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Pennsylvania sends too many Republicans to Washington.

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Thats not a partisan attack. Its just math.

Of the 18 Pennsylvanian members of the House of Representatives, 13 are Republicans and 5 are Democrats. That split should be more like 11 to 7 or even 10 to 8 if the districts were drawn without attempts at favoring Republicans, according to recent expert analyses.

Its all about the map: Several lawsuits are attempting to get various state legislative and congressional maps declared unconstitutional on the basis of partisan gerrymandering, the idea that one political party drew the lines in a way that benefited them unfairly.

The lawsuits rely on a set of tools that for the first time could convincingly identify skewed maps and persuade the courts that a states map goes too far in favoring one party. A federal court has ruled Wisconsins state legislative map unconstitutional, the first victory in a partisan gerrymandering case in three decades.

That decision used one of several new mathematical tests to help measure the maps Republican skew, and the Supreme Court will hear the case in the fall; if it upholds the decision, it could create a legal standard, potentially including some of these tests for measuring map bias.

That could spell trouble for Pennsylvania, which fails those analyses.

People have made these claims before, but proof has been elusive. The Supreme Court had said too much gerrymandering could be unconstitutional, but the justices couldnt agree on how much is too much in part for lack of measurement standards.

Anthony Kennedy, the pivotal swing vote in the 2004 Pennsylvania case, laid down a gauntlet: A convincing test hadnt been found, but that didnt make it an impossibility. That opinion and how close the court came to declaring partisan gerrymandering a political issue off-limits to the courts spurred academics and lawyers to put forward a host of mathematical methods to precisely identify skewed maps.

No matter what concept you care about in partisan gerrymandering, Pennsylvania is going to be an outlier, said Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who helped develop the efficiency gap test.

Unlike in many other states, Pennsylvanias congressional district map is drawn by the state legislature, passed as a bill, and signed by the governor. The current map was drawn in 2011 by Republicans, who controlled both houses of the legislature and the governors mansion. New Jersey, which uses a commission of political appointees, has a bipartisan split and tiebreaker vote; its map is generally not flagged as a problem by these tests.

The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divvied up after the census every 10 years, based on population. As populations shift across the country, so, too, does political power Pennsylvania has lost at least one seat every 10 years, while states in the Southwest have grown. Once the state is given its number of representatives, it redraws its map.

Those mapping decisions ultimately can shape government policies that affect millions of Americans.

Pennsylvania is clearly quite extreme. This is not random, said Michael Li, a redistricting and voting rights expert who is senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

According to tests run by Li and others, the 2011 redrawing of Pennsylvanias congressional districts skewed the districts in Republicans favor, giving two or even three seats to Republicans over what would occur with a politically neutral map.

Here is a summary of how Pennsylvania fares in three of the tests that experts believe best capture evidence of gerrymandering.

The primary gerrymandering methods are packing and cracking.

In packing, a rival partys voters are concentrated in a district it usually wins easily. While that districts race is conceded, the rivals voters cant cast ballots in elections that would be more contested. Cracking involves dispersing a partys voters into multiple districts in such ways that they are deprived of majorities.

In the parlance of what analysts call the efficiency gap, certain votes are wasted, defined as ballots cast either for sure losers, or for the victors above and beyond the winning margins.

Using 2016 election results, Pennsylvania has fared poorly in several efficiency gap analyses, including those by the Associated Press, the Brennan Center, and Philadelphia-based mapping firm Azavea.

By their measures, the Keystone State should be sending 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats to the House not 13 and 5.

Princeton University researchers use very well-known and very well-tested, battle-tested statistical tests to measure ways that mapping can affect elections, said Brian Remlinger, the statistical research assistant who serves as the main analyst at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

Cracking and packing would result in one partys winning districts with wide margins, while the other party wins more districts, but with slimmer margins. That effect was evident in Pennsylvania in 2016, when winning Democrats on average took 75 percent of the vote, compared with 64 for Republicans. The odds of that happening would have been less than 0.03 percent with a politically neutral map, Remlinger said.

Historically, what percentage of votes did a party receive in Pennsylvania, how many seats did it win, and how does that compare to recent elections?

