Gerrymander to Jerryrig

Do you hear that, reader? The howling shofar in the distance? Sirens wailing over crowded streets? Tocsins crashing in the clouds? An air-piercing whistle sent forth from a shaved-headed femcel? The thudding peal of those annoying plastic favor bells your kids get at every birthday party?

A thundering call to arms sounds across America. The mustering roar demands one duty: resist Republicans and their orange-offal autocrat!

The shock-and-awe of the first six months of President Trump’s sequel term has finally snapped the Democrats out of their long, post-election funk. The party that shunted its own nominee, then anointed an unpopular candidate who received zero primary votes, is putting everything on the line to rescue our democracy. And by “everything,” I mean the whole kitbag: social-media followers, CNN appearances, ghostwritten book sales, Twitter likes, co-sponsorships of DOA legislation. (NB: Not the standing Morton’s dinner reservations with the charming Lockheed Martin lobbyists.)

Invidia haunts Democratic voters. The poor losers watch from afar as Republicans man the government switchboard. In their jealous fury, they long to toss a big bucket of cold water on the whole apparatus, short-circuiting the MAGA machinations.

A minor wrinkle in the plan: the libs have only thimbles of soy milk at their disposal. Effective counter-hegemonies are built on more than shrill exhortations to DO SOMETHING! Hence midterm elections, which, thanks to the wonders of inertia, rebound to the minority’s benefit.

President Trump can barely see above the rim of his Diet Coke, and to his thick ears, the name Sibyl sounds like a comely Mar-a-Lago server. Yet even he senses his fate should Republicans lose grasp ahold the House of Representatives next fall. Another impeachment, a parade of investigative hearings, no more big, beautiful bills, Reps. Eric Swallwell and Al Green holding anti-Trump tallywacker measuring contests, Jasmine Crockett shredding a nacarat effigy with 2-inch acrylic nails.

A contumacious dodger of kismet, the President is attempting to dally the doom of that inevitable thumb. His plot is as skullduggerous as it’s desperate. Tampering with voting machines, deploying the Department of Justice to enact mass disenfranchisement, booking Democratic challengers, striking midterm elections altogether, pantsing Barack Obama on national television—all these strategems pale before the bluntness of Trump’s underhanded shimmy to keep the lower chamber in his party’s tiny clutches. The President has always prized straight talk over sophistry, refusing to beat around the bush on policy specifics. For his next trick, his directness is unparalleled: gerrymander the damn thing.

Trump is bulldogging Texas into enacting a mid-decade redistricting that will, should it pass, eliminate up to five Democratic districts. The newly proposed map by Lone Star Republicans shrivels up the state’s already diminutive blue plats. This gambit, the wily Donald believes, just may give the marginal wins needed for Mike Johnson to keep his mallet. Putting all his chips on five, an air-thin fraction of the House, is only the type of gamble made by an Atlantic City derelict who discovers a sawbuck tucked into a discarded cheeseburger wrapper and wanders into the closest casino only to put it all on red 17.

The half-hatched tactic doesn’t just carry low odds, but is brazenly corrupt, a Schmittian ploy par excellence, a bald attempt to subvert norms to cling tenuously onto absolute control. In that sleazy sense, it’s entirely predictable, and a wonder it’s taken so long for a modern-era president to gin up such a scheme. All credit to the blustering nationalist for laying bare our noble pretensions!

The Democrats, unwilling to lay prone prattling about “decorum,” are swinging back just as hard. California Governor Gavin Newsom is upping the ante, suggesting the Golden State will soon follow suit with its own map tilt. Between re-pomading his hair, the governor retweeted a lib-tick’s suggestion that California could easily obviate up to nine ruddy districts. The only thing tying the governor’s hands, besides his furious podcasting schedule, from mopping all the red out of his state is the necessity of summoning a special session of the legislature, then putting redrawn maps to a plebiscite. No progressive voter will resist the urge to emulate Trumpian eye-for-an-eye-ism. Democracy must be bloodlet for its salvation!

Lincoln’s better angels hardly stand a chance against such temper-sating brinkmanship. Twitter progs care not for propriety; neither do chest-beating MAGAites. The swinish multitude will get mud-flinging satisfaction. Accelerationism is a cynical white flag. The pistons are already pumping at full pressure, the republic hurtling downwards to a Hobbesian hellscape, a fore-and-aft of declension.

“Every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles,” observed Samuel Johnson. What first principles can America fall back on to slow the aggressive retaliation? The wise balancing of interests laid out in those musty founding documents? Snatching power is a first principle in itself for our parties. What chance does prudency have in a whirlingly maddening lust for control?

Texas Democrats have already egressed out of state to deny any vote quorum, repairing to blue harborages. Governor Greg Abbott is threatening to strip the on-the-lam longhorn lefties of their station.

After enough punches, the heads on Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots detach irremediably from the body. How many headshots will be dealt until our final decapitative collapse?