Paul Waldman: Surprisingly, there has been a redistricting turnaround

As one analyst after another noted, Republicans control more state legislatures and more redistricting processes, while in many states controlled by Democrats, redistricting is done by independent commissions. As a result, Republicans might be able to win the House through redistricting alone, even without increasing their vote share in the 2022 midterm elections.

At least that’s what everyone thought. Until now.

Just in the past few days, the conventional wisdom on redistricting has undergone a dramatic shift. The most informed redistricting experts now say it appears that this process will look more like a wash, or even that Democrats might gain a few seats.

How did this happen? Here are the key factors:

Republicans had already gerrymandered so aggressively in the post-2010 redistricting that they had limited room to add to their advantage.

In the relatively small number of states where they had the opportunity, Democrats are gerrymandering with equal vigor.

Look at the two largest states. If all you knew was that the GOP legislature controls redistricting in red Texas while in blue California the process is run by an independent commission, you might expect a huge net gain for Republicans. But that’s not how it worked out.

In Texas, Republicans chose to lock in their current advantage rather than expand it, a decision driven by the way the state is trending in a more Democratic direction. Currently there are 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats in Texas’s U.S. House delegation. Above all, the legislature made sure there would be almost no competitive districts in the future. So the new map will have 24 safe Republican seats, 13 safe Democratic ones and one competitive district (which Republicans might win).

Which means Republicans will gain only one or two seats in Texas — the smart move in the long run but not something that ensures victory in 2022 or 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/23/redistricting-turnaround/

Dana Milbank: This is the worst economy we never had

For months, the GOP-Fox News axis forecast the bluest of Christmases.

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy joined 159 House Republicans in a letter to President Biden saying his policies “will certainly ensure that this Christmas will not be merry” because of a “supply chain crisis” and inflation.

Chairman Jim Banks of the House Republican Study Committee, citing the same reasons, wrote to colleagues: “Our job as Republicans is to explain to the American people what the grinches at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave did to ruin Christmas.”

Fox News told viewers that “Christmas presents for your kids may not arrive on time or even at all” (Sean Hannity), that the president is “the Biden Who Stole Christmas” (Laura Ingraham) and that Biden is “facing a nightmare come Christmastime,” when “gifts are going to cost a fortune, and that’s even if you’re lucky enough to snag anything” (Jesse Watters).

Breitbart News trumpeted a Trump campaign adviser’s forecast for “a frankly miserable Christmas … the Biden Blue Christmas.” Newsmax foresaw “Biden’s Blue Christmas: Shortages, Frustration, Economic Malaise.”

And then — a Christmas miracle!

Holiday retail sales were the highest ever, jumping 8.5 percent from last year and nearly 11 percent from pre-pandemic 2019, as “consumers splurged throughout the season,” Mastercard reported Sunday.

Stores were stocked. Package deliveries were overwhelmingly on time. Inflation, though a serious concern, clearly didn’t deter shoppers, and holiday motorists found gas prices 14 cents a gallon lower than in November.

So, did GOP leaders and Fox News acknowledge they fearmongered in error? My closed-caption search might have missed something, but I found only three passing mentions on Fox News of the holiday sales triumph, amid a new round of doomsaying (“it looks like things are about to get a lot worse in the new year”). Republican Twitter guns were similarly silent. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/29/this-is-worst-economy-we-never-had/

Laurence H. Tribe, Donald Ayer and Dennis Aftergut: Will Donald Trump Get Away With Inciting an Insurrection?

The legal path to investigate the leaders of the coup attempt is clear. The criminal code prohibits inciting an insurrection or “giving aid or comfort” to those who do, as well as conspiracy to forcibly “prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” The code also makes it a crime to corruptly impede any official proceeding or deprive citizens of their constitutional right to vote.