Pennsylvanias map is the most heavily skewed in the country on this measure, a Brennan Center analysis found. In 2016, Republicans had about a four-seat advantage, compared with the outcomes in a neutral mapping, and about five seats in 2012.

There isnt necessarily a need to pick one test, you can have multiple tests and the fact that multiple tests point in the same direction, as in Pennsylvania, suggest this isnt random, Li said.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments this fall in Gill v. Whitford, the Wisconsin case in which a three-judge panel relied on the efficiency gap, in part, to declare Wisconsins state legislative map unconstitutional.

If the Supreme Court upholds that decision, using the efficiency gap or other measures, that in effect would green-light the use of these measures in gerrymandering case law, experts said, and open the door for other maps to get challenged using these tests.

All of these things tend to point in the same direction, so we think that presenting any of these pieces of evidence could be useful for a court, said Ruth Greenwood, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, which is bringing the Whitford case before the Supreme Court.

Pennsylvanias map is already facing a direct challenge: The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania in June sued the state, using the efficiency gap as part of its legal argument that partisan gerrymandering had occurred.

An election system in which one party, whatever party happens to be in control of the election system, can rig it so it can win and keep a majority thereafter, is almost by definition the antithesis of self-government, said Michael Churchill, an attorney at Philadelphia-based Public Interest Law Center, which is representing the League in the case.

It defeats the very purpose of having elections.

Gerrymandering is an age-old process of dividing congressional and legislative districts in such a way as to give one party an advantage.

On Feb. 11, 1812, Gov. Elbridge Gerry, then the governor of Massachusetts, signed into law a redistricting plan aimed at keep his party in power.

The Boston Gazette printed mock map in the shape of a salamander under the headline The Gerry-mander.

The rest is history.

Could Pa. courts do what lawmakers won't? Jun 25 - 11:19 PM

Groups sue Pa. over congressional district gerrymandering Jun 15 - 8:39 PM

Supreme Court to hear potentially landmark case on partisan gerrymandering Jun 20 - 1:07 AM

GOP quietly carved key districts in its favor Oct 23 - 1:08 AM

Published: August 14, 2017 8:00 AM EDT | Updated: August 14, 2017 8:37 AM EDT

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Why Pa. sends too many Republicans to Congress - and why that could change - Philly.com

White nationalists carry torches on the grounds of the University of Virginia on Friday. STRINGER / Reuters

To be sure, many of these areas are extremely hostile to minorities, or outsiders, but while there may be a culture manifested in isolation and poverty among poor whites, racist institutions cannot exist on their power alone. They have neither the money nor the means to fight for oppressive voter registration laws, gerrymandered voting districts, or corporate-friendly tax loopholes that enrich board members who in turn use that money to lobby Congress for even more corporate welfare.

Poor whites, no more than poor blacks or Latinos, are not more likely to find Iraq on a map than they are any number of countries to which we send our soldier youngsters to secure access to whatever resource Congress has deemed a national interest; sugar, bananas, oil, whatever.

Poor whites probably couldnt tell you that the United States spends almost as much money on military power than the rest of the world does combined. The words

And yet, when we think of white supremacy we think of these poor whites. We do not think of our history and the fact that institutions like the police have been infiltrated by white supremacists; we still see how minorities are treated as the enemy. You are as likely to find illegal drugs in wealthy Scottsdale, Arizona or in a fraternity than you are to find it in Compton or East Los Angeles. And yet we see an armada of helicopters flying over the latter and not the former. Poor whites dont make that policy.

We do not think of

We do not think of

Indeed, Cvjetanovic is our future loan officer, or firefighter. A supposed student of history, he may be our kids' high school teacher.

And this is perhaps why the GOP was so quick to condemn these people, not because of who they are, but because of what they reveal about us as a country. Their sin was not to be racist, but to be visible. Promoting obscure policies that have the effect of oppressing minorities is an acceptable American pastime, one can do so while still pretending to advocate for American principles, like liberty, equality, or fairness.

But the GOP's reaction to white supremacy is nothing but a shell game. They created Trump with decades of vilifying immigrants, attacking the black community through coded language about "welfare queens" and being "tough on crime".

