As Democrats start employing the same tactics as Republicans have done for the last 32 years, watch how the right begins complaining. Then watch how right-wing media tries to paint things. Rrepublicans will claim to be victims. Will the legitimate media fall for this tactic again?
Newsom responds to Trump’s gutter politics
In fighting President Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom reminds me of actor Gene Hackman’s hard-nosed character in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”
Hackman plays a take-no-prisoners FBI agent, Rupert Anderson, who is investigating the disappearance of three young civil rights workers in racially segregated 1964 Mississippi. His partner and boss is stick-by-the-rules agent Alan Ward, played by Willem Dafoe.
The two agents eventually find the victims’ murdered bodies and apprehend the Ku Klux Klan killers after Anderson persuades Ward to discard his high-road rule book in dealing with uncooperative local white folks.
“Don’t drag me into your gutter, Mr. Anderson,” Ward sternly tells his underling initially.
Anderson shouts back: “These people are crawling out of the SEWER, MR. WARD! Maybe the gutter’s where we oughta be.”
And it’s where they go. Only then do they solve the case.
Newsom contends Trump is playing gutter politics by pressuring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the GOP-controlled Legislature to redraw the state’s U.S. House seats in an effort to elect five additional Republicans in next year’s midterm elections. House seats normally are redrawn only at the beginning of a decade after the decennial census.
Democrats need to gain just three net seats to retake control of the House and end the GOP’s one-party rule of the federal government.
Trump is trying to prevent that by browbeating Texas and other red states into gerrymandering their Democrat-held House districts into GOP winners.
Republicans currently hold 25 of Texas’ 38 House seats. Democrats have 12.
In California, it’s just the opposite — even more so. Out of 52 seats, Democrats outnumber Republicans 43 to 9, with room to make it even more lopsided.
“We could make it so that only four Republicans are left,” says Sacramento-based redistricting guru Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.
Newsom and the Legislature would be seizing redistricting responsibility from an independent citizens’ commission that voters created in 2010. They took the task away from lawmakers because the politicians were acting only in their own self-interest, effectively choosing their own voters. As they do in Texas and most states, particularly red ones.
But the governor and Democrats would be ignoring California voters’ will — at least as stated 15 years ago.
And Newsom would be down in the political gutter with Trump on redistricting. But that doesn’t seem to bother him.
“They’re playing by a different set of rules,” Newsom recently told reporters, referring to Trump and Republicans. “They can’t win by the traditional game. So they want to change the game. We can act holier than thou. We could sit on the sidelines, talk about the way the world should be. Or we can recognize the existential nature that is the moment.”
Newsom responds to Trump's gutter politics
www.latimes.com
As my man Bruce Buffer says before the UFC Championship fights
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