This morning’s episode of The Daily, “Democratic Anger and Republican Revenge: Welcome to the Primaries,” illustrates yet again the absurdity of the way we choose candidates for high office.

The transcription is not yet available but, in a nutshell:

Republican primaries for key US Senate, US House, and even some state legislative races are being dominated by President Trump’s revenge tour against Republican politicians who have dared oppose him. It highlights a weekend report from one of the guests, Shane Goldmacher, “Trump’s Push for Electoral Retribution Heads to the Ballot Box,” which is more detailed that the podcast discussion.

But, basically, Republican-aligned groups are spending millions of dollars going after easily re-electable Republican incumbents, rather than saving their war chest to target Democrats in a crucial midterm election that will determine how much of Trump’s agenda can be passed in the remainder of his term. In particular, they’re going after Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who votes with Trump essentially all the time but voted to convict in the post-January 6 impeachment trial; Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who’s voted with Trump 91% of the time but opposed him on the release of the Epstein files and the Iran War; and several Indiana state legislators who voted against gerrymandering the state’s congressional districts.

This is all good news for Democrats and others who oppose Trump. But it’s just idiotic from a political strategy standpoint. The only thing Trump should be worried about is keeping his thin majorities in Congress.

Meanwhile, Democratic primary voters in Maine have nominated a Nazi* firebrand with no political experience rather than popular two-term Governor Janet Mills because she’s not sufficiently exciting. Since the party needs to run the table on the Senate races in November, and Republican Susan Collins is seemingly quite vulnerable, this seems wildly stupid. But Democrats are mad at Chuck Schumer, so they’re sticking it to him. Because reasons.

Choosing candidates based on the preferences of the angriest, most rabidly ideological voters makes no sense at all. And, of course, the fact that the House is gerrymandered such that 32 of 435 seats are considered competitive and we are so polarized that 46 of 50 states have both of their Senators from the same party means there’s seldom punishment at the ballot box for choosing the worst candidates. We’re just punished as a society.

*He had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest for twenty years. He claims he was unaware. I don’t believe he could possibly be that stupid.

WaPo (“Attacks in Strait of Hormuz, Gulf region imperil fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire“):

A sharp escalation in attacks in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf is threatening the shaky ceasefire between Iran and the United States as the two sides struggle to make progress in talks on a lasting end to the war.

Iran accused the U.S. of ceasefire violations and issued new warnings Tuesday after two U.S. destroyers, closely followed by two merchant vessels, came under attack Monday morning during successful transits of the strait, in an expansion of U.S. operations in the waterway.The United Arab Emirates reported an Iranian assault on an energy hub that caused a fire. And Oman’s state media reported an attack in the country but did not identify a perpetrator.

Iran fired cruise missiles and drones at the U.S. naval and commercial vessels but did not land any hits, said Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command. Iran also sent six fast boats after the commercial ships, he said, but U.S. forces fired on and destroyed the vessels. He would not say whether the exchange of strikes meant the ceasefire was over.

In a separate incident, President Donald Trump said Iran hit a South Korean tanker in the strait. “Perhaps it’s time for South Korea to come and join the mission!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Monday. South Korean officials met Tuesday to discuss their response to the incident, according to Yonhap, South Korea’s state news agency.

Iranian officials issued new warnings following the flare-up in hostilities. Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf accused the U.S. of ceasefire violations, saying “we know full well that the continuation of the status quo is intolerable for America; while we have not even begun yet,” in a post on X.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said events in the strait “make clear that there’s no military solution to a political crisis” in a separate statement. “The U.S. should be wary of being dragged back into quagmire by ill-wishers,” he said, adding: “Project Freedom is Project Deadlock.”

Earlier, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the predominant branch of the Iranian armed forces, warned any U.S. vessels in the strait would be considered “a legitimate target.”

“The Strait of Hormuz will not be opened by the tweet of the President of the United States; the management and control of this waterway is in the hands of Iran,” Ahmad Vahidi said in a post on X.

Iranian officials said over the weekend that U.S. attempts to “interfere” with Tehran’s “management” of the strait would qualify as a ceasefire violation.

The ceasefire is over in all but name. Iran is firing at our ships and we’re sinking theirs.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner states the obvious: “It would not take much for the situation to escalate further.”

