More Michigan Media Lies; Not Even Quality Fake News
Ingrid Jacques tells us that the Michigan GOP is “running scared” in an opinion posted yesterday at The Detroit News. “Republicans fear that the end of traditional district drawing by lawmakers is their death knell.” Michigan’s Republican Party leadership shares our dismal view of the baleful effect of Proposal 2 on our future.
Ms. Jacques goes on to quote Secretary of State elect Democrat Jocelyn Benson, who will be in charge of the Proposal 2 redistricting commission:
“I have a deep background in redistricting law and in particular citizen-led redistricting,” Benson told me in an interview last month. “I do believe that it is the most impactful way that you can remove the conflict of interest that currently exists in districting, where people are drawing their own districts and preserving their own power.”
Ms. Jacques concludes her opinion, however, with soothing ‘independent’ reports from Wayne State Law Professor Robert A. Sedler saying there’s no doubt this will benefit Democrats, but that’s just because the contorted districts Republicans have drawn will no longer exist; and Eric W. Lupher of the Citizens Research Council imagining the GOP will keep control of at least one legislative chamber in the coming decade.
Republicans have nothing to fear. It is another tin foil hat conspiracy beloved of Trump supporters.
Feeling some reassurance? You shouldn’t.
Benson, of course, is an outright partisan Democrat. You would expect her to soft soap the hangman’s noose which is Proposal 2.
How about Sedler and Lupher?
Wayne State Law Professor Robert A. Sedler is an Act Blue contributor and a big time contributor to Democratic candidates at the federal and state level, in this very election cycle. A subtle point which Ms. Jacques failed to relate in her opinion; if she even knows it. Think Professor Sedler is going to be candid with Ms. Jacques, or the Michigan public? He seeks only desolation and destruction for Michigan Republicans.
Eric W. Lupher has been President of the Citizens Research Council since September of 2014. He was out shilling for Proposal 2 on Radio Moscow, promoting CRC’s Report 402 in June. The CRC is all in with the Stephanopolous-McGhee ‘Efficiency Gap’ theory, which (along with the Gelman-Katz-Tuerlinckx studies) is the deceitful intellectual propaganda the Democrats used to promote Proposal 2.
Ms. Jacques certainly knew of Mr. Lupher’s sub rosa promotion of Proposal 2, but failed to tell her readers. Mr. Lupher is not going to disinherit his grotesque stepchild.
Suffice it to say, the good Ms. Jacques got played. One can only hope she was a useful Democratic tool, and not an actual collaborator in the destruction of Michigan’s Republican Party.
But who really knows?
The Detroit News was a big promoter of RINO Rick Snyder, the Fifth Columnist who set up the collapse of the Michigan GOP. Why wouldn’t they use their last shreds of credibility to complete Snyder’s nefarious project?
They endorsed both Brian Calley and Gretchen Whitmer, after all.
We are so screwed.
(18)Nuh Uh.
(1)
Over the last year or so, I've dismissed Democrats' ridiculous claims that Michigan's state legislative districts are "gerrymandered" by pointing out this indisputable fact:
In the 2008 elections, the people of Michigan elected a state House of Representatives comprised of 67 Democrats and 43 Republicans.
In 2010, under the EXACT SAME DISTRICTS, the people of Michigan elected a state House of Representatives comprised of 63 Republicans and 47 Democrats.
If someone had "gerrymandered" legislative districts after the 2000 census to give one party or the other an advantage, they obviously hadn't done a very good job of it.
Regarding the new, allegedly "non-partisan" redistricting process approved by voters on Tuesday's ballot, Republicans and Democrats both would be wise to remember Mark Twain's famous response to inaccurate media reports that he'd died: “The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”
Case study...
I was heavily involved in the redistricting process in the state of Idaho following the 1980 census, which ended -- after repeated deadlocks between a Democrat governor and a Republican legislature -- with a state judge ordering into effect a new plan authored by a hardcore liberal activist professor at North Idaho College.
Democrats were exhuberant, and I distinctly remember seeing Democratic Gov. John Evans on TV boasting about how Democrats would pick up seats under the new plan in the next legislative election.
Except...
No Democrat, apparently, had looked at the numbers. I had, calculating the partisan performance of all 800-plus precincts in the state over the previous three elections -- with a legal pad and a calculator, mind you, back in the day before computers.
Before the judge rendered his decision, the aforementioned college professor had given the judge two or three dozen possible plans to choose from, all of them intended to eliminate an alleged redistricting advantage for Republicans.
And because I had calculated the plan the judge finally chose as the single strongest plan for Republicans -- a plan likely, in fact, to produce a veto-proof GOP legislature -- I was confident that was the one plan the Democrat-appointed judge would never order into effect.
But he did. And check this out. Of the several dozen plans and variations the North Idaho professor had authored for the court's consideration, the one eventually ordered into effect was designated as plan 14(b).
Which made for this delicious irony.
It is Section 14(b) of the National Labor Relations Act, commonly known as the Taft-Hartley Act, that allows states to enact Right to Work laws.
And come 1984, in the first legislative election held under the new court-ordered plan, Idaho voters elected the first veto-proof Republican legislature in Idaho history, which allowed the 1985 legislature to override the Democratic governor's veto of House Bill 1 and make Idaho the nation's 21st Right to Work state. (Said law was subsequently upheld by a vote of the people in a November 1986 ballot referendum, despite the fact that we were outspent 3-to-1 by Big Labor bosses.)
But reinforcing my point that the will of the voters in any given election will supersede whatever process may have produced legislative district lines, the same Plan 14(b) redistricting plan that had produced a 28-14 veto-proof Senate in Idaho in the 1984 election produced a deadlocked 21-21 state Senate in 1990. Different times. Different issues.
After the 1990 census, lawmakers again redrew Idaho's legislative districts, but in 1994, Idaho voters approved a state constitutional amendment taking the redistricting process away from the legislature and turning it over instead to an appointed panel of three Republicans and three Democrats, who have since redrawn legislative district lines after the 2000 census and again after the 2010 census.
Democrats once again argued that this would eliminate an alleged bias for Republicans because of "gerrymandering."
The makeup of Idaho's legislature today, after the 2018 election:
59-11 Republican in the state House, 28-7 Republican in the state Senate.
Of course, Michigan's electorate is much different from Idaho's.
My point is, simply, that Democrat exhuberance and Republican gloom about changing the outcome of the Will of the People by changing the redistricting process may be both premature and, as Twain said, "greatly exaggerated."
I have argued against Prop 2, but do realize the more things change, the more they remain the same.
The one concern I have is with the integrity of the incoming SoS. Crooks with power are better at stealing things.
Have you opened your eyes to The Left's other hammer of Prop 3: no-excuse absentee, same-day registration, and straight-ticket voting?
Sedler and Lupher? lzozolzozlzolzolz! They're Ashkenazi.
Same problem y'all have that is in charge of running the MI-GOP.
Ron didn't want Trump- look it up. Ron's a billionaire, all the Party clinger-ons won't buck Ron.
Ron fucked this election up worse than big-nose Saul who is part of Soros' NPV agenda. Yad Veshem!