Republicans Are Poised to Gerrymander Their Way Into Long-Term Power

By Walker Bragman, Jacobin

15 August 21

Democrats missed a critical deadline to stop GOP gerrymandering. Now it will be full steam ahead on the Right’s undemocratic agenda.

emocrats just missed a crucial deadline in the fight against gerrymandering — and experts say very soon we will be witnessing the consequences.

On Wednesday, just before the Senate adjourned for its August recess, Republicans blocked an effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, to get the chamber to consider pared-down versions of the party’s voting rights and democracy reform legislation. Schumer’s ploy was largely symbolic: It was doomed to failure, given the lack of any GOP support, because Senate Democrats have so far refused to eliminate the filibuster and therefore need ten Republican votes to pass most legislation.

Schumer remained positive as he prepared to leave for vacation, declaring that Democrats were “making great progress” on a voting rights bill and promising that it ”will be the first matter of legislative business” when the Senate returns on September 13. In truth, though, Schumer and his caucus were knowingly giving up on their best chance to block state-level Republicans from gaming the redistricting process and relegating Democrats to the minority in the US House of Representatives.

That’s because on Thursday, the US Census Bureau released its 2020 census data, enabling states to begin the once-a-decade process of redrawing their statehouse and congressional districts. Advocates have long been warning of the need to pass electoral reforms before map drawing begins. Since that has now failed to happen, experts say there will be dire consequences, including an effective end to majority rule in the United States and a failure to address climate change in a meaningful way.

“These have been eight squandered months,” says journalist and gerrymandering expert David Daley, “The train is barrelling down the tracks and the light of the train is [now] upon us when it comes to these maps.”

“A 21st Century Jim Crow Assault”

Every ten years, after the census, states redraw their statehouse and congressional districts. In thirty-seven states, elected officials are in charge of that process. Twenty of those thirty-seven legislatures are completely controlled by Republicans, while eight are controlled by Democrats.

In 2011, thanks to a dark money–funded GOP campaign to capture hundreds of legislative seats during the 2010 midterms, Republicans dominated the redistricting process, designing the maps for more than 200 of the 340 congressional districts that were redrawn by state legislatures.

The GOP-drawn district maps heavily favored Republicans majorities at the state level and in the House. A 2017 study from the Brennan Center for Justice found: “In the 26 states that account for 85 percent of congressional districts, Republicans derive a net benefit of at least 16-17 congressional seats in the current Congress from partisan bias.”

The GOP’s control of Congress kneecapped the Obama presidency and was only overcome by Democrats after courts struck down gerrymandered congressional maps in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Last year, after scoring narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, Democrats at first appeared determined to prevent a repeat of the post-2010 debacle. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden declared that “a first priority” would be electoral reforms like those in the For the People Act, also known as HR 1, a voting rights and election infrastructure bill that would ban partisan gerrymandering.

As president, Biden continued to rail against GOP voter suppression laws, calling them a “21st Century Jim Crow assault,” and declaring that the fight for voting rights is “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”

Efforts to protect voting rights have broad support. Last month, more than a hundred fifty civil rights groups urged the president to pass voting rights reform “by whatever means necessary.” Meanwhile, a poll released earlier this week from Data for Progress and the nonprofit Equal Citizens revealed that 60 percent of Americans support banning partisan gerrymandering and creating independent redistricting commissions, including 74 percent of Democrats, 53 percent of Independents, and even half of Republicans.

But a vote to debate the For the People Act failed in late June, thanks to unified Republican opposition and Democrats’ refusal to abolish the filibuster. And last month, White House officials appeared to signal they were giving up on the bill, reportedly suggesting in private calls with voting rights activists that it might be possible to “out-organize” voter suppression, rather than combat it through legislation.

Now that a senate vote on the act has failed a second time and the new census data has been released, experts say we will see the results of that Jim Crow assault in the 2021 redistricting process.

“A GOP Takeover That Could Last a Decade”

Since the last redistricting, the Supreme Court has cleared the path for even more extreme gerrymandering thanks to two rulings: one from 2013, which struck down the formula for requiring jurisdictions to seek federal preclearance under the Voting Rights Act for changes to their election laws; and the other from 2019, which held that partisan gerrymandering is a political issue left up to the legislature to resolve.