As the US-Iran ceasefire teeters on the brink of collapse, residents in the Gulf are now wondering if a full-scale resumption of hostilities is inevitable and if so, what form it will take.

With the US attempting to break the blockade that Iran has imposed on the Strait of Hormuz and with Iran lashing out at both shipping and onshore targets in the UAE it would not take much for the situation to escalate further.

Iran retains a large number of its missiles and drones, including some reportedly dug up from where they were buried to evade airstrikes in March.

The IRGC Navy is also thought to possess powerful anti-ship missiles which pose a serious threat to any US Navy warship escorting merchant vessels past Iran’s coastline.

President Trump has threatened dire retaliation if a US warship is hit.

This all reinforces the fact that it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prise open the Strait of Hormuz by force.

While a ceasefire with a guarantee that the Strait returns to its prewar state would seem to be the best deal in the offing for either party, neither side seems willing to take that deal. A prolonged ceasefire with American sailors and Marines seems rather clearly to Iran’s advantage, as it degrades US combat power and gives them time to regroup and reconstitute.

I haven’t the foggiest what comes next. We seem to be about out of useful military targets to hit from the relative safety of the air and sea. And we clearly have no desire to launch a ground invasion.

I have a piece up at Liberal Currents, Lessons from the Redistricting Wars, for anyone who might be interested.

Here are the basic lessons:

There are three key lessons I hope are learned here:  lines are more important than people in our system, making changes to the electoral system is possible, and when both sides are threatened, there is hope for more positive change.

Click on through above to read more!

Natalie Oliverio, founder of Military Talent Partners, argues “Military widows shouldn’t face a penalty for remarrying.”

Under federal law, military widows lose their family’s survivor benefits if they remarry before age 55. The result is a trade-off few civilians ever confront: Either maintain the financial support tied to a spouse’s sacrifice, or risk losing it to move forward. But as Congress considers the bipartisan Love Lives On Act, it has an opportunity to correct a policy that no longer reflects how military families live or what they need after loss.

The existing rule is rooted in the Survivor Benefit Plan, which provides ongoing financial support to spouses of deceased service members. When the plan was designed, lawmakers assumed that remarriage would replace that support, reflecting a model in which one spouse worked and the other stayed home. But today, 54 percent of military households are dual-income. Surviving spouses now often raise children while managing careers shaped by years of relocation and interruption. They must rebuild financial stability without the local support networks that many civilian families rely on after a loss. Remarriage does not resolve those pressures. Rather, it can compound them.

[…]

Supporters of the existing rule argue that it prevents overlapping benefits and reflects a change in financial dependency after remarriage. That logic assumes a new marriage replaces what was lost. For many surviving spouses, it does not. The long-term effects of military life — including frequent moves, disrupted careers and delayed earning potential — continue to shape widowed spouses’ financial realities.

I’m dubious of much of Oliverio’s argument. The military offers considerably better “support networks” than most civilians enjoy. The disrupted careers stop being disrupted. And others face the loss of federal survivor benefits upon remarriage. Notably, surviving spouses lose eligibility for their late partner’s Social Security benefits if they remarry before age 71.

Still, the policy creates perverse incentives. Ordinarily, we would want people, especially those with small children, to remarry. Making doing so economically disadvantageous is, well, odd.

At the same time, it’s an incredibly generous policy. Because most military members are quite young, the benefits could last half a century or more. And it doesn’t apply only to those who died in combat. Those who die in automobile accidents or even by suicide leave behind the benefit.

Further, it’s rooted in the days when the servicemember, almost always a man, was likely the sole income earner or at least the primary one. Nowadays, the dependent* spouse almost always works. Providing a lifetime benefit to replace the lost income of a deceased spouse after remarrriage is rather odd.

And so begins our multi-part look at Harlan Ellison, one of the most influential writers, editors, and personalities in the realm of “speculative fiction.” In this first episode, we look at Harlan Ellison the public persona: the guy we knew from TV and radio interviews, convention appearances, writings about himself, and other avenues. Force of nature, pugnacious champion for a more serious take on the genre, nemesis of TV producers, editor of groundbreaking SF anthologies, champion of fellow writers, vocal critic of everything that he deemed wrong about the world — call him what you will, he left a deep imprint on science fiction and fantasy. He won dozens of awards, and earned the respect and affection of his fellow SF&F writers. Most of them.

