00:00Let me just get your reaction to this. This was a war that was ratcheting up before we got that
00:03Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act, before we got this news from the Virginia Supreme
00:07Court. Where do you see things going from here? It does seem like we could see in America where
00:11there are no contested districts across these great United States. Well, I think, you know,
00:16David, we're in the early innings of what will probably become a redistricting war. And I think
00:22we've gotten here because of the White Houses, the Republican parties and Donald Trump's concerns
00:30about how the midterms were taking shape. And it's unfortunate because I don't think
00:35politicians of either party want to inhabit a Congress in which lines are routinely redrawn
00:42midterm. One, at a practical level, it distracts all of them from doing the legislative work
00:48they go to Washington to do. Secondly, I think it effectively undermines democracy.
00:53The framers of the Constitution didn't envision districts at all. And there's a good reason to
01:02have them, especially because they also didn't envision the population of the United States
01:06booming and spreading in the way it has. And districts essentially allow the states to be
01:11carved up in a way in which a representative from each state has a manageable district to represent.
01:15What's happened now is they become a political football. They used to be withdrawn when they
01:20used to be drawn, you know, every decade after the census was taken. The second they become a
01:26political tool, then the maps become suspect, whichever party is finagling with them. And the
01:33politically correct term for finagle is gerrymander. And so it raises this issue, you know, apart from
01:42machinery and the machinations around it is, does it represent a democratic process? Are the voters
01:49being heard? Are they being effectively represented? And if they're not, that's a problem. And if
01:55districting has, and redistricting has become weaponized, then it poisons, I think, the voting
02:01process. And I think there's gonna be much more of this in store. And I don't think either party will
02:06ultimately be happy with it.
02:07That's what I was just gonna ask you is, is this mutually assured destruction? You know,
02:11my mother always said two wrongs don't make a right. And for a while, that seems to be, you know,
02:17Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go high. But there has been a sea change. And that's due to
02:21pressure both from Democratic voters to want to see Democratic lawmakers take action. But also,
02:27they're telling us they feel like they kind of had to do something. But it seems like this could be
02:31a
02:31short-term game for long-term damage to both parties and to the political system as a whole.
02:36I think that's exactly right. The Democrats didn't set this in motion, you know, at least in this,
02:42the most recent iteration. Trump did. And for expressly political reasons. And that's poisonous.
02:50And I do think it's a threat to democracy. And even if we come out of this sort of revisiting
02:57this,
02:57stepping back, curing some of the illness that's been bled into the system, I think it's still
03:04damaging. And, you know, the Constitution envisioned trying to resolve this tension between
03:12mob rule, majority rule, and responsible elected officials. And a lot of those checks and balances
03:22in the Trump era, whether it's the separation of powers at the federal level or how voting occurs
03:28at the state level, have all been tossed up into it in the air in a way that's really very
03:34damaging.
03:34And I think people who care about the rule of law, a democracy, and efficient electoral processes
03:40should be alarmed.
03:42Tim, last question here. A bit of a curve bubble. We did see Abigail Spanberger, the governor of Virginia,
03:46signing this legislation into law this week, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
03:50A number of other jurisdictions have done this as well. And I'm curious how you see this,
03:54coloring that conversation about the electoral college, whether we should still have it in this
03:59day and age, if you think that this is going to add grist to that movement to get away from
04:03it.
04:04Well, you know, the electoral college is the flip side of the districting issue.
04:07You know, it was invented by the framers, again, to prevent mob rule, to make sure that each state
04:15had an effective presence in the federal government and that you wouldn't have extremes
04:24of either side forcing poor outcomes. But again, they didn't envision the world we've become.
04:31Now, if the GOP and Trump were consistent on this, if they're revisiting redistricting,
04:37they should also be happy to revisit the structure of the electoral college. But somehow,
04:42mysteriously, there's no conversation going on on the Republican side about revisiting what the
04:50electoral college does and how it functions. And, you know, classic conservatism preserves
04:56institutions because institutions over time have shown they have value to a society.
05:01So the conservative argument for the electoral college would be preserve it in its form because
05:06it's proved to be worthwhile. But if that's the case, then they shouldn't be messing at all with districts.
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