Republicans are already planning on pressing their advantage. Recently, Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-TX, told a conference of religious conservatives that redistricting “alone should get us the majority back” in the House.

It is a situation that Daley, author of several books on GOP gerrymandering, including Ratfucked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, finds deeply concerning.

“The idea that Congress goes on recess and says we’ll deal with this in September is crazy-making,” Daley tells the Daily Poster. “There are states that could have maps enacted this fall, over the course of the next couple of months. This isn’t something that can be dealt with effectively after vacation. This is something that needed concerted effort and focus since day one.”

Daley predicts that Republicans will work to ensure a 2022 congressional majority by aggressive gerrymandering campaigns in key states like Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and New Hampshire. He says that while Democrats can pick up seats in Illinois, Maryland, and maybe New York, it won’t be enough to prevent a GOP takeover that could last a decade.

Texas in particular will likely be heavily gerrymandered, Daley says. The state is gaining two congressional seats because of population growth recorded by the 2020 census, and he expects both to go red. He says overall, the state could yield a total of two or three additional seats for Republicans through gerrymandering.

North Carolina, which is likewise gaining a congressional seat following the 2020 census, is also likely to be subject to heavy gerrymandering, says Daley. The state’s congressional split is currently 8-to-5 in favor of Republicans, but Daley expects the map to change to 11-to-3 or 10-to-4, with a net GOP gain of two or three seats. The North Carolina GOP already tried to rig the state’s maps in the past, but the efforts were blocked by federal and state courts in 2018 and 2019.

Daley furthermore expects Republicans to pick up four seats between Georgia and Florida, especially since the latter is gaining a seat thanks to the census. In New Hampshire, meanwhile, Daley says Republicans have made it clear they intend to draw an additional seat for themselves.

The redistricting could end up costing several Democratic lawmakers their seats.

In Kansas, for example, Daley says he fully expects Sharice Davids, the first openly LGBT Native American woman elected to Congress, to be gerrymandered out of her elected position. Daley also says if he were Rep. John Yarmuth, D-KY, he would be “a little jittery,” because “you could pretty easily crack Louisville in half and create an all-Republican delegation there.”

Other states to watch for GOP gains, he says, are Tennessee and Missouri. Daley thinks it might be difficult for Missouri Republicans to split Kansas City because doing so might invite a racial gerrymandering lawsuit. Still, he says it is feasible for the state’s 6-2 map to become a 7-1 map.

On the other hand, Daley says Democrats could pick up one or two seats in Illinois and one in Maryland. He notes, however, that while Maryland currently has a 7-1 congressional map in favor of Democrats that could potentially become 8-0, Democratic Reps. John Sarbanes and Jamie Raskin are both vocal opponents of gerrymandering. Should the state Democrats pull the trigger, Daley says, it “could be awkward.”

Daley calls New York a “wild card” because the state, which is losing a seat, has had an independent commission in charge of redistricting since 2014. But he adds that the commission could be overridden by the state’s Democratic legislature for “maybe a couple” of seats.

Another state to watch, according to Daley, is Wisconsin, since it has a Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who could veto the most egregious maps put forward by the state’s GOP legislature.

All in all, concludes Daley, Republicans could be looking at a net gain of twelve-plus congressional seats, thanks to gerrymandering.

“You can look at the map and you can say here’s at least 12 to 15 seats Republicans can pick up, and you can look at the map and say it’s hard for Democrats to squeeze out 4 or 5,” he explains. “And that’s before you redraw Ohio and Pennsylvania. Do Democrats lose seats there as a result of those new maps?”

The end result, Daley fears, will be the effective end of majority rule in the United States at the state and federal level, and a total failure to address urgent problems like climate change.

“I don’t know how you get climate [legislation] past the filibuster let alone a gerrymandered House,” Daley says. “But in many ways, the stark danger is what could happen to state legislatures. If the gerrymandering of this last cycle are effective and enduring as the ones about to be drawn, that’s another decade gone.”

“The Window Is Still Open”

Michael Li, who serves as senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, is concerned about Democrats missing this key deadline — but he says that hope is not entirely lost yet.