Based purely on what we know today from news reports and the steady stream of revelations coming from the House select committee investigating the attack, the attorney general has a powerful justification for a robust and forceful investigation into the former president and his inner circle. As White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows was intimately involved in the effort to overturn the election. He traveled to Georgia last December, where he apparently laid the groundwork for the phone call in which the president pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio reportedly promoted a scheme to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject duly certified Joe Biden electors. And from their war room at the Willard Hotel, several members of the president’s inner circle hatched the legal strategy to overturn the results of the election.

The pending state and local investigations in New York and Atlanta will never be able to provide the kind of accountability the nation clearly needs. The New York case, which revolves around tax fraud, has nothing to do with the attack on our government. The Atlanta district attorney appears to be probing Mr. Trump’s now infamous call to Mr. Raffensperger. But that is just one chapter of the wrongdoing that led up to the attack on the Capitol.

Significantly, even if the Atlanta district attorney is able to convict Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump for interfering in Georgia’s election, they could still run for office again. Only convicting them for participating in an insurrection would permanently disqualify them from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Some have expressed pessimism that the Department of Justice would be able to convict Mr. Trump. His guilt would ultimately be for a jury to decide, and some jurors might believe he deluded himself into believing his own big lie and thus genuinely thought he was saving, rather than sabotaging, the election. But concerns about a conviction are no reason to refrain from an investigation. If anything, a federal criminal investigation could unearth even more evidence and provide a firmer basis for deciding whether to indict.

To decline from the outset to investigate would be appeasement, pure and simple, and appeasing bullies and wrongdoers only encourages more of the same. Without forceful action to hold the wrongdoers to account, we will likely not resist what some retired generals see as a march to another insurrection in 2024 if Mr. Trump or another demagogue loses.

Throughout his public life, Mr. Garland has been a highly principled public servant focused on doing the right thing. But only by holding the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrection — all of them — to account can he secure the future and teach the next generation that no one is above the law. If he has not done so already, we implore the attorney general to step up to that task. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/opinion/trump-capitol-riot-january-6th.html

William Kristol: Trump’s Defeat a Year Ago Was Dunkirk, Not D-Day

Where do we stand, as year 2021 of the common era and year one of the Biden presidency comes to an end?

We’re much better off than we might have been.

We’re not as well off as we might have hoped to be.

Respectable Republicans are not, at the end of 2021, doing much if anything to repudiate the conspiratorial craziness, the incitements to violence, the hostility to rational discourse, that are all around us and which have moved from the fringes of conservatism to close to dead center.

So the guardrails of liberal democracy and civic sanity are not stronger than they were a year ago. We did prevent the destruction of those guardrails, which is no small thing. But we haven’t succeeded in repairing or rebuilding them. Or to construct new ones. The forces of democracy remain beleaguered, the forces of sanity on the defensive. To the degree they’re regrouping, they’re doing so slowly and fitfully. And time is not on our side.

After Dunkirk, Churchill concluded his June 4, 1940, speech to the House of Commons with his famous peroration, “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on . . . until in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

But there is no one today who will step forth to rescue and liberate us from beyond the ocean. It’s not enough if we merely hold on. We have to be the source of our own rescue, the cause of our own liberation. And that work we have only just begun. https://www.thebulwark.com/trumps-defeat-a-year-ago-was-dunkirk-not-d-day/

Evan Osnos: Dan Bongino and the Big Business of Returning Trump to Power

Every weekday from noon to three—the coveted time slot once held by the late Rush Limbaugh—“The Dan Bongino Show” goes live across the United States, beginning with an announcer’s voice over the sound of hard-rock guitars: “From the N.Y.P.D. to the Secret Service to behind the microphone, taking the fight to the radical left and the putrid swamp.”