As Robert Bloch said about him, “He is the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water.”

In later episodes, we’ll cover Ellison’s writing, as well as adaptations of his works to the screen.

Typewriters! The Southern California SF scene! Dead gophers! Tom Snyder! Creative writing professors! Beloved TV scripts! Fights with TV executives! Fights with editors! Fights with other writers! Fights with fans! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact so**************@***il.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. Also, check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack! And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

Reuters (“How redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races“):

The number of competitive U.S. House of Representatives districts in this fall’s midterm elections was already near historic lows before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday opened the door to even more aggressive efforts to draw district lines for political gain. The court’s ruling, which arrived amid what was already an unprecedented national fight over congressional redistricting, may usher in a new era of nakedly partisan gerrymandering ​that results in still fewer competitive elections, leaving voters with less power than ever, experts said.

The lack of competitive races means that control of the U.S. House of ‌Representatives will likely be determined in November’s midterm election by fewer than 10% of Americans, with the winners in the vast majority of districts all but assured before a single ballot is cast, a Reuters analysis found. Only 32 of the House’s 435 seats are currently considered competitive, according to the analysis. Those districts were rated either toss-ups or leaning toward Democrats or Republicans by three leading independent forecasters: Cook Political Report, the University of Virginia’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections.

Most other districts ​are simply out of play. Cook, for instance, rates 375 seats, more than 85% of the House, as either “Solid Republican” or “Solid Democrat,” which means its analysts do not expect them to be ​seriously contested. Another 28 races are “likely” Republican or Democratic, according to Cook, meaning they are not competitive at present but might become so under new conditions.
This ⁠year boasts the fewest competitive House races at this stage of the election cycle since at least 2008, according to an archive of prior Cook ratings.

Democrats need to gain just three seats to win ​a House majority, giving them the power to block President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda and initiate investigations into his administration.

The shrinking House battlefield is the result of several factors, including increased political polarization. But the weaponization ​of congressional redistricting, or gerrymandering – which has gone into overdrive since last year, when Trump began pushing Republicans to draw new maps – is a critical element that is only going to accelerate after the Supreme Court’s ruling, according to experts.

Because of partisan sorting, most states are now reliably “blue” or “red.” We have 50 states, of which 25 have two Republican Senators and 21 have two Democratic Senators. That means only four states have a split delegation. Arguably, that’s simply democracy in action.

At the presidential level, there are only six or seven “swing” states. That’s highly problematic, in that California’s 54 Electoral votes go to the Democrat despite a third or more of the state’s voters going Republican. Still, that’s been baked into our system so long that we accept it as normal.

But the House should be different. The “reddest” state at the Presidential level is Wyoming, which last voted Democratic in the landslide 1964 election. Some 30 percent of its residents consistently vote Democratic. The bluest state is likely Massachusetts, which last voted Republican during Reagan’s 1984 re-election landslide. Other candidates are Hawaii (ditto) and Vermont (1988). All likewise have roughly a third of their citizenry consistently voting Republican.

The upshot, then, is that the dominant party primary is effectively the election, barring some extraordinary happening. Which leads to predictable results.

The lack of competitive districts can have consequences for Congress, said Matthew Klein, a House analyst ‌with Cook. If ⁠House candidates only need to appeal to their base voters to win elections, rather than moderates or members of the opposing party, they are more likely to move toward the extremes instead of the political middle.

“If you look at Congress and how it acted 20 years ago, 30 years ago, even farther back, you see a Congress that is both less acrimonious and also more productive,” he said. “There used to be bills that passed with huge majorities on major issues. We just don’t really see that anymore.”

But, hey, nobody’s stopping anyone from voting, so all’s good.

In “Justice Kagan’s peculiar idea of voting rights,” WaPo columnist Jason Willick comes at the issue I was wrestling with in “Is Partisanship Merely a Proxy for Race?” from a different angle. He inadvertently illustrates why separating race and partisanship is more difficult than it may seem.

Think of a Republican living in San Francisco. She always votes, but the politicians she wants to send to Congress lose to Democrats by a wide margin every time. She is never represented by the candidate of her choice. Is she disenfranchised?

Or think of a Democrat living in Wyoming. He also goes to the polls every election cycle, but his preferred candidates for federal office are always outvoted by Republicans. Is he disenfranchised?

