LET THE REDISTRICTING WARS BEGIN!

Today, the Census Bureau has released the official data of the 2020 Census that will be used for the decennial reapportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives. The data will flesh out the who, what and where of the 331,449,281 people who live in the United States. The files will show how the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods have shifted over the past decade. It is the data most state legislatures use to redraw political districts for the next 10 years.

If you were looking for an event that might calm our troubled political waters, you’re going to have to look elsewhere. This is not that. Here’s why:

Most of the states that gained House seats in the 2020 reapportionment are in the south and west: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon each gained one new seat while Texas won two. Also: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each lost a seat. Two of the shifts were by razor-thin margins; New York lost that seat by just 89 people. Minnesota held onto one by only 26 people.”

The crucial fact is this: Republicans have control over more of the state legislatures that will draw the new lines.

Among the states gaining a seat, Colorado has both a Democratic state legislature and governor, making it likely the new congressional seat will be at least competitive for a Democratic candidate. Unfortunately, with Florida, Montana and North Carolina each getting one, while Texas gets two, that comes to five seats moved to states controlled by Republicans. Republicans hold total control of redistricting in 20 states, and they expected to gain seats after the 2020 census was tabulated, as they have. Some election experts believe the G.O.P. could retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from those five newly drawn districts. If they do, Qevin McQarthy, will become Speaker of the House on January 3, 2023. That is why this process will likely turn into the biggest political battle of 2021; more likely it will be the fiercest fight before the 2022 midterms. That’s because this will determine what happens in 2024.

Even before the census results were known, Republicans were planning to redraw two suburban Atlanta districts held by Democrats to make one of them more Republican; slicing Democratic sections out of a Houston district that Republicans lost in 2018; and carving up a northeastern Ohio district held by Democrats since 1985.

Remember, the attempted coup of 2021 was unsuccessful, but the Enemy has learned from their mistakes, and are now preparing the coming battlefields of 2022 and 2024 to lead to first their victory in taking control of the House, and then using that control to invalidate the results of the 2024 election to throw it into the House of Representatives, where the Republicans will control a majority of the state delegations, and can then hand the presidency back to Donald Trump.

This is why the Democratic failure to run a credible campaign in 2010, listening to the execrable Rahm Emmanuel tell them to concentrate on “the races we know we can win,” which led to the Republican takeover of the state legislatures through redistricting and gerrymandering between 2012-18 was so important. Now that the Democrats failed a second time to end up in a dominant position in a decennial election, the Republicans - now so radical they make the crazies of the 2010 Tea Party look sane - are this close > < to achieving their 50 year goal of overthrowing liberal democracy in this country.

The redistricting affects more than the national legislature. The GOP’s redistricting advantage could ensure Republican control of dozens of state legislatures for the next ten years. In some state legislatures, Republicans could create super-majorities, giving them the votes to override a governor’s veto and thus making the result of any election for governor of those states moot. Consider that such Republican control of state legislatures could mean even more voter suppression enacted before the 2024 election, while offering them the insurance of having control of enough legislatures to question the 2024 presidential election, as Trump wanted them to do in this last election.

An important point from the census is that U.S. population growth over the past decade slowed to its slowest rate since the 1930s, the second most sluggish since the first census in 1790. And unlike the slowdown in the Great Depression, which was a blip followed by a boom in the 1940 census, the slowdown this time is part of a longer-term trend, tied to the aging of the country’s White population, decreased fertility rates and lagging immigration. Almost all population growth nationwide was due to growth in minority POC communities. The Republicans, as the White People’s Grievance Party, have even more reason to monkey with the structure of how political decisions are made, since they represent the community that is losing voters. By 2024, it is likely a good one-fourth to one-third of the Baby Boomers - those born between 1946-50 that are now the most reliable demographic for the GOP - will have permanently departed.

All of this means that when the Congress reconvenes in September, voting rights legislation MUST BECOME THE TOP PRIORITY. Without a level playing field, it won’t matter what the Democrats have achieved this year and next with regard to their economic program they plan to run on in 2022. And if they lose the House in 2022, they will lose the presidency in 2024, and we will lose this country as it has existed since its founding.

The stakes this fall could not be higher. Do we keep our constitutional democratic republic, or do we go the way the Roman Republic did?

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