“The window [for reform] is still open, but the clock is ticking,” he says. “Things get more complicated the more time goes on.”

Li believes Congress could pass meaningful reforms after Labor Day, but once gerrymandered district maps are in place in the states, he explains, undoing them will require litigation and additional legislative maneuvers.

“That might require an additional legislative session to draw maps and it might mean having to move primaries or other election-related deadlines,” Li says. “[That] makes the process a lot messier than it would be if the rules were in place before maps are drawn.”

Reforms passed after the maps are drawn are also likely to be less robust than they otherwise could have been. Some of the redistricting provisions in the For the People Act cannot be made retroactive — like requirements that the map-drawing process be conducted transparently. Privileged communications cannot be made public after the fact, Li says.

Anti-gerrymandering provisions that are passed after maps are drawn could also be at a greater threat of successful court challenges.

Li says that, even though Democrats have already missed their key deadline, they should still do everything in their power to still pass redistricting reform.

“The reforms do get weaker the longer Congress takes to pass them, but the critical piece of the reform — which are new national rules including a ban on partisan gerrymandering — you could still impose even if maps have been passed,” Li says. “It just is a lot messier of a process then.”

The Return of the Taliban

By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

15 August 21

Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition.

atching Afghanistan’s cities fall to the Taliban in rapid succession, as the United States completes a hasty withdrawal from the country, is a surreal experience, laced with a sense of déjà vu. Twenty years ago, I reported from Afghanistan as the Taliban’s enemies took these same cities from them, in the short but decisive U.S.-backed military offensive that followed the 9/11 attacks. The war on terror had just been declared, and the unfolding American military action was cloaked in purposeful determinism in the name of freedom and against tyranny. For a brief moment, the war was blessed by that rare thing: public support, both at home and abroad.

In the wake of the horror of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, most Americans polled believed that the country was doing the “right thing” in going to war in Afghanistan. That level of support didn’t last long, but the war on terror did, and so did the military expedition to Afghanistan, which stretched on inconclusively for two decades and now ends in ignominy. Donald Trump set this fiasco in motion, by announcing his intention to pull out the remaining American troops in Afghanistan and begin negotiations with the Taliban. In February, 2020, an agreement was signed that promised to withdraw all U.S. military forces in return for, among other things, peace talks with the U.S.-backed Afghan government. The American troops were duly drawn down, but, instead of engaging in real discussions, the Taliban stepped up their attacks. In April, President Joe Biden announced his intention to carry on with the withdrawal, and pull out forces by September 11th. However much he says that he does “not regret” his decision, his Presidency will be held responsible for whatever happens in Afghanistan now, and the key words that will forever be associated with the long American sojourn there will include hubris, ignorance, inevitability, betrayal, and failure.

In that regard, the United States joins a line of notable predecessors, including Great Britain, in the nineteenth century, and the Soviet Union, in the twentieth. Those historic precedents don’t make the American experience any more palatable. In Afghanistan—and, for that matter, in Iraq, as well—the Americans did not merely not learn from the mistakes of others; they did not learn from their own mistakes, committed a generation earlier, in Vietnam.

The main errors were, first, to underestimate the adversaries and to presume that American technological superiority necessarily translated into mastery of the battlefield, and, second, to be culturally disdainful, rarely learning the languages or the customs of the local people. By the end of the first American decade in Afghanistan, it seemed evident that the Western counterinsurgency enterprise was doomed to fail, and not only because of the return of the Taliban in many rural parts of the country: the Americans and their NATO allies closed themselves off from Afghans in large regional bases, from which they operated in smaller units out of combat outposts, and distrust reined between them and their putative Afghan comrades. “Green-on-blue attacks,” in which Afghan security forces opened fire on their American and European counterparts, became alarmingly frequent. The Taliban, meanwhile, grew inexorably stronger.

During a visit to the tense, embattled, eastern province of Khost, in the winter of 2010, a senior American military commander there, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Lutsky, acknowledged to me the lack of trust with his Afghan counterparts, several of whom he suspected of working with the Taliban. “The cultural complexity of the environment is just so huge that it’s hard for us to understand it,” he said. “For Americans, it’s black or white—it’s either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it’s not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It’s just beyond us.”

