In This Taylorville Diner...

This is the headline in The Washington Post

Illinois Democrats drew new maps. The changes pushed the GOP to the right.

The state’s congressional redistricting illustrates how gerrymandering hollows out the political center and strengthens the fringe, experts say. 

Wow.  Illinois must have a real and distinctively Illinois problem to warrant dispatching WaPo's "senior correspondent covering national and international affairs", Kevin Sullivan and Clara Ence Morse, data intern, all the way from Washington, D.C. to the continental interior!

And where did they go to and who did they talk to to get the real, inside dope on gerrymandering?

They tell you that in the first two paragraphs!

TAYLORVILLE, Ill. — On a warm Friday night in the St. Mary’s Catholic Church parking lot, sweating men sipping cold beers dipped fish fillets into bubbling deep fryers as children played on the bouncy castle.

This down-home fish fry used to be a regular stop for U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, a moderate Republican who grew up in this former coal town in Central Illinois. But that was before new district lines drawn in 2021 pushed him into far more conservative terrain — and into competition with a fellow GOP incumbent...

Wow again!  And poor Rodney David!  Those Illinois Democrats must be uniquely despicable to warrant being called out in the first sentence of the headline, and blamed for the Illinois GOP losing it's mind in the second sentence.  

If only someone, somewhere had a solution.  But I guess not.  I guess we're just screwed forever.

And then...literally 41 paragraphs later.

The parties have different stances on how to address gerrymandering. Democrats have pushed for federal legislation that would require that maps be drawn by independent commissions; Republicans have largely resisted those calls.

Ah.  So its the Democrats have repeatedly proposed an equitable solution and Rodney Davis's party that has killed it.  Weird how you have to  slog through 43 paragraphs to find that out.

The whole article is hilariously slanted that way

The only actual Illinois humans they talk to are…

• Rodney Davis
• A supporter of Rodney Davis
• The “nonpartisan” mayor of Taylorville who is still registered as a Democrat but, y'know what they say about Taylorville Democrats.
• Some cranks in the adjacent district whe feel cheated that they couldn’t still vote for far-right conspiracy flake Mary Miller.
• And someone from Adam Kinzinger’s new “ I Was Redistricted Out Of Office and all I got was this lousy cable news gig” PAC.  

That would be the same Hero of the Resistance Adam Kinzinger whose Farewell Cruel Congress speech was larded with Both Siderist crap like this:

To my Democratic colleagues, you must too bear the burden of our failures.

The same Adam Kinzinger who, when redistricting presented him with an opportunity to run against exactly the kind of MAGA Republican he claims to despise, instead chose to cut and run. apparently so he could preserve his future viability in Illinois Republican politics, which I wrote about here. "Why Did Adam Kinzinger Cut and Run?"

Anyway, once you get deeper into the article, the writers do bother to mention that Texas is pretty god-awful.  That more Republican states are gerrymandered to within an inch of their lives.  That Republicans are willing to buck the Supreme Court to keep black people from voting.

Gerrymandering was also given a huge boost in 2019 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4. that partisan redistricting is a political question that must be decided by legislators, not federal courts. 

 Care take a wild guess as to which party appointed the justices that made up that five vote majority?

The writers also worked hard to drag the Overton Window over far enough so they could write about Rodney Davis as a “moderate”, which is only true in a technical sense if you reposition the "moderate Center" a million miles to the Right to account for the number of absolute lunatics that Republicans have been sending to Congress for decades.

Consider the case of Harriet Hagemann who is straight-up batshit crazy, and who beat Liz Cheney out of her seat in the House.  Cheney was about as far right as any Republican in congress: someone who was only too happy to praise and support Donald Trump and demonize Democrats with brazen lies...right up to the point of Trump's coup.  That was enough to get her primaried right out of her seat by a gibbering freak like Hagemann, despite Cheney begging Democrats interfere in the Republican primary by switching sides and voting for her (Fun Fact:  Dems trying to fiddle around in few Republican primaries was denounced as the vilest!calumny! by Kinzinger, David Brooks and the entire Bulwark crew when it affected a candidate they favored.) 

