Hold your nose and vote for Proposition 50 in November. That’s what I’m going to do, now that I’ve been forced to.
Afraid that what happens to every incumbent president at the mid-term elections — a loss of seats in the House for his own party — would happen to him in 2026, Donald Trump ordered red-state legislatures to redistrict in order to maximize Republican House districts and disenfranchise Democrats, and therefore Black and other minority Americans.
Which is what they are doing.
It wouldn’t be happening if some regular, patriotic Republican president were in the White House. A Mitt Romney would just roll with the punches, trying to govern in a manner that wouldn’t create the backlash Trump is creating by being, well, evil.
Fighting evil can cause a holding of the nose against the rancid smell, and a fighting back with the same tactics the evil guy is using. That’s what California is doing with Prop. 50. Sometimes politics stinks. The smell was even worse than today, intra-state, back before 2008’s Proposition 11, the Voters First Act, when the California Legislature drew its own districts, in what was known as the Incumbent Protection Plan. Democrats, Republicans, they all stank, and met behind closed doors to keep their cushy jobs. That was followed by Proposition 20, the Voters First Act for Congress, which added congressional districts to the newly formed California Citizens Redistricting Commission’s responsibilities.
I have been writing editorials and columns in support of stopping the incumbents from gaming the system for 38 years. Now that we have an independent commission, I am loath to see it go, and have the map-drawing go back to the legislative pols. But it is not disappearing. Under Prop. 50, the commission is coming back in 2030, after the present danger that is the sorry Donald Trump has disappeared from the White House.
Texas Republicans have long drawn districts that aim to disenfranchise Dems. They cut up the state’s four big cities of Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio — all of which vote heavily Democratic — into tips of pie-piece-shaped districts that then run way out into the ranching country surrounding them.
Now, on Trump’s orders, they have made the slices even more ridiculous, and will gain new seats.
So the even more populous state that is our own is supposed to just roll over when it has the same tools in its toolbox? Not when there’s a chance to overturn Trump’s putsch and let what happens naturally to other presidents — a national reaction to extreme policies that results in a turnover in House power, making it harder in the last two years of a presidency to ram through Congress more bad policies for Americans and for the world — happen.
Instead, with Proposition 50, Sacramento electeds will do their own gerrymander, as pols have done since the creation of the republic. Then, after four years, the map-drawing will go back to the regular citizens. Fairness will return. But in the near term, you don’t fight unfairness by being lily-livered. You fight back.
This is bigger than California — big as the world.
The terribly easy thing about pointing out the evils of Trump and his authoritarian worldview is that you never have to go back very far in time to find examples of why his narcissistic personality leads to dangers we must avoid in order to stay free.
Say, last week, when he addressed hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico. Just days before, he didn’t know what the meeting was about. He thought it was a bunch of foreign military brass called on the American carpet before he was set straight. Then the top military leaders of our nation had to sit there while their commander-in-chief once again lost it in public:
“I’ve never walked into a room so silent before. This is very — oh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what, just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want — you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future, but you just feel nice and loose, OK, because we’re all on the same team. And I was told that, sir, you won’t hear — you won’t hear a murmur in the room. I said, we got to loosen these guys up a little bit.”
He was joking? They didn’t think so. They didn’t loosen up, except likely over a whiskey later, in bitter laughter. They saw a man who’s a danger to the republic. So that, like sensible Californians, they too, given the chance, would vote yes on Prop. 50 to rein in Trump.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.