The answer is no. If people can vote, and their votes are counted equally, they are enfranchised even if they are outnumbered. 

That’s too simplistic, actually. If the citizen in question is voting to decide the next mayor of San Francisco or governor or US Senator from Wyoming, Willick is right. They were simply outvoted by their fellow citizens. But I would contend that those citizens are indeed disenfranchised when voting for President, owing to the wildly undemocratic nature of the Electoral College.

That principle was at the philosophical core of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last week in Louisiana v. Callais.

The court held, in a nutshell, that states no longer need to go out of their way to draw majority-Black or majority-Hispanic congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act. The VRA says that racial minority voters must have equal opportunity “to elect representatives of their choice.” But voters of all races have that opportunity at the ballot box, the court said, even if they live in congressional districts where their favored political party is unlikely ever to prevail.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent condemned the majority for “stripping minority citizens of their voting rights.” But, of course, no one’s right to cast a vote will be affected. What will change is the political composition of the districts people vote in, assuming states change their congressional boundaries in light of the new rules.

Here, I tend to agree. I’ve always found the idea that, if 70 percent of a state’s population is White and 30 percent is Black, we should expect 30 percent of the elected representatives to be Black rather odd.

Yet, I absolutely think that, if 70 percent of a state’s population is Republican and 30 percent is Democratic, we should expect roughly 30 percent of the elected representatives to be Democrats. Because party affiliation is directly on the ballot, we readily see that drawing the lines in such a way that 90 percent of the representatives are Republican is unfair. In that scenario, the state’s Democrats have clearly been disenfranchised.

We’ve all seen this many times over the years:

It’s seldom possible to draw Congressional District lines to perfectly match the partisan preferences of the citizenry, simply because there aren’t enough districts. But a neutral observer would clearly judge the fairness of the outcome by how close it came to the 60-40 split.

For Kagan, voting in a jurisdiction where your favored candidate will lose is next to meaningless. “What if the districts in which minority citizens exercise voting power” — that is, districts where a state’s minority population has been grouped together to comply with the VRA — “are sliced up, and the pieces appended to districts in which they can play no meaningful role?” she asked.

The right to vote, as Kagan formulates it, seems to include the right to have the satisfaction of voting for the winner. For those in the political minority, “voting power” is a mirage.

But that’s not Kagan’s position. She’s simply refusing to separate race and partisanship. Here’s the opening paragraph of her dissent (joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson):

Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional districtin a hypothetical State, subjected to a redistricting scheme. The example is admittedly stylized, but in its essence simulates the dispute before us, and clarifies the immense issues at stake. The district, let’s say, is a single county, in the shape of a near-perfect circle, sitting in the middle of a >rectangular State. The State is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination, and its many effects, including in residential segregation and political division, remain significant even today. The population of the circle district is 90% Black; the rest of the State, divided into five surrounding districts, is 90% White. And voting throughout all those districts is racially polarized: Black residents vote heavily for Democratic candidates, while White residents vote heavily for Republicans. The circle district thus enables the State’s Black community to elect a representative of its choice, whom no neighboring community would put in office. But that arrangement, in this not-so-hypothetical, is not to last. The state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts. The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.

If we change Black and White to Democrat and Republican, respectively, there’s simply no question that she’s right. It’s only when we separate out race as a separate category—one that’s supposed to be immaterial in the drawing of districts—that it’s a debatable proposition.

That’s a jarring conception of representative democracy, which depends on the idea that representatives “speak for” their entire constituency. Hundreds of millions of Americans can’t all gather and deliberate on how to govern themselves, so they select a few hundred politicians to do so on their behalf. For that process to work, everyone has to be bound by the decisions of the political representatives — even those who didn’t vote for the politician who represents their district.

Kagan is calling that bargain into question. And the bargain, admittedly, is fragile: How can a person be represented by someone against his will? A litigant can choose the lawyer he wants to represent him in a contract negotiation. But many millions of Americans are represented in Congress by politicians of the opposing party they see as working against their interests. They have to accept the outcome of the legislative process anyway, or government by consent of the governed yields to government by force.

This strikes me as deliberately obtuse. A Democrat living in Alabama has every reason to expect to live under laws made by Republican governors with a Republican-leaning state legislature and state Supreme Court. To the extent the laws they pass are in accordance with the Alabama and federal Constitution, they’re legitimate.