Gerrymandering had nothing to do with Cheney losing her seat.  She lost because the baseline crazy of the GOP base has been rising exponentially for decades.  It was a rising tide Cheney was only tooo happy to ride into office, but one which swamped her once she lost her footing.

The article is also shot through with the usual Both Siderism, like this quote from Davis “You have people in Congress, in both parties, who are rewarded for not working with the other side.”

Really?  Because two short weeks ago, Democrats handed Kevin McCarty a life-line and saved the day by keeping the government open, when Davis’ party was trying to shut it down. Then McCarthy stabbed Democrats in the back.

Remember that Davis was Trump’s House leader on trying to take health care away from millions of Americans, including my family, by repealing the Affordable Care Act.  And Davis voted to repeal the ACA upwards of 60 times,

During Trump’s  presidency Davis voted in line with Trump's position nearly 90% of the time,

Davis voted for House Resolution.59 – Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2014, which resulted in the government shutdown of 2013.

Davis voted for the Trump Tax Scam in  2017.

Davis voted against both articles of impeachment against Trump.

In November 2021, Davis voted against censuring Paul Gosar, the Republican shitbag who had shared an animated video of himself killing a fellow member of Congress and assaulting the president. When a majority of the House voted to censure Gosar, Davis criticized Nancy Pelosi, saying she had "torn the fabric of this House apart".

But the funniest part of the article was the interview with the Mary Miller supporter who is no longer in her district.  Oakland Illinois mayor Jack Turner.  He said her extreme wingnut politics represented Oakland well, and "That was taken away from us, and I think that’s unfair.”   And yet Turner then turned right around and said this.  

“Now you’re either way left or way right,  There used to be a middle road, and the middle road was fine. Why does it have to be this extreme?"

Hey dumbass.  Your pal Mary Miller?  She is the extreme right.  And it's mopes like you who are the fucking problem.  Mopes like you who happily vote for goons like Miller and then expect everyone else to do the work of maintaining your fantasy of a "middle road".

The problem is not that Rodney Davis got moved to s different district, and it certainly not that

Illinois Democrats drew new maps. The changes pushed the GOP to the right.

The problem is that the Illinois Republican party -- like every other state Republican party -- has lost its damn mind.  

Consider who Republicans nominated to run for governor in 2020.  Darren Fucking Bailey.  If you you know, you know, and if you don't...read my blog.  The race for governor is a state-wide race which is not affected by gerrymandering.  Bailey represented the preference of the Republican voters of Illinois, god help us all.

Then consider a different statewide election.  Illinois Democrats renominated and ran Senator Dick Durbin for re-election.  Durbs has been a senator for 26 years.  He's from downstate.  He lives in Davis' former district.  And he is generally considered to be as wild and controversial as warm skim milk.  Durbin represents the preference of the Democratic voters of Illinois.

Finally, consider the sort of speakers the Sangamon County Republican Party -- the county where I live -- brings every years to raise money and fire up the faithful in featured speakers at their annual Lincoln Day dinner.  These are the speakers that organizes know that the donors and the base want to hear from.  And this year it was...Kellyanne Conway.

And last year?   

Last year the Sangamon County Republican Party celebrated the legacy of Abraham Lincoln by paying Charlie Fucking Kirk $30,000 plus expenses to come to town and spin up the crazies. 

And before Chuckles Kirk it was Candace Owens.  

And before that it was Jason Chaffetz, one-time congressperson and current Fox News troll who now lives in Donald Trump's underwear drawer, and now blocks the little blue light on Trump's phone now that the FBO has taken away the classified file folder he used to use.

The year before that it was Fox News in-house train-wreck/barfly,  Jeanine Pirro.

The year before that wingnut-network-job-hopper and H.R. Haldeman stunt-double, Corey Lewandowski.

The year before that, in 2016, it was none other than Fox News prime-time Gorgon and Keith Olbermann's former girlfriend, Laura Ingraham.

If you're interested, I wrote a whole thing about it here, which also includes links to other pieces I've written about previous years.  

And here, at last, it the point.  The entire Republican party, from crotch to crown, is an existential threat to our democracy.  And I am cool with any method within the law that reins them in and, eventually, chokes them out of power.  

I Am The Liberal Media