Ten years on, as Afghanistan’s provincial capitals are falling to the Taliban and Kabul itself becomes encircled, the litany of exotic place names—Sheberghan, Taloqan, Kunduz, Kandahar, Herat—must mean little to most Americans, except for those who were once deployed in them. But a generation ago, as Afghan mujahideen, or holy warriors, of the so-called Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban coalition commanded by warlords, battled alongside American Special Forces to free these same towns from the Taliban, they were in the news constantly, as commonplace to Americans then as Benghazi or Raqqa became in later years. (In war, as in life, perhaps, people and places can become briefly and often intensely familiar, only to be discarded from memory when their apparent relevance has ceased. Who today remembers Hamid Karzai? Or Mullah Omar?)

When Kunduz and Sheberghan, adjacent cities in northern Afghanistan, fell within a day of each other, last weekend, I wondered how many Americans recalled that these were the sites of some of the bloodiest early episodes of the war, in 2001. In the desert outside Kunduz, hundreds and possibly thousands of Taliban and suspected Al Qaeda prisoners of war, who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance after the fall of the city that November, were locked in shipping containers and shot or left to die by forces led by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was working with the C.I.A. and with Special Forces commandos. Some of the survivors of that ordeal were selected for rendition by American agents on the ground, and ended up as prisoners in Guantánamo, beginning a controversial new chapter in American judicial history.

At the same time, an uprising by captured Taliban and foreign jihadis, at a nearby fortress named Qala-i-Jangi, resulted in the killing of Johnny Micheal Spann, an American C.I.A. officer—the first American to die in combat in Afghanistan. After days of fighting, during which at least three hundred prisoners died, the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, a twenty-year-old Muslim convert from California who had become a volunteer with the Taliban forces and had been questioned by Spann, was recaptured, after Dostum flooded the compound’s underground chambers. Lindh was returned to the U.S., tried in federal court for providing support to the Taliban, and sentenced to twenty years in a high-security federal prison. His presence at the fortress, though there is no evidence that he participated in the revolt, provoked strong feelings in the United States and led to an ongoing debate about national identity and loyalty in the modern age. In 2019, Lindh was released three years early, for good behavior, and he is on probation for the remainder of his sentence.

I was on the scene for the fall of Kunduz, in 2001, and was part of a small group of foreign journalists ambushed by Taliban fighters who had remained in hiding and attacked, even as most of their comrades were in the process of surrendering. Fortunately, none of us was killed, but the following night, after we returned to the nearby provincial capital, Taloqan, which had already been retaken by the Northern Alliance—and which also fell to the Taliban last weekend—a Swedish journalist was shot and killed by gunmen at the house where he was staying. After his death, and considering the lingering presence of numerous Taliban in Taloqan—along with that of allied Uzbek fighters, a group of whom we had seen engaged in last-minute deals with the Northern Alliance—the foreign journalists soon fled the city. I joined an armed convoy headed for Kabul, a four-day journey through the Hindu Kush mountains. Along the way, we were accosted by Afghan gunmen—perhaps Taliban, perhaps merely highwaymen—but, again, we were lucky, and arrived without loss of life.

Kabul had already fallen, supposedly. At least, the Taliban were visibly gone and, with them, their Al Qaeda friends. But, on subsequent days, as I moved around the devastated city, I had reason to wonder how genuine the Western-assisted Northern Alliance victory had been. One morning, a group of four women concealed in blue burqas approached me on the street, and one asked if I knew of any work opportunities. I was accosted by a furious shopkeeper for daring to communicate across the gender divide. The women scattered. It was as if a malady lingered in the Afghan air, despite the Taliban’s retreat.

Most of the Afghan men whom I met and who led battles against the Taliban two decades ago are now dead. Almost all were killed, in separate assassinations, as part of the Taliban’s plan to return to action. Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition, and has involved all the usual elements of guerrilla strategy: a stealth campaign of hit-and-run military attacks, selective assassinations to demoralize their adversaries, and acts of terror that both weakened the government and created an atmosphere of abject compliance from local populations. A public campaign of hearts and minds followed, accompanied by decoy negotiations with the government and its allies in order to promote the idea that, as a force, the Taliban are not really extremist and are, in fact, open to dialogue, even to internal change. But the Taliban, by their very nature, are fundamentalists, believers in a strict Quranic credo.