But judging from their presidential voting history over the last quarter-century, Alabama is roughly a 60-40 state. There’s no way to draw its seven Congressional Districts to exactly match that, as 4-3 would skew in the Democrats’ favor and 5-2 would skew Republican. The current map is indeed 5-2, owing to a court-imposed requirement to draw a second majority-minority district. Given the ruling from which Kagan dissented, we’re likely to see the state pass a 6-1 map. That’s grossly unfair but, notably, that was the result that prevailed from 2010-2022. Before that, the state typically had two Democrats and, indeed, had three for a single term pursuant to the 2008 election.

Where Willick and I disagree slightly with Kagan is how to factor race into this. Like Willick, I don’t think there’s any inherent right for the roughly 26.5% of Alabamians who are Black to have a Representative that looks like them. But I do think that the roughly 40% of Alabamians who are Democrats—including probably 90-odd percent of the Black population—to be represented in Congress.

The Supreme Court’s ruling involved how to draw legislative districts, but the most important elections for federal office these days are not subject to a gerrymandering frenzy. Senators are elected in statewide contests with fixed boundaries. So are presidents, for the most part — the electoral college is a winner-take-all contest in 48 states.

If Kagan is right that the minority party can be, in effect, disenfranchised in lopsided congressional districts, that is already true in more-consequential elections for the Senate and the presidency in deep-red and deep-blue states. Democrats in Alabama, and Republicans in Hawaii, for example, can’t expect their preferred presidential candidate to win their state’s electors in the foreseeable future.

Again, this seems deliberately obtuse. The whole point of Congressional Districts, at least as we’ve conceived them historically, is to represent local interests. “Cracking” localities to skew the outcome is undemocratic. Senators represent states, so electing them at large makes perfect sense. My objections to the Electoral College have been documented at length for the last two decades, so I won’t rehash them here.

There are several more paragraphs in the column, but it’s more of the same.

The Secretary of Belligerence, Pete Hegseth (aka the Bro of War), testified to Congress this week. While he excels at such skills as smirking, dodging questions, and getting more than a bit shouty, he did not provide much in the way of helpful explanation concerning the ongoing excursion in Iran. Indeed, he provided a great new twist to the War Powers Act: cease-fire days don’t count. I think that’s kind of like cheat days when you have a donut (but just one!) when you are on a low-carb diet.

Shh! Nobody tell him that a naval blockade is an act of war!

One thing Hegseth did do this week was emphasize concerns over Iran’s nuclear potential.

For example:

That clip kind of makes my brain hurt, given the fact that, as a lifelong reader and writer, I am aware that words are supposed to mean things. Knowing something about international relations and politics, as well as basic cost-benefit analysis, adds to the pain of it all.

For example, this administration’s usage of “obliterated” has essentially become like what we all did as kids, saying a certain word over and over and over until it loses meaning (the internet informs me that this is called “semantic satiation“-so if you learn nothing else today, maybe you learned that like I did).

Anyhoo, for those keeping score at home, to “obliterate” means to “destroy utterly.” It does not mean, as Hegseth suggests, burying something. Perhaps Pete means “entomb”? Inter? Cover with rocks and garbage?

But, of course, the Möbius strip that is the explanation about the war is that we “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability by burying their enriched uranium and not destroying it, but we still had to go to war because they still have nuclear “ambitions” and because they are building a “conventional shield” (you know, the one that was utterly ineffective against our conventional attacks).

Indeed, in other testimony, he kept making it sound as if any cost is worth paying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon (despite all the aforementioned obliteration). For example:

I wonder how much the Iranian’s would have charged to sell us their enriched uranium? If no price is too high, I guess we should have paid it as per Hegseth’s, shall we say, logic?

Or, I wonder, if the cost of having to adhere to an agreement negotiated by Barack Hussein Obama was worth it?

Well, apparently, that cost was too high.

Setting aside a discussion of what the exact threat to the US or its interests would be of a nuclear-armed Iran, the sad reality is that we are where we are because Donald “Art of the Deal” Trump withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and promised to provide us with a much better deal.

You know, the same way he promised lifelong marriage to Ivana Marie Zelníčková and Marla Maples (but I digress) and that Trump University would provide some kind of actual education (which it did by proving the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted).