In Bongino’s world, it matters little that Trump’s claims of rampant fraud were dismissed by his own top appointees at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, as well as by federal and state judges. To the true believer, the lack of solid evidence simply confirms how well hidden the rigging was. In the study of conspiracy theories (a description Bongino rejects), this is known as “self-sealing”: the theory mends holes in its own logic. “A corrupted intelligence community, in conjunction with a corrupt media, will eat this country like a cancer from the inside out,” Bongino told his audience, as he built to a takeaway. “This is why I’m really hoping Donald Trump runs in 2024,” he said. “He’s the best candidate suited to clean house. Because if we don’t clean house the Republic is gone.”

One follower celebrated the campaign against vaccine mandates and gloried in the prospect of vindication. “Seeing a rise in people turning to NOT getting so many jabs, quitting jobs, and telling govt. to screw off is the first sign of a revolt,” she wrote, and added, “Let the revolt happen.”  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/dan-bongino-and-the-big-business-of-returning-trump-to-power

Paul Waldman: Joe Manchin has all the power — and a catastrophic lack of imagination

Manchin’s vision for the future of coal country seems to involve nothing more than letting the state’s ownership class — including him and his family — squeeze the last drops of wealth from a dying industry, then leave the people who labored in that industry with few economic prospects.

Yet for just a few billion dollars, we could give every one of them a new house, a truck and a seed grant to start a small business. Manchin could have asked for something like that and a whole lot more, and he would have gotten it. But he didn’t.

You could argue that Manchin isn’t ideologically inclined toward lots of government spending. Fine. But what does he want, other than to cut things out of the BBB that other Democrats favor? No one seems to know, maybe because the answer is that he doesn’t want anything.

Which raises a broader question: Is West Virginia a better place because of Manchin’s time in the Senate? More prosperous, more vital, more fair, better positioned for the future? What has he actually done for West Virginia?

Even if it’s hard for one senator to completely transform his home state, this is Manchin’s chance to do it. He’s in a position to do for West Virginia what no senator has ever done for their home state, if he really wanted.

But he doesn’t seem to want to. He has all the power, and no imagination. This failure has to be counted among one of the greatest lost opportunities in the history of Congress. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/22/manchin-has-no-imagination/

Ed Kilgore: Donald Trump Jr. Rejects Christianity’s ‘Turn the Other Cheek’ Teaching

 We have grown accustomed to the irony of conservative Christians all but idolizing a politician who is the most heathenish public figure of our generation, inordinately proud of his power over women in particular and supposedly lesser beings generally and incapable of confessing a single sin or weakness or defeat. But it’s still a bit jarring to hear this chip off the old block openly calling for an ethic of hatred, resentment, and vengeance against his imagined persecutors.

There is, of course, an ancient tradition in right-wing politics and culture of loudly proclaiming fidelity to Christianity while strategically ignoring its less convenient tenets. The authoritarian tradition of the 20th century, which so many of us fear the MAGA movement emulates, was conspicuous for promoting an extremely un-Christ-like worship of violence and repression in the name of defending “traditional Christian culture.” Adolf Hitler spoke of valuing “positive Christianity,” by which he meant the few teachings of Jesus Christ that did not directly contradict his gospel of racism, nationalism, and total war as a biological necessity. The Trumps aren’t typically articulate enough to promulgate a similar revision of the faith and may not personally subscribe to the crude racism and nationalism they relentlessly and cynically exploit. But it’s clear they appeal to a sort of cafeteria Christianity in which conservatives are encouraged to downplay or simply forget about the Jesus who condemned blood-and-soil loyalties on behalf of a universal ethic of love.

Mock it all you want, and I will, but this distorted Christianity has “worked” pretty well for Donald Trump Sr. and Jr. It has “gotten them” the White House for four years, dominion over of one of America’s two major political parties, and saddest of all, the especially devoted support of so many conservative followers of the Prince of Peace, who are willing to dismiss the savior’s teachings as T-ball and pursue an eye for an eye in order to smite their many enemies. So long as this thirst for holy violence and sanctified score-settling persists, the Trumps and their successors will always have a political base. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/donald-trump-jr-rejects-jesuss-turn-the-other-cheek.html