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They indulged Trump's assault on President Barack Obama's legitimacy as a citizen through his birther sham, a project he took up with former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a

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Trump ran on not being "politically correct" and vowed to proclaim "Islamic terrorism" by its name, yet he is a coward when asked to confront Nazis or Vladimir Putin. The GOP is led by this very small man. Tweeting their disapproval when a person was killed and dozens injured in a neo-Nazi rally is not nearly enough.

Writing the training manual for the police which allows them to shoot minorities and almost never face any consequences is racism. The GOP should address that. Who sits on these commissions is often an obscure mystery to poor white folks who could care less, but it matters greatly to the Richard Spencers and Stephen Millers.

Minorities are less likely to

If you don't stand with the white supremacists, stand for changing these facts.

Cvjetanovic and his funny foreign-sounding name, which white supremacists of the past would not have distinguished from Nuo or Chen or Weinstein, is a misguided tool, but like the tools he marched with, he was certainly not oppressed and would not know oppression if he saw it. Indeed, he will be a part of our system of oppression before long, and had he not showed his face, his participation in our racist system would have gone largely unnoticed or unchallenged.

Racism is the laws, the institutions, and the policies which oppress minorities, women, and sexual minorities and gives privileged status to people like Tucker Carlson. They want to keep it that way, so they use their influence, education, and resources to buttress a system of rules that maintain their power. This weekend's rally finally put an accurate face on these institutions.

The question now is whether the GOP will be politically incorrect and call out our racist system.

I'm not holding my breath.

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Opinion: Republicans' Reaction to Racism Is a Shell Game - NBCNews.com

President Trump made two big political decisions over past half-week, and both are already proving disasters.

The first decision was to cut himself loose from the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with a sequence of tweets fixing blame on McConnelland thereby absolving himselffor the failure of Obamacare repeal.

The second decision was to issue a statement condemning many sides for the confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekendand adhering to that policy of pandering to white nationalism even after the ramming death of a counter-protester and the injury of many more.

Trump had wanted to stand apart from Republicans in Congressand they have now obliged him. Former campaign rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio; Senator Cory Gardner, who heads the Senate Republican campaign organization; President Pro Tempore of the Senate Orrin Hatchall issued statements implicitly criticizing Trumps for its even-handedness between perpetrators and targets.

Its always hazardous to overthink the strategy behind Trumps words or actions. Oftentimes the president simply reacts with impulsive emotionalism to events. Yet there are plausible reasons for him to distance himself from the Senate Republicans now. A president normally needs Congress to enact his agenda. This president, however, does not have much of a legislative agenda. Instead, he has submitted to the policy agenda of Congressand that agenda is, if possible, even less popular than he is. Trump will be far better off going to the nation in 2020 not having removed Medicaid coverage from millions of red state voters, not having shoved through a huge upper-income tax cut financed by stringent domestic budget cuts, than he would be running on that record.

What Trump needs most for 2020 is an excuse, and a plausible enemy. Complaints about Democratic obstruction and partisan Russia witch hunts sound absurd when Republicans control both houses of Congress. Lose even one chamber, however, and suddenly those talking points acquire some plausibility, at least in the ears of Trump-inclined voters. And even if blaming Congress does not reflect a deliberate strategic calculationwith this president, its difficult to conclude that anything doesit could be regarded as working to his advantage. The Trump base is much more clearly defined by its cultural resentments than by any policy program: sacrificing the program to enflame the resentments may well appear to the embattled Trump White House as the least bad survival option.

Until Charlottesville.

Trump supporters often invoke the presidents supposed mandate from the people. Heres what Kellyanne Conway told Andrea Mitchell just last weekend:

Republican consultants ... totally missed what was happening in America. That the forgotten man and forgotten woman, many of whom had voted for Democrats in the past, many of whom had never voted, or never voted in decade, came forth and made this new Trump coalition in a way thatin a way that frankly, respectfully, the last couple of Republican candidates did not.