In the pre-Taliban days of the late eighties, when I spent time with the mujahideen of Kandahar, who were then fighting the Soviets, a pair of local Islamic scholars banned music after consulting their sacred texts; this rule was added to their list of severe prohibitions, which included death for adulterers and the amputation of hands for thieves. In a court, set up in the middle of a battlefield, the two judges explained their sentencing system and told me how many murderers and adulterers they had put to death, after which one of them said, “We adhere to the Sharia in all cases.” Patting a pile of holy tracts next to him, he added, “All the answers are here.”

It was this same kind of earnest devotion to Islamic law that earned early popularity for the Taliban, when they emerged in the same area a few years later, after the Soviet retreat, under the leadership of Mullah Omar, a particularly devout mujahideen commander. Various mujahideen warlords who had emerged ascendant were fighting one another for power, and some were abusive toward civilians in the areas that they controlled. Mullah Omar’s Taliban presented themselves as a moralizing force and made swift headway against the warlords. Within a couple years, they controlled most of Afghanistan, and Kabul fell to them in 1996.

With no opposition except for a rump group of Northern Alliance warlords, who held out in the northern mountains for the next few years (until the Americans came along to assist them, in 2001), the Taliban imposed their strict version of Sharia law. Afghan women were all but excluded from public life, with many girls prohibited from attending school; the freedom to work for female teachers, doctors, and nurses was drastically circumscribed. The Taliban zealotry grew so great that children were forbidden to play with dolls or to fly kites, in favor of prayer sessions, while ethnic minorities and members of religious sects other than the extreme Sunni version of Islam that the Taliban espoused were persecuted. In one incident, it is estimated that the Taliban killed at least two thousand ethnic Hazaras, who are Shiite. Public executions became a norm, as well, often of women accused of various moral offenses. The killings were often carried out on sports fields or in stadiums, with the condemned sometimes stoned to death, or summarily shot in the head, or hanged, or, in the case of homosexuals, crushed and suffocated by mud walls toppled onto them by tanks. Before ISIS, in other words, there was the Taliban, showing how to do things.

In March, 2001—a few months before their Al Qaeda comrades carried out the 9/11 attacks—the Taliban, as a testament to their supposed iconoclastic purity, destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. These were a pair of giant, fifteen-hundred-year-old sandstone statues, regarded as one of the man-made wonders of the ancient world. Taliban officials also took sledgehammers and axes to priceless artifacts in the Kabul Museum, destroying anything that predated Islamic civilization. The outside world did little to prevent any of these crimes.

The list of atrocities that the Taliban committed while they were in power goes on and on, and in the two decades since their ouster they have murdered again and again, in a war aimed at anyone who opposes them or even represents a potential challenge to them. The other day, a Taliban spokesman took credit for the murder, in Kabul, of his government counterpart, in what he called “a special attack.” Women have also been among the Taliban’s most consistent victims, from schoolteachers and television presenters to female parliamentarians and judges. In March, in the eastern city of Jalalabad, the Taliban killed three young female media workers; a female journalist was killed in June, in Kabul, by a car bomb. If the Taliban do sweep back into power in Kabul in the coming weeks, which seems a strong possibility, women will again be among their foremost targets.

There is a conceit that today’s Taliban is different from the Taliban of 2001. This is certainly an idea that some senior Taliban officials have sought to propagate in recent years. Facts on the ground suggest otherwise. They claim to have moved on from their old alliance with Al Qaeda, for instance, but over the years they have partnered with other jihadist groups operating, as they have done, out of sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, such as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for scores of suicide bombings and so-called complex attacks—involving gunmen and suicide bombers acting in tandem—and for causing hundreds of civilian deaths.

The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten. They merely did what guerrillas do in order to survive: they melted away in the face of overwhelming force, regrouped and restored themselves to fighting strength, and returned to battle. Here they are.