The Democrats Just Had Their Bluff Called

 

     A bluff?! That's all it was this whole time?

     When Donald Trump realized the 2026 midterms were going to be a bloodbath for the GOP, he realized some rat-fuckery was necessary in order for the Republicans to cling to their vanishing power in the House. So he picked up the phone and called Texas Governor Greg Abbott (hereafter referred to as FDR's evil doppelgänger) and ordered him to call a special session of the Texas legislature. It was originally supposed to address the flooding in central Texas last month had killed over 130 Texans but the real agenda of the special session was shamelessly made public- To gerrymander Texas's congressional districts and to shoehorn five more Republicans into the state's congressional delegation. 

     When Democrats learned this, over 50 of them fled the state and sought refuge in Illinois to deny the Republicans a quorum. Of course, being the crypto Nazis they are, Republicans used every dirty, under-headed trick in the book to force Democrats to come back to Austin so they could succeed in rigging the electoral map. Unconvicted felon Ken Paxton got involved and sought arrest warrants, the Texas courts, also run by Republicans, barred Beto O'Rourke from funding the Democrats' sabbatical through his Super PAC.

     Lost on the Texas GOP was the fact that state Senate Republicans in Oregon did exactly the same thing six years ago and fled to neighboring Idaho to deny Democrats a quorum on a climate change bill. 

     Predictably, Republicans passed the gerrymander bill in the House and it's expected the same thing will happen in the Senate, whereupon FDR's evil doppelgänger will sign it into "law", after which it will be appealed in the corrupt Texas courts without success.

     While this legislative war was brewing in the Lone Star State this month, several major blue states, principally California, New York and Illinois, threatened to gerrymander their own districts and get back those five seats. With the largest congressional delegation, California was the biggest threat to make good on its promises. J.B. Pritzker and Kathie Hochul were fully on board.

     Then today, Politico published a story that it was all a hoax. A bluff.

     California, and Gavin Newsom, called the Republicans' bluff, somehow not realizing that Republicans, like their ideological forbears, the Nazis, don't bluff. Texas doubled, tripled, quadrupled and quintupled down because that's what they do. They're more stubborn than a dead mule. The Texas House rigged the electoral map, mid decade.

     Essentially, Texas Republicans called California's bluff and demanded to see their cards. And all the California legislature could show were jokers. Said Politico:

     "When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind? Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so."

     Setting aside for a moment the absurdity of this so-called data expert telling them gerrymandering their own electoral map was "absurd" (if the second-largest state legislature in the country can do it, why can't the largest?), what's alarming is that California Democrats brought a rubber gun to a knife fight. They never had the slightest intention of redrawing their maps or protecting the US House from what is at best a borderline illegal power grab.

    Yes, it would have involved an end run around the nonpartisan redistricting panel but, as the man said, "desperate times call for desperate measures."

    It revealed a serious flaw in the Democrats' strategy. When Republicans try to steal seats when they realize they can't legitimately cling to power, Democrats, at least in California, have nothing but shadow puppets with which to counter them.

     Now, Democrats, their shitty hand exposed, are in a position where they have to make good on their threats.  Now there's some vague talk about holding a special legislative session in Sacramento and putting redistricting the state's electoral map on the ballot, which is hinky, at best, considering how popular the redistricting commission is.

     What looked like a heroic, principled stand against the GOP's ratfuckery was shadow boxing all along. It's a vast understatement to say that Democrats need to do better than that. The Nazis of 90 years ago didn't bluff and did everything they said they were going to do and their political descendants in the latter-day Republican Party are no different.

     And Gavin Newsom's memes are funny, yes, but that alone is not going to counterbalance what the GOP is doing. It's time for them to put up or shut up in Sacramento, to fight fire with fire. If Texas Republicans can shamelessly tell Democratic voters, "Your vote doesn't matter anymore" by putting them in an electoral playpen, then Democrats in California should tell Republican voters the same exact thing.