Mostly Monday Reads: Cheat if you have to Republican Strategy

“He’s not ever leaving as long as Republicans turn a blind eye.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Texas Democratic Delegates have fled to Illinois to stop the redistricting of Congressional Districts, preventing a quorum on a vote. Legislators in both California and New York are gearing up for similar action in response. It’s likely Florida will try the same maneuver. Trump ordered the action to prevent likely Republican losses in the midterms. Usually, Congressional Districts are redrawn every 10 years to reflect changes shown by the most recent census. This is definitely a move to disenfranchise people of color.  It has become clear that our institutions are in a process of democratic backsliding due to extremists and cowardly Republicans. Even the People’s House is losing its historic look as Yam Tits paved over the gifts of flowers from our allies that filled Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden.  A huge, tasteless ballroom to the east of the edifice is the next planned monstrosity. Nothing is safe or sacred.

This is the headline from NBC News. “Texas Democrats decamp to Illinois to deny Republicans a quorum on redistricting. In response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to try to remove the Democrats from the state Legislature and said some of them may even be “felons.”  This coverage is from NBC News.

 A showdown over redistricting in Texas played out here on Sunday as dozens of state Democrats took refuge roughly 1,000 miles away from home, saying they had fled Texas to deny a quorum to Republican efforts to add as many as five congressional seats to their map.

It culminated with Texas’ governor, a Republican, threatening to expel the Democrats from the Texas state House and potentially extradite them, saying they may be “felons.”

The Texas state House Democrats filed off of buses and Ubers into a crammed county party headquarters at a strip mall Sunday night, standing alongside Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to rail against what they charged was a racist, unfair and undemocratic attempt to overhaul the Lone Star State’s political map.

Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said that he believed about 57 Democrats have left the state, with the bulk staying in Illinois for at least the immediate future. Other House Democrats were in Boston and Albany, New York.

“Gov. Abbott is doing this in submission to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump can steal these communities’ power and voice,” Wu said. “We will not be complicit in the destruction of our own communities. We’re not here to play political games. We’re here to demand an end to this corrupt process.”

After the news conference, Wu said there was real fear that some of their members could be arrested for defying a special session call.

“We have discussed this. This is a topic of serious concern. We know the governor has no authority to send state troopers over here but we don’t know what Donald Trump’s going to do,” Wu said.

He argued there was no legal basis for arrests but then pointed to questionable actions taken by immigration officials in their nationwide sweeps.

“That’s not far-fetched from arresting state legislators because they feel like it, and consequences be damned,” he added.

This is not the first time this has happened.  You may remember that the same strategy was used in 2003 for the same reason. However, this action has roots deep in Texas History, according to the Texas Tribune. Hayden Betts reports that “Denying quorum has been a Texas political strategy since 1870. While the Democrats could technically derail the GOP’s redistricting map, such efforts have been largely symbolic and had limited success blocking past legislation, experts say.”

In June 1870, 13 Texas senators walked out of the Capitol to block a bill giving the governor wartime powers, depriving the upper chamber of the two-thirds quorum required for voting. Though the fleeing members were arrested, and the bill eventually passed, the “Rump Senate incident” established quorum-breaking as a minority party tactic that has persisted in Texas politics ever since.

After significant quorum breaks in 1979, 2003, and 2021, Texas House Democrats are once again employing this nuclear option, fleeing the state Sunday to block passage of a congressional redistricting map that would give Republicans five additional seats in the U.S. House. The attempt represents the latest chapter for the maneuver that political scientists say, barring exceptional endurance on the part of the democratic delegation, is likely to be symbolic rather than directly effective in preventing redistricting.

“It’s a messaging move,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “It’s a last resort for Democrats who have run out of options legislatively and even legally.”

Partisan Republicans stacked into the Supreme Court are making moves to diminish the Constitution and our democratic republic, also by signalling willingness to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. This is from Slate. Robert L. Hasen reports this. “The Supreme Court Just Signaled Something Deeply Disturbing About the Next Term.” It’s a lawsuit against the redistricting that happened recently in Louisiana because the courts determined that Louisiana redistricting had disenfranchised minorities in Louisiana.

Reading the tea leaves from cryptic Supreme Court orders can be perilous business because the justices are not bound by the questions they ask at oral argument, the offhand comments they make at a judicial conference, or even their monumental “shadow docket” rulings on emergency petitions that have become all too common. But a technical briefing order in a long pending case out of Louisiana, posted on the court’s website after 5 p.m. on a Friday in August, was ominous. The order was likely intended to obscure that SCOTUS is ready to consider striking down the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 2. Such a monumental ruling, likely not coming until June 2026, would change the nature of congressional, state, and local elections all across the country, and likely stir major civil rights protests as the midterm election season heats up.

