Also on today’s menu:
‘Time To Restore Democracy’
American Democracy Under 'Major Threat'
The New Hampshire Legislature is required by the state constitution to adjust the boundaries of congressional, executive council, state senate, state representative, county commissioner, and state party delegate districts every 10 years, based on the latest census. The 2020 census lists the state population as 1,377,529 persons, so with a 400-seat House of Representatives, each city or town qualifies for one representative to every 3,444 residents.
In public hearings across the state, the House Select Committee on Redistricting has been hearing from constituents who are demanding a fairer distribution of representatives than what happened in 2011, when “gerrymandering” — or manipulating the boundaries to favor the Republican party — placed towns in groupings that residents felt made no sense.
An example is the district that brought together Meredith and Gilford, which share a boundary — in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee — but have nothing else in common. Residents of that town and several others in Belknap County asked for a fairer distribution of representatives when the Select Committee held a hearing at the Belknap Mill on Tuesday night.
‘Time To Restore Democracy’
In comments prior to a vote on whether to hold Stephen K. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to honor a congressional subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Senator Angus King (I-ME) reminded his colleagues that the U.S. was founded on the radical idea “that the people … are the ultimate source of power and can govern themselves through their elected representatives.” He said that idea “was tested at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and the Wilderness. It was defended at Anzio, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, and was reaffirmed in 1965.”
He went on to say that democracy is fragile and can fail “from erosion from within.” He said the breakdown of trust in the electoral system and the Republicans’ “overtly partisan attempt” to use that doubt as a justification to skew future elections amounts to “stone-cold partisan voter suppression.”
King urged his colleagues “to pull our country back from the brink, and to begin the work of restoring our democracy as we did in the Revolution, as we did in the Civil War, and as we did in the Civil Rights struggles: first, by simply telling the truth and then by enacting a set of basic protections of the sacred right to vote.” If they will not, he said, we will lose “our identity as a people, ... the miracle of self-government, and …the idea of America.”
American Democracy Under 'Major Threat'
A new poll conducted for Grinnell College by the Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer found that 76 percent of Trump supporters believe that American democracy is under major threat. Overall, more than half of Americans believe democracy is in trouble, and more than a third say they do not believe that votes cast in the 2022 midterm elections will be counted accurately.
After a year-long campaign by supporters of the former president to undermine faith in the integrity of America’s electoral system, 52 percent of adults, 55 percent of likely voters, and two-thirds of self-described conservatives fear for the future of democracy. About four in ten supporters of President Joe Biden and a little more than a third of Democratic voters feel the same way. Older voters are more likely to see a major threat to American democracy than are younger voters, and those in rural areas are more likely to describe a major threat than those in urban or suburban areas.
Overall, nine in ten Americans say it is very or fairly important that the United States remain a democracy, including 96 percent of Biden backers and 94 percent of Trump supporters.
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