The NYT has an excellent analysis of the situation: How Iran Accumulated 11 Tons of Enriched Uranium.

Since eight years ago when President Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal with Tehran, Iran has accumulated 22,000 pounds, or 11 tons, of enriched uranium. But the fate of Iran’s stockpile remains a mystery, two months after the United States began a war meant to prevent Iran from ever building an atomic bomb.

[…]

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, when Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the pact and reimposed a series of tough economic sanctions.

Then Iran began to enrich above the deal’s limit, first at low enrichment levels to pressure the West and then up to 20 percent in early 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office.

The Biden administration tried, unsuccessfully, to restore aspects of the abandoned deal. Throughout the negotiations, Iran enriched uranium to an unprecedented level of up to 60 percent — a hairsbreadth away from the preferred grade for atom bombs.

With Mr. Trump again in office in 2025, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium grew at the fastest rate since the International Atomic Energy Agency started reporting.

Check out this graph. It may be difficult to spot, but if you squint, you can see where the JCPOA took effect and the consequences of the US withdrawal from said deal. Try not to strain your eyes

Heckuva job, Trumpie.

The reality remains, to conclude, that this war has emboldened the Iranians to use the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon, it has likely shifted regime leadership into a more hardline space, and it has taught them that they need a nuclear weapon as a deterrent.

So, to sum up: if the administration’s main goal is an Iran that has no nuclear ambitions, they appear to be doing everything in their power to ensure the opposite.

Maybe threatening to destroy all their bridges and power plants will help? Perhaps a threat to end their civlization will compel them to eschew any desire for the one weapon that has been shown to deter attacks of the kind they have recently experienced?

I know! Let’s send in a real estate developer and an investor with conflicts of interest to negotiate a peace deal.

That’ll solve the problem.

tl:dr, Trump essentially created the problem he is now trying to solve by spending massive amounts of money, killing people, and doing massive damage to the global economy (with collateral damage to our alliances in Europe and the Persian Gulf), all to create a situation that increases the chance that Iran will pursue a nuclear weapon. As a bonus, all of this will likely increase, not decrease, the chances of nuclear proliferation globally (not only because of regional concerns, but lots of countries that were willing to rely on the US will be less confident in that stance going forward).

Writing in Slate, UC-Berkeley public policy professor Jake Grumback purports to explain “How Normie Pundits Paved the Way for the Supreme Court Voting Rights Disaster.” He makes some compelling points but is ultimately too reductionist. Indeed, the introductory paragraph gets there straight away:

For two decades, a certain kind of American political thinker has insisted they know the real problem. Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and racism were symptoms rather than causes. The true pathology was partisan polarization. The sorting of Americans into hostile camps. The collapse of bipartisan comity.

Nobody of any note has argued that polarization was the only problem, merely that it was making it impossible to govern.

We built serious institutions around this diagnosis. Duke opened its Polarization Lab. Princeton launched its Bridging Divides Initiative. No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars. Braver Angels held town halls. The Carnegie Foundation offered prestigious fellowships, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened a blue-ribbon commission. Ezra Klein’s bestselling book didn’t seek to answer why democracy is dying, but Why We’re Polarized. Today there are more conferences and fellowships devoted to “bridging divides” than there are functioning bridges between the parties.

Again: these are part and parcel of the same thing. Our system is explicitly designed to require compromise every step of the way. If there are no functioning bridges between the parties—and the parties are completely sorted—then our system breaks down.

So, for example, Klein’s book (written in 2019 and published just as the COVID pandemic was starting in January 2020) describes the situation thusly:

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

“A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

This rather clearly does not ignore racism as a causal factor. It’s just one factor among many.

Back to Grumback:

The Supreme Court just revealed where that project was leading. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority held that when a legislative district is polarized along party lines, it cannot simultaneously be found to be polarized along racial lines under the Voting Rights Act. The consequence is devastating: In a country where over 90 percent of Black voters vote Democratic and over 60 percent of White voters vote Republican, any racially discriminatory map can now be laundered as merely a partisan one. The VRA’s protection against racial vote dilution has been nullified—using a conceptual weapon that liberals and moderates spent years building and lending prestige to.

But, put another way, 10 percent of Black voters are Republican, and 40 percent of White voters are Democrats. So, clearly, race isn’t the only sorting mechanism.

