Also on today’s menu:
Taking Donald Trump Seriously
NH Supreme Court: Political Gerrymandering OK
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shared his views on the Israel-Hamas war, education, transgender policy, and immigration at the southern border as he brought his presidential campaign to the 405 Pub & Grill in Laconia on December 4.
Before taking questions from the audience, he distanced himself from former president Donald Trump. “Trump, I don’t think, can get elected in this country,” he said, claiming to be the best alternative.
DeSantis cast the election as being more about a referendum on President Joe Biden Jr. “The election [Democrats] don’t want is to have a guy like me holding Biden accountable every single day,” DeSantis said, adding, “we have a pathway to a better future for our policies and our vision.”
Commentary: No one in New Hampshire should vote for Joe Biden, not because he has done a bad job but because he purposely chose not to be on the Granite State ballot. His policies, however, have given the United States the best recovery from COVID among the G7 counties; wage growth remains robust, having stayed ahead of inflation for several months; median wealth increased 37% between 2020 and 2022 with median wealth for 18- to 34-year-olds more than doubling; jobs are more plentiful than any time since the 1960s; and pandemic-caused inflation has fallen to 0 percent (although the Federal Reserve’s overzealous response has started bumping unemployment up and almost certainly will lead to a weakening of the economy in the coming year). If not Biden, who? There are other Democrats aligned with the successful Biden Administration policies that should get a close look. Republicans? Until they stop their childish antics and begin taking their jobs seriously again, no one seems presidential.
Taking Donald Trump Seriously
The media are increasingly focusing on what a second Trump administration would mean. “Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker,” writes the New York Times.
Robert Kagan writes in the Washington Post, “Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. … If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.”
David Frum, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, introduced a new series of articles on Trump by writing, “In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.”
Discussion: The former president no longer hides his disdain for democracy, and has openly promised to take down anyone opposing him. Remember that, on Truth Social, he wrote that General Mark Milley’s phone call offering reassurance to China in the aftermath of the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” Trump turns on anyone and any group that offers criticism, so no one would be safe under another Trump presidency. Some have criticized me for the anti-Trump drumbeat in this virtual café but I do believe that Trump’s fascist approach to government would destroy America.
NH Supreme Court: Political Gerrymandering OK
In a 3-2 decision, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that courts in the Granite State have no authority to overturn legislative maps created by partisan gerrymandering. Only the state legislature can determine the makeup of districting maps.
A group of Democratic voters filed the lawsuit Miles Brown v. Secretary of State to argue that the Senate and Executive Council districts drawn in 2021 gave Republicans unfair advantage by putting Democrat-leaning towns into districts that would dilute their voting power. The court found it to be a “non-justiciable political question” over which the court had not jurisdiction.
While racial gerrymandering is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act, that does not apply to political gerrymandering, according to Lawrence Friedman, law professor at the New England School of Law. “Unlike race, partisanship is not an inherent human characteristic, even in our hyper-partisan times,” Friedman said. “I think a lot of courts are naturally reluctant to say how much is too much, given that it’s kind of baked into the system: The party that wins the most votes gets to make the maps.”
Discussion: The court probably made the right decision. It is the legislature’s role to establish districting maps that fairly divide the population to ensure that all voters have equal representation in Concord. Voters attending the public hearings made their wishes clear: They wanted to have districts that fairly represented their interests, and combining towns that have little in common does not do that. The legislature ignored those wishes, and voters should keep that in mind when those representatives come up for reelection. As to how effective gerrymandering is, I’m not so sure that it has the effect it did when everyone simply voted along party lines. At least in New Hampshire, with its sizable undeclared voting population, there is more of a tendency to vote for the candidates that best reflects their views, rather than sticking with one political party down the ballot. Whether a district as a whole is Red or Blue is less important than who is running. At least I hope so.
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