliable vote, anyway.

Where does all this leave us? With a President who claims a mandate despite getting less than 51% of the vote against a terrible candidate. With a Speaker who claims a mandate despite losing the popular vote. With a clear statement only with respect to the Senate, but with that body saddled by inane filibuster rules and personal privilege nonsense that allows a single obstructionist to derail, well, virtually anything.

With an arcane and anti-democratic Electoral College system that skews proportional representation: there are about 677,000 Californians per electoral vote, vs. 209,000 Vermonters per electoral vote. Yes, that’s more than a 3:1 ratio. Worse, there is no incentive for Barack Obama to care in the slightest about my vote because I live in Texas, or for Mitt Romney to care about the votes of my high school friends who still live in New York. Worse still, the resulting over-emphasis on places like Ohio and Florida leads not merely to an inundation of political advertising in those states, but to a level of pandering to special interests that ought to be unacceptable even in our all-too-venal political system: would we even be talking about crap like “clean coal technology” if it weren’t for the fact that a few thousand votes in southern Ohio might actually tip a national election even if the rest of the country decides otherwise by literally millions of votes.

Finally, fraud has a greater chance of mattering. Flipping 100,000 votes wouldn’t have made any difference in the popular vote in any election since 1960. Flipping the right 100,000 votes—in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004—would have changed outcomes. Thus, the claims of the Anonymous (?) folks that they prevented Karl Rove and his nasty little minions from stealing Ohio for Romney are… well, they’re a lot of things, including a little more plausible. True Believers like Thom Hartmannare are convinced that’s why Rove was so smarmily confident on Fox News on election night: that he thought (incorrectly) that the fix was in. (Of course, Hartmann is convinced the 2004 election was stolen, too.) At best, the Electoral College helps to erode the confidence of the public that election results are accurate. At worst, we get a President and a Congress whom most of us voted against.

What’s to be done?

When They Make Me Tsar ©:
We do away with the Electoral College, or at least circumvent it.
We eliminate the arcane rules of the Senate, especially but not exclusively the filibuster.
We pull re-districting from partisan control.
We overturn the legalized anonymity part (at least) of the Citizens United decision.

Can all this happen? It must. Because the status quo is well short of a democracy.

Another Power Play Masquerading as Democracy

A few days before the 2000 election, there was speculation amongst the Talking Heads world that whereas George W. Bush seemed poised to win the popular vote, Al Gore had a reasonable chance of winning the only vote that mattered by means of a victory in the Electoral College. Republican spewers of talking points bemoaned the archaic system whereby the Voice of the American People (Always capitalized. Always.) was subject to such flagrant misrepresentation; their Democratic counterparts babbled about how “rules are rules,” and both sides knew them from the outset.

Of course, the actual election was as close as it was expected to be, but it was Gore who won the popular vote and Bush who (with a little help from the Supreme Court) claimed the presidency. I need hardly mention that the airwaves were promptly filled with more blatherers from both sides, making precisely the opposite points from what they’d been saying only a few days earlier. Neither side as much as missed a beat. One was indeed reminded of Lili Tomlin’s sage observation that no matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.

Since then, there have been numerous attempts to tinker with the electoral process. Mostly, these have consisted of Democratic attempts to register more voters in urban areas with significant minority populations, and Republican efforts to require more identification than had hitherto been necessary. Both these campaigns seem legitimate on their surface: the ethical position must be that every effort should be made to allow all qualified voters the opportunity to exercise that franchise while exercising appropriate controls to prevent abuse (voting by non-citizens, multiple votes by the same person, etc.).

Of course, both sides were actually engaged in largely disingenuous endeavors not to provide a comprehensive and legitimate electoral base, but to help their side win. Indeed, about the only thing more outrageous than the campaigns themselves was the opposition to them. That is, while Democratic efforts to register voters were unquestionably more self-serving than altruistic or patriotic, the GOP’s hysteria about ACORN and the like was as disingenuous as it was voluminous. Similarly, Republican efforts to require photo identification of prospective voters purported to be a response to a problem that was largely imaginary, but actually expecting some sort of real identification from someone attempting to vote hardly qualifies as the sort of diabolical voter suppression the left would have us believe.

True, there are exceptions: Steve Krieser, the jackass in Wisconsin who decided that state employees shouldn’t tell citizens that government-issued ID cards are in fact free (if you ask specifically), not $28, should be bitch-slapped; whoever was responsible for firing a state employee for having the audacity to inform the public of their rights should face a worse fate than that. But I confess myself unable to work up much righteous dudgeon at the idea of actually needing the card (provided that it’s free).

The latest attempt to fiddle with the system seems on the surface to be innocuous enough, even though everyone on both sides knows it’s a power play. Pennsylvania is contemplating, and—given who’s currently in power in the state—may well pass, legislation to change the way its electoral votes are allotted. Needless to say, Republicans, who currently control state government but haven’t won the state in a presidential contest in a generation except in the blowout of 1988, claim that their proposition is intended only “to more fairly distribute our electoral votes based on the popular vote in Pennsylvania.” Meanwhile, Democrats argue that the problem with the idea is that it would reduce the influence of Pennsylvania on the national election. I need hardly mention that both sides are lying.