The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation. The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party. Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans’ Southern Strategy over the decades since. To “control for partisanship” when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn’t discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive—positions from which women were systematically excluded—the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.

This is Grumback’s strongest point and, indeed, the one that makes the essay worth thinking about. Six decades beyond Jim Crow, anti-Black racism is no longer the central driving mechanism in American politics—even in the Deep South. Diluting the Black vote is not the main aim of Republican-led gerrymandering. But it’s certainly a guaranteed outcome if not a necessary mechanism to achieving the desired outcome of maximizing Republican advantage.

Race and partisanship are therefore inextricably linked. But they’re not one and the same.

The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party. The exceptional era was that of the New Deal coalition of the mid-20^th century, when the staunchest segregationists and the most anti-racist politicians in the country coexisted within the same Democratic Party only by keeping civil rights off the agenda. To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.

Well no. Indeed, the primary reason Abraham Lincoln and the upstart Republican Party won the 1860 election was that the Democrats split into two factions over the issue of race and the remants of the old Whig Party formed the Constitutional Union party, creating a four-way race. Slavery and the fate of the Union was the central issue in the contest. But, of course, that means we didn’t have the partisan sorting that Klein and others have pointed to.

Polarization-obsessed liberals did not directly cause the Callais ruling. But they laid an intellectual foundation. When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. And we’ve handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.

I’m considerably older than Grumback and can not remember a presidential election when race was not at least a tacit issue. And Democrats have explicitly made race—and racism—a central issue in their campaigns against Republicans and, especially, against Trump. Further, there have been multiple best-selling volumes attributing Republican electoral success to racist rhetoric and proclaiming that Democrats would emerge as a permanent majority party as older Whites die off and get replaced by Black and Hispanic voters. (In fairness, some Republicans were making that argument at least as early as 2012.)

Polarization is a description of political temperature. It tells you nothing about what is being fought over or who is being harmed. A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.

So, I fully agree with the second sentence here. I just disagree that “multiracial voting rights” is the primary driver of our polarization. Indeed, Grumback’s prize-winning book, Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, seemingly agrees:

Jacob Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking. He shows how this has had the ironic consequence of making policy more varied across the states as red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change. The consequences don’t stop there, however. Drawing on a wealth of new data on state policy, public opinion, money in politics, and democratic performance, Grumbach traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.

Required reading for this precarious moment in our politics, Laboratories against Democracy reveals how the pursuit of national partisan agendas at the state level has intensified the challenges facing American democracy, and asks whether today’s state governments are mitigating the political crises of our time—or accelerating them.

The book is based on his multiple prize-winning Berkeley PhD dissertation, and I’ll happily defer to his expertise on what’s happening at the state level, especially since it comports with my more casual observations. While I was somewhat slow to come around to the implications, I’ve been writing about “using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself” for at least fifteen years now.

But those things are happening precisely because the parties have become more polarized and sorted. And, as Grumbach notes, the divisions are about much more than race: “red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change.” That’s to say nothing of abortion, LGBTQ issues, the role of women in society, vaccines, masks, what should be taught in our public schools, and so many other issues. And, indeed, the culture wars at least temporarily moved a considerable number of Black and Hispanic men into the Trump camp.

The court absorbed decades of elite discourse that trained us to distrust racial explanations and reach for partisan ones instead, then took that discourse to its logical conclusion. If everything is partisan, nothing can be racial, and the law that Congress designed to specifically fight against racial discrimination can no longer operate within its legislative intent.

I fully agree with Grumbach that it’s impossible to fully disentangle race and partisanship in America. But it’s noteworthy that we’re seeing polarization and the rise of extreme populism and nativism across the West, including in places without our history of Black slavery and Jim Crow. So, while it’s right to reject “nothing can be racial,” it’s absurd to argue “everything is racial.’

“Sinking”

(Or “How the News Makes Me Feel These Days”)

March 14, 2026

Providence Canyon State Park (Lumpkin, GA)

WSJ (“Trump Poised to Defy Congress on War Authorization“):

The Trump administration is on course to blow past an initial deadline for congressional approval for the Iran war on the grounds that the ongoing cease-fire stopped the clock on a 60-day deadline—an assertion met with outrage from Democrats and skepticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Under a 1973 law called the War Powers Resolution, the president is required to notify Congress within 48 hours of military action and withdraw U.S. troops 60 days later, unless lawmakers declare war or authorize the use of force. The expectation on Capitol Hill was that the 60-day deadline expires on Friday.