Louisiana v. Callais, the case that was the subject of last Friday’s order, is a voting case over the drawing of the state’s six congressional districts. Louisiana has a one-third Black population, but after the 2020 census the state Legislature drew a districting plan, passed over a Democratic governor’s veto, that created only one district in which Black voters would be likely to elect their candidate of choice. Before Callais, Black voters had successfully sued Louisiana in a case called Robinson v. Ardoin, arguing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required drawing a second congressional district giving Black voters that opportunity. Section 2 says minority voters should have the same chance as other voters to elect their candidates of choice, and courts have long used it to require new districts when there is a large and cohesive minority population concentrated in a given area, when white and minority voters choose different candidates, and when the minority has difficulty electing its preferred representatives.

After Robinson and more litigation, the Louisiana Legislature drew up a new plan, which created the second congressional district. The state drew the second district to otherwise favor Republicans in the state overall, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. A new group of voters then sued in the Callais case, arguing that Louisiana’s drawing of the second district violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause by being a racial gerrymander. Since 1993’s Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court has found racial gerrymanders when race is the central factor in drawing district lines and the state has no compelling interest in drawing such lines.

When the court first held oral argument in the Callais case in March, it appeared to be another in a long series of cases (many out of Louisiana) in which the justices considered whether race or partisanship predominated in the drawing of district lines. I’ve long written that this is an impossible exercise in places like Louisiana, where the factors overlap—most white voters in the state are Republicans and Black voters are Democrats, so when the state discriminates against Democrats, it is also discriminating against Black voters. It appeared from the initial March oral argument that the court was going to once again determine whether race or party predominated.

But instead of deciding the case at the end of June, when the court ordinarily disposes of the cases heard during the term, the court set the case up for reargument. That’s a rare move, but it’s not unheard of. Back in 2010, SCOTUS set the Citizens United case up for reargument the following September. But when the court issued its June order in Citizens United for reargument, the same order informed the parties that the court wanted something new to be briefed and argued on reargument: whether to overrule a line of cases allowing limits on corporate spending in elections. The court the following January then overruled these cases in one of the most consequential election law decisions of our time. It has had significant reverberations for our politics ever since.

Fifteen years later, something similar seems to be happening with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In June of this year, rather than deciding the case it heard in March, the court issued an order in Callais setting the case for reargument and stating, “In due course, the Court will issue an order scheduling argument and specifying any additional questions to be addressed in supplemental briefing.” Justice Clarence Thomas impatiently dissented from the order, saying that this was the time to recognize that Section 2 of the VRA and the court’s racial gerrymandering case are on a collision course and to kill off Section 2 or rewrite it to be toothless.

Orange Caligula is searching for someone to fudge the numbers at the Bureau of Labor. This is from the New York Times. I’ve gifted the article so you may read the entire thing. It is reported by Tony Romm. “Trump to Appoint New Top Labor Official Within Days. President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday after the agency released dour monthly jobs data.”

President Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics “over the next three, four days” after he fired the head of the agency last week over a gloomy jobs report.

Mr. Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Erika McEntarfer, on Friday after the B.L.S. released monthly jobs data showing a significant slowdown in hiring. Mr. Trump accused Ms. McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the numbers.

Ms. McEntarfer had worked as a government economist for decades and was confirmed by the Senate in a bipartisan vote last year. Mr. Trump gave no further details about the announcement of her replacement.

Earlier Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, insisted that the administration was “absolutely not” shooting the messenger on the heels of the jobs report.

Mr. Hassett repeatedly declined to furnish detailed evidence that would substantiate the president’s claims that the data had been manipulated to hurt him politically.

“The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Mr. Hassett told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” explaining at one point that the president sought to ensure jobs numbers could be “trusted.”

In a second appearance, on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hassett claimed there were “partisan patterns” in the jobless data, and said that “data can’t be propaganda.”

Since Ms. McEntarfer’s sudden dismissal, economists across the political spectrum have offered a more worrisome assessment, warning that Mr. Trump’s actions threaten to pollute the nonpartisan work at B.L.S. to measure the trajectory of the economy.

Her dismissal came only hours after the statistics agency reported the slowdown in hiring in July, on top of two substantial downward revisions to its previous estimates of job growth in May and June.