This is all about gaining a political advantage, and has nothing to do with providing a real voice for voters or ensuring an accurate representation. Why else would the Dems have thought this was a good plan a couple years ago and the GOP hated the idea? Of course, the cleanest and most sensible solution would be to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would ensure that the Presidency would be won by whoever gets the most votes. The ploy here is to entice enough state legislatures to vow that the entirety of their state’s electoral votes would go to the national popular vote winner, regardless of who wins their state.

If states totaling 270 electoral votes sign on (they’re currently at 132), the problem is solved. Don’t expect it to happen any time soon, however: the Pennsylvanias, Ohios, and Floridas have too much to lose if presidential campaigns—and the accompanying media buys, demand for office space, hotel rooms, restaurants, and the like—were to afford them only the same interest those of us in states dominated by one party (whichever one it is) receive. Indeed, of the eight states (and the District of Columbia) which have passed this legislation, which would kick in if and only if the 270 vote threshold is achieved, only one, New Jersey, is ever seriously in play in a close election.

The system being proposed in Pennsylvania has already been adopted by Maine (in 1972) and Nebraska (in 1996), but those deviations from the norm have swung a grand total of one electoral vote ever, giving then-Senator Obama a slightly larger margin of victory over John McCain than he otherwise would have. But it is perfectly plausible that a state like Pennsylvania, with a heavy concentration of Democratic voters in and around Philadelphia but a largely Republican electorate elsewhere in the state, could vote for Obama’s re-election but he not only wouldn’t take all the state’s electoral votes, he might not even get the majority. Yale University constitutional law professor Akhil Reed Amar argues that “[it] might be very likely to happen in [Pennsylvania], and that’s what makes this something completely new under the sun. It’s something that no previous legislature in America since the Civil War has ever had the audacity to impose.”

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with dividing a state’s electoral votes. But, even apart from the obvious partisanship that underlies this proposition, there are problems here. First off, it leads to a bizarre patchwork of state policies that leads to a system even more arcane and, frankly, stupid, than even the silliness that is the Electoral College to begin with. Indeed, about the only thing more inane than giving a state’s entire complement of electoral votes to someone who wins by a couple hundred votes is to give the majority of electoral votes to a candidate who doesn’t even win the state. The Republicans don’t care, of course, and I’m not naïve enough to think the Democrats would be any different if the shoe were on the other foot.

More importantly, especially in the short term, this change provides a further incentive for the shameless gerrymandering characterized by post-Tom DeLay Texas. Politicians’ first instinct, alas, has little to do with service and everything to do with power: theirs, and that of their ideological brethren. The Republican Congressmen and their staffers who are quoted periodically admitting that they don’t want to do anything to help the President—as agreeing to a jobs package that they implicitly admit would have benefits to the country would do, for example—are different from their colleagues on either side of the aisle only by the frankness with which they confess their unfitness for office.

So it comes as no surprise that we get districts—state and federal alike—that look like butterflies, cobras, and coatimundis (complete with tails). Indeed, identifying the shape of gerrymandered districts is the 21st-century equivalent of naming constellations a couple of millennia ago or playing “that cloud looks like…” when you were a kid. The inevitable result, however, is a democracy in name only. The majority of the population voted for Al Gore and we got George W. Bush. I think that’s a calamity: not (just) because Bush was the worst President in American history (although he was), but because of the means by which he was… ahem… elected. But at least (with the possible exception of the Florida debacle) that was “by the rules.” More significantly in the here and now: gerrymandered state districts lead to gerrymandered federal districts, which could reasonably lead to tipping an election by means of the kind of vote-splitting now being contemplated.

Indeed, the only significant officials at the state and national level who are elected directly by voters without artificial and often dishonest districting policies are governors and US Senators. There are a lot of idiot governors out there—there’s one in my current state and another in the state I lived in before moving here—but at least the people actually had a voice, however much the Citizens United decision may have skewed their ability to discern the actual characteristics of the people they were electing.

But nothing can pass the US Senate if Senators representing a pretty damned small percentage of the population decide to filibuster (or, given the fecklessness of today’s Democrats, even threaten to do so). The 15 states with two GOP Senators total less than 27% of the population. Add in 11 other Republicans (from states with one Republican and one Democrat) representing another 10% of the population, and you’ve gummed up the works for everyone. Meanwhile, over 42% of the population lives in a state that elected two Democratic Senators, and another third live in a state with one Democratic Senator. And, of course, citizens of the reliably Democratic District of Columbia, with essentially the same population as reliably Republican Wyoming, have no representation in the Senate at all. For all this, we get gridlock… if we’re lucky.

Choosing electoral votes by Congressional districts is not the end of the world. But taking one more step down the road towards re-writing laws to benefit those currently in power might be. And that’s where this proposed legislation will take us. In a just universe, of course, if the bill passes, the Republican nominee (whoever that may be) will squeak out a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, but the handful of electoral votes President Obama gets by winning Philadelphia tips the election to him. It could happen. Hey, it’s even possible the GOP will nominate someone sane. Just don’t hold your breath.