The current attempt by President Donald Trump and his bootlicking supporters in the Indiana Republican Party to redistrict the Hoosier state mid-decade is no exception.
The president’s Indiana GOP water carriers have engaged in escalating adventures in the realm of fantasy.
We started with Gov. Mike Braun’s argument that Hoosier Republicans just were engaging in political self-defense because Democrats have been gerrymandering—rigging congressional maps for partisan advantage—for years.
In fact, the best objective studies of the subject show that, of the top 10 most gerrymandered states in America, either eight or nine are in Republican control. That’s not to say that Democrats aren’t guilty of such offenses against both representative self-government and fair play when they have the opportunity—Maryland’s maps alone are proof of that—but the notion that they started this fight is nonsense.
Braun’s contention is, if anything, an argument for taking the drawing of legislative maps out of the hands of politicians and putting them under the control of the people those politicians are supposed to represent.
Other Republicans point next door and say that Illinois, which skews heavily Democratic, was redistricted between census counts.
That’s true, but it was because Illinois did so under court order. That’s because the pols in Illinois got caught trying dilute the voting impact of Black citizens and other minority groups—a charge that could apply to Indiana Republicans, whose proposed congressional maps seem to focus on stripping from office the state’s only Black member of the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Indianapolis.
The map’s architect, Indiana Rep. Ben Smaltz, R-Auburn, says he rigged the maps for partisan rather than racist reasons in an attempt to avoid similar sanctions by the courts, but his argument was undercut by House Republicans’ repeated refusals to consider how their redrawing of the district lines would affect Black Hoosiers and other minority citizens of the state.
Smaltz’s argument is the equivalent of saying you can fly if you flap your arms hard enough. Even if you truly believe that, if you don’t get airborne once you begin prancing like an agitated chicken, everyone around you is going to know you’re delusional.
As silly as these attempts to defend the indefensible are, they pale in comparison with the massive rationalization for wrenching power away from the people by Indiana Sen. Michael Young, R-Indianapolis.
Young, one of the most partisan creatures to ever take a breath, says the justification for rigging the maps is that the 2020 census was botched. He says this even though every census has had errors.
These are a product of the immense challenges associated with counting and categorizing the population of one of the largest and perhaps the most diverse nation on earth, a country in which people constantly are moving around, taking new jobs, building new lives and pulling up old roots.
The census takers always acknowledge that there likely were overcounts in some areas and undercounts in others. They did so again, saying the errors in the 2020 census weren’t outside the typical range and that the mistakes didn’t materially affect the results.
No matter.
Young says the fact there were errors is proof Democrats were cheating.
His reasoning is right out of the Trump playbook, a manual that urges the terminally gullible to believe anything bad that happens—even when the president and his fellow Republicans are in power—is someone else’s fault and any good thing that occurs, accidentally or not, is to the credit of the commander-in-chief and his partisan camp followers.
Such credulous folks actually believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen—even though Trump was president and thus, as head of the executive branch, overseeing elections—but the 2024 one, when Joe Biden was president, was a fair one.
Somehow, though, in Trump world this doesn’t demonstrate that the Donald was at best incompetent in administering the 2020 election or that Biden played fair, even when doing so was against his own interests.
But that would involve acknowledging reality and—this part seems difficult for Mike Young and many other Hoosier Republicans—embracing the same standards of personal accountability that we demand of elementary school students.
That’s why Young and others of his mindset seek retreats.
Further and further into absurdity.
