Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 14

Republicans Discover the Horror of Gerrymandering

The Democrats who control New York politics had drawn maps that could essentially wipe out half of the GOP’s eight congressional seats in the state before a single vote is cast. “It is wrong, and it is illegal,” Representative Elise Stefanik, the upstate New Yorker who serves as chair of the House Republican Conference, told me last week. She is supporting a lawsuit that Republicans nationally and in New York have filed against the Democratic-drawn map, alleging that it violates a prohibition in the state’s constitution against partisan gerrymandering.

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Heading into the once-a-decade reapportionment process, Democrats and political forecasters warned that Republicans could capture the House majority—now held by Democrats with a mere five-seat margin—through gains won by gerrymandering alone. Yet with maps completed for more than two-thirds of the nation’s 435 House seats, the biggest surprise has been how well Democrats have done. They have fought Republicans at least to a draw and, according to one prominent forecaster, David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, they might have even gained a few seats overall.

The United States is stealing Afghanistan’s money

In essence, a group of 9/11 families secured a default judgment against the Taliban as a nonsovereign entity a decade ago. At the time it was viewed as a largely symbolic ruling. After the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan last year, however, this same group of families went after the central bank’s assets held in the New York Fed. Using some bizarre logic, a federal district court ruled that because the Taliban now controlled Afghanistan, the plaintiffs could go after the frozen assets — even though the United States does not recognize the Taliban as the lawful rulers of Afghanistan (and even if they did, Afghanistan was not named as a sovereign defendant in the initial lawsuit).

Democracy Is On The Ballot In These 11 Secretary Of State And Attorney General Elections

An article about the various candidates for Secretary of State in the 2022 elections for several close state offices.

The aftermath of the 2020 presidential election was probably most Americans’ introduction to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who rebuffed then-President Donald Trump’s entreaties to “find 11,780 votes” that would allow him to carry the state. Same with Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who filed a baseless lawsuit to get the Supreme Court to throw out 60 of then-President-elect Biden’s electoral votes.

Secretaries of state and state attorneys general have always been influential within their own states, but the attempted abuse of these offices to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election has finally awakened the rest of the country to their importance.

As the ones who oversee the administration of elections and the certification of results in most states, secretaries of state play a fundamental role in our democracy. And given their discretion to interpret and implement election laws in ways that either make it easier or harder to vote, they’ve already drawn a lot of attention for 2022: Candidates for the office are raising record sums of money, Trump has personally pushed to install loyalists in three key states, and incumbents who otherwise might have sailed to an uncontroversial reelection are now facing rabid primary challenges.

From the day before the election:

Parental fury propels San Francisco school board ouster (Politico)

On Tuesday, voters here are poised to oust three school board leaders who focused on symbolic liberal moves — most famously, the renaming of 44 schools — as classrooms stayed shut longer than most cities during the first year of the pandemic.

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Incredulous parents watched last year as the seven-member board spent hours worked to rename schools and discard merit-based admissions policies at a storied high school, citing equity concerns, as classrooms sat empty of students. Then board member Alison Collins, one of the recall targets, sued the cash-strapped district for $87 million, claiming the district violated her free-speech rights when she was reprimanded for old tweets accusing Asian-Americans of “using white supremacist thinking to get ahead.” A federal judge tossed the case.

Some San Franciscans grew angry enough to launch a recall drive that gained the support of deep-pocketed allies and prominent Democratic officials, vastly outraising the school board’s defenders. Affluent technology industry players like former PayPal executive David Sacks and other wealthy donors, including charter school proponent and billionaire investor Arthur Rock, have opened their wallets to buoy the effort.

Here are the results:

Three Progressive SF School Board Members Booted in Landslide Vote (The Daily Beast)

More than 70 percent of the 117,165 voters opted to recall Commissioner Alison Collins, President Gabriela López and Vice President Faauuga Moliga. They will be removed from office and replaced by mayoral appointments once the vote is officially accepted by the Board of Supervisors.