Strange How Racial Gerrymandering Only Exists When It Hurts the GOP

5 min readThis Week in the Laboratories of Democracy(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to This Post)Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where tomorrow is Friday. We'll see what it brings.We begin in Mississippi, the latest front in the redistricting wars. Governor Tate Reeves, who will forever look like the guy who sold you the Plymouth Valiant with the bad alternator, has decided to take matters into his own hands. From the Mississippi Free Press:Mississippi will not redraw any of its electoral districts this month. Governor Tate Reeves canceled a special legislative session to redistrict the state’s Supreme Court map after a federal appeals court determined that the state no longer needs to create a majority-Black district. ... But the governor is urging the Mississippi Legislature to redraw its legislative, state supreme court, and congressional lines before the 2027 elections, when state legislative seats will be on the ballot. He also vowed in a social media post on Wednesday morning that the state’s only Black congressman’s “reign of terror” will be “over” soon, referring to Democratic U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson.I'm sure that the last part has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Thompson a) chaired the congressional committee examining the events of January 6, 2021, and b) is Black. These are two things that are guaranteed to draw the eye of Sauron to Mississippi. And the penny-loafer Uruk-Hai are on the march.Mississippi State Auditor Shad White, a white Republican, has also said repeatedly that he wants Mississippi to redraw its congressional districts to eliminate Thompson’s district, which he said is currently racially “gerrymandered.” Mississippi’s other three congressional districts are all more than 60 percent white. “This likely opens the door to redrawing Mississippi’s congressional districts. Mississippi might no longer have a district drawn to protect Bennie Thompson,” White posted on social media on April 29 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. White is considering a run for governor in the 2027 election, although he has not made an official announcement yet...“Bad news is that the Legislature now no longer has any plans to come back to Jackson to take up congressional redistricting,” the state auditor said. “But look, President Trump has been pushing for this and putting pressure on lawmakers in states like South Carolina to come in and do redistricting, and I suspect he’ll put pressure on Mississippi politicians to do the same.”Auditor Shad is seeking to replace Governor Tate? Is this a government or God's Little Acre?Let's skip on up to Tennessee, where the speaker of the state's House of Representatives apparently looked in the mirror one morning and saw Dean Vernon Wormer looking back at him. From the Democracy Docket:In a letter to House Minority Leader Karen Camper (D), [Speaker Cameron] Sexton said Democratic lawmakers would receive individual letters removing them from committees because of their conduct during last week’s special session, where Republicans repealed a decades-old state ban on mid-decade redistricting and rammed through a new congressional map expected to give the GOP a 9-0 delegation. “Members of the Democratic Caucus will receive individual letters removing them from all standing committees and subcommittees of the House,” Sexton wrote.Sexton’s letter accused Democrats of “disrupting the democratic and legislative processes and creating disorder on the House Floor” during the special session. The letter cited several alleged actions by Democratic lawmakers, including “interlocking arms in the well of the House,” “blocking aisles on the House floor” and “the use of prohibited props and noisemakers on the House floor.” Sexton also accused Democrats of “instigating and encouraging disruptions of the legislative process in coordination with paid protestors and attendees in the gallery, including the distribution of earplugs to a member of your caucus.”I, for one, will treasure forever the sight of Rep. Justin Jones burning an ersatz Confederate flag in the state capitol. It was the best thing to happen in Confederate Nashville since General George Thomas kicked hell out of that part of John Bell Hood's army that survived Hood's bungling at Franklin. Sexton's mileage may vary on that. I don't know what the business with the earplugs is.We move along to North Carolina, where Democratic Governor Josh Stein is being inexplicable. Stein's predecessor, Roy Cooper, had established a a system whereby people who were sentenced to long prison terms as juveniles could ask the state's governor for clemency. Cooper didn't grant many of these people clemency, but when he left office, the board handling these petitions disbanded, and Stein refused to grant clemency on the pending petition. From Bolts:When Cooper left office at the end of 2024, the four-person board disbanded, and the 75 people who filed petitions that hadn’t yet been decided by the governor were left waiting for consideration from North Carolina’s new Democratic governor, Josh Stein. According to Ben Finholt, director of Duke law school’s Just Sentencing Project who tracks petition outcomes, Stein denied 58 of the remaining petitions, while a dozen other people who applied for clemency were ultimately released before the governor made a decision. One other person who filed a petition died in custody before a decision was made, according to Finholt. Of the four petitions still pending, two are from men who have already been exonerated of their crimes yet remain incarcerated.Well, that's certainly a bummer, man. Get on the stick, Governor Josh.Finholt, who largely drafted the executive order that Cooper signed to form the JSRB, told Bolts he expected it to provide a pathway out of prison for more people at the time it was created in 2021. But he said the limited releases under the short-lived board seem to reflect a return to the political realities around clemency born out of the tough-on-crime era and rhetoric of the 1990s. “Given where we are now in terms of the backlash to things like George Floyd’s murder and the Task Force for Racial Equity and Criminal Justice, and Trump being elected again, I am not surprised,” Finholt said.And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Sheep Whisperer Friedman of the Algarve brings us this tale of democracy inaction, and/or inactive. From NonDoc:More than 100 of Oklahoma’s elected judges won reelection April 3 by virtue of being the only person to file for the job, with even a few open seats decided by default. Of Oklahoma’s 152 elected judicial offices, 138—about 91 percent—were elected without opposition in the 2026 election, with 14 of those judges taking their post for the first time without a vote.Oklahomans will have six new district judges and new associate district judges after candidate filing closed. Another 14 judicial races, which are nonpartisan, will see elections across the state. Races with three or more candidates will hold first-round elections June 16, and any candidate who secures a majority in June will win the seat. If no candidates secure more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two will advance to the November general election. In races with only two candidates, the only election will be held November 3.There are a number of reasons why an elected judiciary is the second-worst idea in American politics. One of them is that nobody votes in minor elections, and therefore, nobody runs in minor elections. Local judgeships are minor elections.This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.