Trump aides say such things so often that they themselves may have lost sight of how untrue they are. Trump not only lost the popular vote in 2016, but he won a smaller share than Mitt Romney in 2012, and only 0.3 percent more than John McCain in the disastrous year 2008. (The tallies stand at 45.93 percent for Trump vs. 45.6% percent for McCain) With barely one-third of the U.S. public approving his presidency in the last pre-Charlottesville polls, Trumps presidency has sunk to the lowest level of popularity ever recorded in a presidents first year.

The Trump team may be trying to replay Bill Clintons triangulation of 1995-96, when Clinton won re-election by positioning himself as a moderate centrist between the extremes of the congressional Republicans and congressional Democrats. And maybe Trump could have executed a blue-collar version of that strategy by joining cultural conservatism to a free-spending populism of infrastructure spending and the defense of Medicare and Medicaid. Instead hes positioned himself in such a way that other political actors can triangulate against him: congressional Republicans, by rejecting Trumps indulgence of murderous racism; congressional Democrats, by fastening Trump to the widely disliked Ryan-McConnell policy agenda.

Its probably impossible for a man of Trumps psychology to process how much legal jeopardy he and his family may be inand how utterly he depends on Republicans in Congress to shield him. President Bill Clinton faced down scandal politics in his second term because his party united to support him, a decision politically vindicated by the strong Democratic showing in 1998, the best sixth-year election performance in modern history. Trump, by contrast, is doing his utmost to persuade congressional Republicans that it could well be less disastrous to face the voters in 2020 under Mike Pence than Donald Trump. Pence apparently thinks so, too. Pre-Charlottesville, that remained a tough sale. Post-Charlottesville, things look different.

Trump now stands not between the parties, or above the parties, but beyond the partiesin some strange political twilight zone where neo-Nazis are seen as a constituency not to be insulted. As events shift Trump to that bizarre place, even his one authentic achievement as presidentthe steep reduction in illegal immigrationrisks becoming an anti-achievement. Trump and his white-nationalist advisers seem determined to corroborate their critics accusation that enforcement is concerned not with protecting the wages and working conditions of legal residents of the United Statespart of a pro-worker agenda that also could include a big investment in construction, trust-busting of college tuition, and a defense of existing social-insurance programs but instead as a component of a white-nationalist agenda that also includes attacks on minority voting rights, a rollback of affirmative action, and compliments to authoritarian leaders worldwide.

The conventional wisdom is that dissension is a party killer; safer to stay united around even a low-polling president than to act against him. But what if it is the president who is fomenting the dissension, because his ego requires that every failure be blamed on somebody else? What if the president is polling so low that he splashes his party with his own odium? What if he is branding his entirely flag-waving party with the flags not of the United States but of Russia, the Southern Confederacy, and now amazingly even Nazi Germany? Then, to quote the Moby Dick at Sea" account that seems at every turn to be subtweeting this presidency:

Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better.

Continue reading here:
Time for Republicans to Leap From the Boat - The Atlantic

Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House on July 31, 2017. (AP Photo / Pablo Martinez)

Republicans used to recognize the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil. The partys great moral champion in the moment when it became the political tribune for a wave of 19th-century abolitionist sentiment, Pennsylvania Senator Thaddeus Stevens, proclaimed, I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christianshowever dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrants lash, and the cries of his tortured victims.

That is the language that Republicans once spoke.

But Americans have not heard any echoes of that language in the awful response of Donald Trump to the racist terror that has rocked Charlottesville, Virginia.

When white nationalists marched with the flag of the slaveholders that Stevens and his comrades vanquished more than a century and a half ago, when these so-called neo-Confederates unleashed hatred and violence in Charlottesville, the Republican president of the United States attempted to equate their infamy with the principled resistance to racism and xenophobia.

I should put out a comment as to whats going on in Charlottesville, said the president, who then proceeded to announce that We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.

Trump then sought to absolve himself of any responsibility by noting that this hatred, bigotry, and violencewhich has flared so horrifically since last years presidential electionhas been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. A long, long time.

Trumps final observation was correct: the American crisis is not new. Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old Charlottesville paralegal who died Saturday after a car driven by a man linked with the white supremacists plowed into a crowd of peaceful antiracism demonstrators, was certainly not the first supporter of equality to be murdered in this country.