The methodology has been used for over 50 years.  The reason for the updates, which usually occur over 2-3 months after the original release, is that many businesses and individuals cannot get their surveys back to the Bureau in a timely manner. Anyone who uses the data for research or making business decisions is aware of this.  It is absolutely nothing new. The current data reflects the chaotic Tariff introductions by Trump. The simplest practice of running a business is that you must have a rational and stable economic policy that provides information and an atmosphere to make good decisions. Trump can’t even make the simplest decisions or leave things alone long enough to prevent the instability that freezes any moves by business decision-makers. Noah Berlesky writes this at Public Notice. “The looming Trumpcession. Orange man bad (for the economy).” This guy bankrupted casinos and himself so many times that you’d think everyone would know this by now.

The July jobs numbers, released last Friday, could not have been much bleaker.

The economy undershot the projection of 100,000 new jobs significantly, adding only 73,000. Even worse, the numbers for May and June were revised down by a ghastly 285,000 jobs. That means that the economy created only 33,000 jobs in May and June combined — anemic growth the likes of which we haven’t seen the final months of President Trump’s first term. In contrast, under President Biden, the economy gained some 420,000 jobs in May and June 2024.

Trump’s response was as unhinged and authoritarian as you’d expect. In an unprecedented move, he abruptly fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and as an excuse, lied that the job numbers were “phony.”

Of course, the numbers were not phony. They were actually exactly what you’d expect given Trump’s relentless effort to destroy the robust economy left to him by Biden.

The president usually has limited control over the economy, with downturns being caused by events beyond their control. In this case, however, Trump’s policies are directly responsible for job losses, rising prices, wavering confidence, and a speedrun toward what looks like stagflation.

Flashing red

The jobs report is bad news. But it’s hardly the only sign that the economy is heading to a dark place.

The overall unemployment rate last month ticked up to 4.2 percent, but more worrying is the increase in Black unemployment to 7.2 percent. That’s the highest rate since December 2021, when the economy was still struggling to emerge from the covid pandemic. Black workers are often the last hired and the first fired. As a result Black unemployment rates often shoot up first when a serious economic downturn is on the horizon.

The economy is also struggling with stubborn inflation that will only be exacerbated by Trump’s inflationary tariff policies. Current inflation indicators are all bad. The personal consumption price index has prices rising 0.3 percent from May to June, which means they’ve risen 2.6 percent from last year.

Usually, a hot job market can mean increased inflation, while lower inflation can lead to slower job growth. In the final years of Biden’s presidency, the US managed to achieve both low inflation and record low unemployment. But Trump has reversed that. And now we may be looking at the worst of both worlds — stagflation, when jobs stagnate and prices spike.

The last time the US experienced serious stagflation was in the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter — and that’s a big part of what led to Carter’s landslide loss to Reagan in 1980.

Berlesky cites a very interesting study by Yale.

While Trump claims that his senseless tariff fetish will somehow lead to awesome trade deals, the truth is that he’s simply imposing massive arbitrary taxes on consumer goods. Taxing goods raises prices. The nonpartisan Yale Budget Lab has concluded that the effective tariff rate under Trump is around 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. That means that households will be paying an extra $2,400 each in taxes to the government on purchases.

Tariffs are a regressive tax — they are hardest to absorb for lower income households, since the taxes are a higher percentage of their income. Even worse, lower income households tend to be especially dependent on imported goods, which are often cheaper than domestic products. Ernie Tedeschi, director of the Yale Budget Lab, told NPR that Trump’s tariffs seem “almost tailor made” to harm lower income workers the most.

I know I’ve been jumping up and down about this since January, but the economic performance has brought us an economy that even an Econ 101 student could predict. Former Republican and still conservative voice Bill Kristol has this to say in The Bulwark today. “Democracy dies in Daylight.”

In the last few days, it seems as if we’ve reached a new stage in the attempted authoritarian takeover of American democracy. It’s not just that the multi-faceted assault on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society has picked up steam—though it has. It’s that the assault, from our own government, now proceeds so openly and unashamedly.

Once, if there were bad economic statistics, the president and his supporters tried to spin them. Now the president and his supporters simply deny them. And those who produced them are punished. And so President Trump fires, with no pretense of real cause or justification, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a career civil servant who has supervised a host of other career civil servants in producing these statistics, as they have for decades. And he brazenly lies in accusing her and a host of other civil servants of “rigging” their findings.

This is part of a broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard—using the resources of the federal agencies they direct—have taken the lead in this. But they are only the tip of the Trump spear.

Once, if a president or his subordinates wanted to cover up a problem, even a crime, they made labored efforts at obfuscation and concealment. Coverups were, as the term implies, pursued under the cover of darkness. That’s why the Washington Post, with the experience of Watergate in mind, came up at the beginning of Trump’s first term with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But that slogan applies to a different era.

