When the Congress was able to reconvene after Wednesday's insurrection at the Capitol, more than half the Republicans voted to challenge the Electoral College results as certified by the states. But this "more than half" included only 8 of the 52 Republican senators:
Josh Hawley, Missouri
Ted Cruz, Texas
John Kennedy, Louisiana
Cindy Hyde-Smith, Mississippi
Roger Marshall, Kansas
Tommy Tuberville, Alabama
Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming
Rick Scott, Florida
I'm not going to list the House Republicans opposed to democracy, because there are 138 of them—138 of their 211-member caucus. But this does raise the question: why are the House Republicans even nuttier than their colleagues in the Senate? A clue to the answer is to be found in the 8 states represented by the above 8 senators. Trump carried all of them, of course, and he won 6 of the 8 by more than 15 percent of the vote. His average margin in all 8 exceeded 17 percent. Cruz and Scott, from Texas and Florida, where the presidential election was relatively close, both won their seats in 2018 and will not face voters again until 2024. Cruz (and Hawley) plainly have presidential ambitions and are maneuvering for favor with Trump-loving Republican primary voters.
While these 8 states aren't competitive, they are, so to speak, accidentally uncompetitive: their borders were set long ago and are unchanging. Congressional districts, however, are redrawn every 10 years and are designed to be uncompetitive. In a manner of speaking, not just some but most Republican House members are from Alabama. In Ohio, for example, there are 16 congressional districts, 5 of which are represented by Republicans who voted to challenge the certified presidential result. Here, courtesy of the ACLU, are maps of those five districts:
Ohio is not huge in area and has several big and mid-sized cities, in different parts of the state, that are home to lots of Democratic voters: Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton, Toledo. This makes it an especial challenge to draw as many safely Republican districts as possible, but obviously they are trying! Several of these maps have "cutouts," which raises the question: what's in the carefully excluded areas? The answer to that question is: Democrats. The map of the first district calls attention to the meticulous excision of Cincinnati, but that's not the only instance. It's about 50 miles from Canton to North Ridgeville, both within the seventh district, but, to travel from one town to the other without leaving the district, you have to drive about 130 miles. What if you take the direct route? Well, that takes you to Akron and then through the suburbs south of Cleveland—Democratic territory. The eighth district carefully excludes Dayton. Etc.
A corollary of the effort to create Republican districts is that Democrats are sequestered, and concentrated, in the remaining ones: political apartheid, which has the effect of amplifying the most extreme voices. Having meticulously assembled this arrangement Republicans, when it's convenient, bemoan the "rise of partisanship" and piously insist that "all sides must turn down the volume." Last year, a 3-judge panel of the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio held that Ohio's congressional map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and ordered that a new one be drawn before this year's election. Ohio Republicans appealed, and five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court held that Congress, but not federal courts, could limit partisan gerrymanders. In other words, the corrupt practice may only be outlawed by its beneficiaries. Just infuriating.
The Ohio districts that exist for the purpose of holding as many Democratic voters as possible, so that Republicans can represent all the others, are even more outlandish. Here's one that squeezes parts of suburban Cleveland into a district with Toledo, which is a hundred miles from Cleveland; about half way between the cities, the "district" is wide as a road:
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