But to equate the champions of equal justice under law with the vile racists who march beneath the banners of slaveholders and segregationists is beyond defense.

At a moment when the country needed a president to speak with moral authority, Trump failed the test. Miserably.

The only question that remains involves his fellow Republicans. Will they finally put principle above party and reject this pathetic excuse for a president?

The great name of the Republican Party has already been dragged through the mud not just by Donald Trump but by every Republican who has to this point facilitated his presidency.

As Trump exploits and extends resentment for purposes of politics and self-aggrandizement, he affronts the legacy of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens. He cannot help himself, or his party, or his country. But Donald Trump is not the whole of the Republican Party. Not yet.

Other Republicans still have an opportunity to reject the destructive politics that the president is employing, a politics that is rapidly turning the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. This will only happen, however, if they have the courage to make an explicit and unapologetic break with their president.

It is not enough that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, and senior Republicans such as Arizona Senator John McCain have issued more responsible statements than did Trump. They have a duty to condemn a Republican president who had done everything in his power to divide the country, and who is now making things much, much worse.

The burden rests heaviest on Paul Ryans shoulders. He is right to say that White supremacy is a scourge. This hate and its terrorism must be confronted and defeated. But the speaker must understand that confronting and defeating slaveholders, segregationists, neo-Confederates, and alt-right haters has always required the moral clarity that Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens mustered in the partys founding time.

Donald Trumps crudely constructed and crudely stated arguments for moral equivalency are an affront to the long legacy of the Republican Party, and to human decency. If Ryan and other leading Republicans fail to confront Trump, if they will not hold their president to account, they are facilitating his heresyand the damage to society that extends from a Republican president who governs with no sense of history, and no sense of honor.

Continue reading here:
Trump Blamed the Violence in Charlottesville 'On Many Sides.' Republicans Must Reject That. - The Nation.

WSU officials call for unity after riot breaks out at University of Virginia

College Republicans President James Allsup waves a Trump flag in celebration of Donald Trumps victory.

College Republicans President James Allsup waves a Trump flag in celebration of Donald Trumps victory.

REBECCA WHITE, Evergreen news editor August 13, 2017

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Many students at WSU have called for a response from the university after WSU College Republican President James Allsup attended a rally turned riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Allsup was publicly identified in several photos by a Twitter account, Yes, Youre Racist, which has released identities of several Unite the Right attendees. Allsup said he was there as a member of the media and to speak at the event and condemned racism and Nazism.

In a series of tweets, WSU President Kirk Schulz condemned Naziism and racism as well and asked the university to come together. Schulz did not acknowledge Allsup or the requests for his expulsion directly, but did make a note that a university is a place where controversial voices must be heard.

Allsup said in an interview before the tweets that he would be insulted if the university took the time to respond or condemn his participation in the Unite the Right Rally.

The university should not be in the business of disavowing what their students do, what their tuition-paying students do in their professional careers, Allsup said.

Allsup said most of the violence at the event was started by the counter protesters, who pepper sprayed a fellow alt-right media figure, Baked Alaska. He blames the police for the death and injuries caused by a car plowing into counter protesters, saying that they did not do a good enough job protecting the rally attendees and separating the two groups.

Allsup said the basis of the rally, as a protest of the removal of a confederate monument of General E Lee, was not a symbol of hate and the neo Nazis in attendance were not representative of the majority of people there.

I think we should check our northern privilege and consider the alternate experiences of people of this country, Allsup said.

Allsup added that he sees any action or response from the university as an affront to his free speech rights and singling him out as a member of the alternative media.

ASWSU President Jordan Frost and student body presidents at other universities posting a statement in solidarity with the University of Virginia.

We are united with the students of the University of Virginia, as what affects one of our campuses affects us all College Campuses are spaces that students should be able to call home, not places of violence, hate and racism.

Other leaders at WSU and in the Pullman community also posted to social media and held candlelight vigils condemning the violence and racism on the University of Virginia campus.

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College Republicans president attends Virginia rally, sparks backlash - The Daily Evergreen