Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of March 29

Why Democrats might need to play dirty to win: The party is trying to ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, but with the threat of Republicans redrawing districts in red states, doing the same in blue states like New York might be the only way to preserve the Democratic House majority.

[...] The shuffling of House seats as a result of the decennial census is expected to shift power from mostly Democratic states like California, New York, and Illinois to states like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina—all of which will have legislatures controlled by Republicans who will be in charge of drawing new districts. “The bottom line is: If this becomes an arms race, and both parties maximize their advantage in the states that they control, Republicans will come out ahead,” [...] The GOP needs to flip just five Democratic seats to recapture the House majority in 2022, and conceivably, the party could gain all of those seats through gerrymandering alone. Wasserman projects that Republicans could net anywhere from zero to 10 seats from redistricting.

While I think most of the article is a decently interesting talk about how Democrats in New York are adapting to this, I think the part of the article I quoted really sums it all up. With the paper-thin margin Democrats hold in the house, Democrats are basically playing prisoner's dilemma with gerrymandering.

Two Capitol Police officers are injured in a vehicle attack; complex is on lockdown.

The Capitol Police said Friday that a suspect was in custody after two officers had been struck and injured by a vehicle near the heavily guarded northern entrance to the U.S. Capitol.

The Capitol complex was locked down, as the agency instructed staff to remain indoors, away from doors and windows, as eyewitnesses posted videos of a large law enforcement response.

“A suspect is in custody,” the Capitol Police said on Twitter. “Both officers are injured. All three have been transported to the hospital.”

Images from the scene posted on social media appeared to show emergency workers treating someone on the driveway of the Capitol.

Conservatives frustrated by popularity of Dems' voting-rights bill

New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang discharged from hospital after kidney stone

"Have been discharged and will now proceed to drink lots of water for the rest of the day," Yang said in a tweet Friday.

Yang visited an emergency room earlier this morning after experiencing abdominal pain and was diagnosed with an apparent kidney stone, his campaign said in a statement.

His public events for Friday were canceled, "but he looks forward to getting back out on the trail in the days ahead," the campaign said.

On Twitter, Yang thanked the team at Mount Sinai West for the "excellent care" and his wife Evelyn "for keeping me company as I experienced my first (and hopefully last) kidney stone."

I think this is a great follow-up article for any article that talks in decent detail about Republicans' very negative response to changes in voting derived from the pandemic, like the one posted here or this article or this one:

This could be Democrats’ only chance to stop the GOP's assault on voting rights

The most explosive battle in decades over access to the voting booth will reach a new crescendo this week, as Republican-controlled states advance an array of measures to restrict the ballot, and the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the federal legislation that represents Democrats’ best chance to stop them.

It’s no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy. The outcome could not only shape the balance of power between the parties, but determine whether that democracy grows more inclusive or exclusionary. To many civil-rights advocates and democracy scholars I’ve spoken with, this new wave of state-level bills constitutes the greatest assault on Americans’ right to vote since the Jim Crow era’s barriers to the ballot.

Democrats may have only a brief window in which to block these state-level GOP maneuvers. Typically, the president’s party loses House and Senate seats in the first midterm election after his victory. Democrats will face even worse odds if Republicans succeed in imposing restrictive voting laws or gerrymandering districts in the GOP’s favor across a host of red states.

If Democrats lose their slim majority in either congressional chamber next year, they will lose their ability to pass voting-rights reform. After that, the party could face a debilitating dynamic: Republicans could use their state-level power to continue limiting ballot access, which would make regaining control of the House or the Senate more difficult for Democrats—and thus prevent them from passing future national voting rules that override the exclusionary state laws.

"More and more Democrats", Sarbanes said, are coming to recognize that “this isn’t just about trying to do something now that we can do later. This is about doing something now that we may not get the chance to do again for another 50 years.” Democrats face an unforgiving equation: a fleeting window in which to act, and potentially lasting consequences if they don’t. “If you look at all the stakes that are involved,” Sarbanes continued, “the notion that you would miss this opportunity becomes incomprehensible.”

Party Primaries Must Go: Extremely low turnout means partisan primaries motivate legislators to keep in lockstep with a narrow and extreme slice of the electorate rather than govern in the public interest.

Why did so many Republicans—147 of them—object to the Electoral College result on January 6?

Most voted to overturn the election out of fear. Not fear of the angry mob that had invaded the Capitol hours earlier, but fear of the voters who might threaten their reelection––specifically in their next party primary.

The problem stems from the fact that most members of Congress represent districts that have become reliably Democratic or Republican; some districts have been gerrymandered that way, but most are now “safe” for one party because of the electorate’s own self-sorting, driven by our growing rural and urban divide. Without any real competition in the general election, the only election of consequence in the large majority of congressional districts––and the only mechanism for accountability––is the primary.

Further, in lopsided districts, only the primary of the dominant party actually matters. In a majority of states, laws prohibit either unaffiliated voters or members of the other party from participating in these elections, sometimes both. And among those who can participate, very few do. Despite record turnout in the November 2020 election, just 10 percent of eligible voters nationwide cast ballots in primaries that effectively decided the outcome of more than 80 percent of U.S. House elections, according to a new report by Unite America, an organization I lead.

A solution to this problem that he mentions on the article is this:

[...] in November, Alaska became the latest state to ditch partisan primaries when its voters adopted a sweeping election-reform package on the ballot.

Known as “final-four voting,” this system has two major advantages. First, by abolishing party primaries, it eliminates elected leaders’ fear of being “primaried” by a small base of voters within their own party. Second, by abolishing plurality-winner elections and the “spoiler” effect they produce, it levels the playing field for independent and third-party candidates.

Personally I find this to be definitely far better than the current system, albeit I think primaries would still be good in a national level because they can highlight differences inside the parties and encourage reconciling them (which is why primaries exist in the US) as opposed to generally having your party's candidate for president be a choice left to a far smaller group, albeit this would be far better if the US had an electoral system that truly allowed multiple parties.

The G.O.P. Has Some Voters It Likes and Some It Doesn’t aka The Republican Party Is Driving the Nation's Democratic Decline.

This is what happens when a political party turns against democracy.

If Republicans are building the infrastructure to subvert an election — to make it possible to overturn results or keep Democrats from claiming electoral votes — then we have to expect that given a chance, they’ll use it.

Starting to feel like these threads are really quieting down. Maybe it's time to move this to fortnightly/monthly?