Now Ghislaine Maxwell, one of two organizers of a massive and horrendous child sex trafficking ring of which Donald Trump appears to have had considerable contemporaneous knowledge, meets with the deputy attorney general of the United States—who had previously been Trump’s private lawyer—and the White House openly embraces it. A week later, contrary to the normal rules for a prisoner convicted of her crimes, Maxwell is transferred to a minimum security “Club Fed” facility. This was presumably as a down payment on not spilling the beans about Trump, and perhaps as an interim step on the way to a pardon. This coverup is happening in broad daylight.

Once, state legislators redistricted congressional seats every ten years, after the constitutionally mandated census. These reapportionments were often accompanied by gerrymandering. But, with a notable exception, the partisan power grabs were at least adjacent to a regular and lawful process. They were at least somewhat constrained by calendars and custom.

Now the governor of Texas has decided, at the public urging of the president of the United States, to have his state legislature carry out a gerrymander mid-decade, so as to try to preserve a Republican majority in the House of Representatives for the final two years of Trump’s term. And it seems other red states will follow.

There is no pretense here other than a grab for power. It is the unconstrained use of the instrumentalities of government, state and federal, to hold on to control of the House.

The New York Times quotes “one person close to the president” as summing up the approach of the Trump White House as “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” It’s important to add that it’s not just maximum warfare by one party against the other. It’s warfare by the government of the United States against the justice system, against the presentation of true facts, against free and fair elections. It’s maximum warfare against the norms and institutions of a liberal democracy and republican self-government.

All of us who have written for and followed Sky Dancing Blog know that we’ve been canaries shrieking in a coal mine. I cannot figure out what is not obvious to everyone, and that’s damned depressing. I’m going to close with a certain sign that this country is in trouble. It’s posted at Maddow Blog and written by Steven Benen. This is a certain sign that justice is not being served in the United States. “The 3 biggest problems with the new and unwarranted investigation into Jack Smith. For years, Team Trump treated the Hatch Act like a joke. To target former special counsel Jack Smith, they’ve apparently changed their mind.”

It’s a serious enough problem when Donald Trump publicly endorses investigations into his perceived political foes. But when the president’s targets actually become the subject of investigations, it’s far worse. NBC News reported:

Federal officials are investigating former special counsel Jack Smith after President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans have alleged that his investigations into then-candidate Trump amounted to illegal political activity. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency, confirmed to NBC News on Saturday that it’s investigating Smith for alleged violations of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits certain political activities by government officials.

Right off the bat, let’s not overlook the most glaring problem with these developments: There’s literally no evidence whatsoever of Smith engaging in any kind of wrongdoing. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Smith to serve as a special counsel in November 2022 — two years before the 2024 presidential election — at which point he oversaw the federal investigations into Trump.

The prosecutor proceeded to collect voluminous evidence, secure indictments and charge Trump with a great many felonies, but at no point did Smith engage in any partisan political activities, making the basis for such an investigation from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel absurd.

Just as notably, it seems rather obvious that this move against Smith is part of a larger partisan vendetta from a party that’s eager to retaliate against those who dared to try to hold Trump accountable for his alleged crimes. Indeed, it was Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a close White House ally, who requested that the OSC investigate Smith for “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election,” despite the complete lack of evidence pointing to any interference.

But even if we put these relevant angles aside, there’s a broader point that’s hanging overhead: Since when does the Trump administration care about alleged Hatch Act violations? I’m reminded of this New York Times report from nearly four years ago:

Thirteen of President Donald J. Trump’s most senior aides — including his son-in-law and his chief of staff — campaigned illegally for Mr. Trump’s re-election in violation of a law designed to prevent federal employees from abusing the power of their offices on behalf of candidates, a government watchdog agency said Tuesday. Henry Kerner, who heads the Office of Special Counsel, made the assertion in a withering report that followed a nearly yearlong investigation into ‘myriad’ violations of the law, known as the Hatch Act.

In a 63-page report, the Office of Special Counsel concluded, “Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law.”

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush/Cheney White House, described Team Trump’s routine transgressions at the time as “disgusting” and “unprecedented in the history of the Hatch Act.” Painter added that the entire Trump administration, at the most senior levels, was “devoted to illegally using federal offices to promote the president’s political campaign.”

Each one of us had better get serious about voting, action, and finding out what these cartoonish villains are doing, because we’re not just democratic backsliding.  We democratic falling off a cliff.

What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?