It's not the beginning of the end. It is not even the end of the beginning. But it might be, if we are lucky, perhaps the beginning of the beginning.
California passed Proposition 50 to allow the state to try to balance the cynical wild west tactic of Texas to pack the Congress with loyal MAGAts.
And, in New Jersey and even in Virginia, the Democrats won governorships, so Trump cannot simply pick up the phone to the governors in those states to demand they Gerrymander their states to safeguard him from impeachment by a hostile Congress bent on bringing a lawless despot to justice.
Trump is not impeached.
Trump cannot be impeached unless the Congress changes hands, both House and Senate, in 2026.
We are a very long and improbable way from that.
And Trump and his MAGA mob are not stupid when it comes to political power. That's why Trump implored Texas to find him 5 more Congressional seats, just as he insisted the Secretary of State of Georgia manufacture 11,000 votes for him in 2020.
The mantra has been that would-be authoritarians always overplay their hands, and Trump's dictate to wimpy Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find him more Congressional seats did cause a reaction in California. Trump is out there stumping on the Gerrymander circuit to extract more Congressional seats for a reason, and that reason is not because he has a grand legislative program he wants to pass--although Project 2025 would be that plan if his acolytes could get him to read, and he might embrace Project 2025 it if they can package it into small video pieces presented by blond women showing lots of leg on white leather couches.
No, what Trump fears is a Democratic House which would certainly impeach him, and if the U.S. Senate turned 2/3 Democrat, they might just possibly work up the spine to convict him.
The math, of course, is in his favor, even if redistricting delivered the House to the Democrats. There is no reasonable calculus for a Democratic Senate any time soon. We have six Senators from the Dakotas and Alaska who represent fewer people than live in Chicago, which has no U.S. Senators.
The United States Senate is by design, anti-democratic, anti-Republic, a design meant to insure that the will of people is thwarted by wealth and aristocracy, a concession to fears that democracy would mean mob rule and trustworthy men of wealth and property had to be given a stranglehold on the processes of government, to insure "stability" and "reason."
A single Senator from Montana represents roughly a million people, where a Senator from California represents 39 million.
So we have the senators from tumbleweed ruling the Senate, and they have to be persuaded before the representatives of the people, in "the people's house" can do anything which might threaten the interests of the wealthy who have always controlled the country.
Of course, if you add up all those Red states which look so big on those election maps--North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska you have fewer people living in all those states, represented by 12 United States Senators than you have people living in New York City, which has no U.S. Senators.
So, the founders were not clairvoyant. And they knew at the time their experiment was imperfect and would have to be adjusted to meet the needs of the future. But, of course, no adjustments have been made fixed the structural problems of representation, beyond changing that rule that slaves count as 3/5 of a person.
But, for now at least, we've got a new mayor of New York City, who represents and will lead a jurisdiction with more people in it than those six red states combined.
And the man was born in Uganda. A naturalized citizen.
No doubt Trump will send ICE after him.
Trump has already said he'll cut all federal funds from reaching New York City, if Mamdani won, which he's been itching to do ever since a NYC jury found him guilty of 39 felony counts and he got kicked out of the city, sent on his way to the sanctuary state of Florida and his Gatsby house, Mar-a-Lago.
Mad Dog has no idea what Mamdani's win says about New York or the USA, but he is pretty sure Mamdani did not win because he is a Muslim who was born in Uganda.
Maybe it had something to do with Mamdani's willingness to address actual problems faced by citizens who hoped or maybe even expected that government might actually solve problems rather than become the problem.
Making buses free is one thing but providing affordable housing is not something governments have had much success doing--"the projects" became festering wounds in every city they were tried, except for some projects in NYC, where they worked well some of the time. In Baltimore they became such a center of crime and decay they simply had to demolish them.
So affordable housing and even more so, homelessness, may be complex problems beyond simple government solutions.
But, at least, New York has voted for hope rather than cynical dismissiveness.
Meanwhile, in Mar-a-log the party goes on, and we've got the woman in the cocktail glass, the perfect symbol for the Trump/MAGA concept of the good life.
The roaring twenties.
 |
| Just off Mar-a-Lago |
And we know how that ended.
No comments:
Post a Comment