In testimony Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the current cease-fire with Iran, which began April 8, stopped the countdown.

While Trump halted airstrikes against Iran, the U.S. military continues to enforce a military blockade that prohibits ships from reaching or leaving Iranian ports. A blockade is considered an act of war under international law.

“We are in a cease-fire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a cease-fire,” Hegseth said. “That’s—it’s our understanding.”

This doesn’t constitute “defying Congress” because Congress hasn’t acted. Indeed, a Senate measure to halt the conflict failed for the sixth time yesterday, by a 47-50 vote. The only new vote in support of the measure came from Maine Republican Susan Collins, who’s in an uphill re-election fight.

Beyond that, the “the war is over even though it’s still underway” argument is not unprecedented. President Obama invoked it after the Libya deadline passed—even though US forces were actively involved in kinetic action—on the basis that we had no “boots on the ground.” Not only do we not have boots on the ground in Iran, but we’re not actively engaged in hostile action.

To be sure, this war rather clearly violates the Constitution, under which only Congress can authorize sending American forces to war, and the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which declares,

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

Alas, both of these have been violated repeatedly. Further, as I noted almost exactly 15 years ago, when the Obama administration was doing the exact same thing in Libya that the Trump administration is doing in Iran now, that resolution “isn’t a criminal statute. The remedy remains what it was before the War Powers Act was passed: Impeachment.”

As a theoretical matter, Congress could also cut off funds to a war that has thus far cost somewhere between $25 and $50 billion. But that’s even less likely than impeachment. It would be seen as a failure to “support the troops.”

I’ve written on this issue many, many times over the years. The first instance appears to be roughly six weeks into OTB’s existence, a March 2003 post titled “Suing to Stop War.”

A group of House Democrats and a handful of citizens are suing in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to stop the war. They are arguing that the president shouldn’t be able to order troops to war without a congressional declaration of war. In the past, courts have been reluctant to intervene in such “political questions.”

While I find the argument interesting, it has no chance of winning. Presidents have been sending the military into harm’s way at least since Jefferson ordered strikes against the Barbary Pirates in Tripoli. It has been done so many times as to have simply become the way we do things, much like the federal judiciary acquired the unenumerated power of judicial review. Indeed, the Congress formalized this fact with the 1973 War Powers Act, passed over Nixon’s veto, which allows presidents to use force on their own, but requires that they notify Congress as soon as possible and get approval after 60/90 days. Furthermore, it is arguable that the October 2002 joint resolution of Congress authorizing the president to use force in Iraq amounts to a declaration of war.

Philosophically, I don’t think presidents should have the right to act without congressional approval in matters such as this case. In situations where there is an imminent crisis, the president as Commander-in-Chief obviously needs to be able to act quickly and decisively. But when we spend months playing footsie with the UN, in a Quixotic quest for legitimacy, presidents have time to gain the approval of Congress. I didn’t like it when Clinton sent troops into Kosovo and Bosnia without authorization, and don’t like it now with Bush. But, again, that’s how the war power has evolved and I can’t see the courts overriding that now.

It turned out that Bush got an Authorization to Use Military Force for the Iraq War, rendering the issue moot. But he could have sent forces into harm’s way on his own authority had he so chosen.

Subsequent posts worth highlighting:

• “War Powers in the Age of Terror,” October 31, 2005
• “Congress and Warmaking,” January 25, 2007
• “War Declarations,” October 7, 2007
• “War Powers Consultation Act,” July 8, 2008
• “War Powers Act and Illegal Wars,” May 12, 2011
• “Congress vs. Obama on Libya,” June 13, 2011
• “America Carrying Load in Libya While Pretending Otherwise,” July 2, 2011
• “Congress is Powerless to Stop Presidential Strike on North Korea,” February 9, 2018
• “Trump Says War Powers Act Doesn’t Apply to Cartel Strikes,” November 2, 2025
• “War Powers Catch-22,” March 5, 2026

And that doesn’t include a boatload of posts on the matter by the late Doug Mataconis and a handful by my co-blogger Steven Taylor. They can be found organized under the War Powers tag.