A normally sane person might think that a person who has claimed a rigged election is wrong would be reluctant to try to rig one himself.

But we are living in Trumpworld.

President Trump wants red states such as Missouri to adjust their congressional districts so more Republicans might be elected next year. A president’s party historically loses congressional seats in midterm elections and Trump and his party don’t have any seats he can spare.).

Texas Republicans have jumped at the opportunity to make the master happy although the GOP already dominates the state’s delegation in the U. S. House of Representatives 27-12.  That’s not good enough for Trump. The effort has led to a confrontation with their Democratic colleagues that has become, our mind at least, a national embarrassment for Texas politics and politicians.

What’s going on here?  Trump is scared.  Of what?  National Review correspondent Audrey Fahlberg said recently on CNN, “The White House is driving this because clearly they are worried about losing the midterms.  They’re convinced that if House Democrats flip the House, that Trump is going to get impeached again…The ‘big beautiful bill’ is not polling super well right now, so they’re going on offense here. They’re driving this into motion in Texas. They’re looking at other states, as well. We may see this continue in states like Florida, Indiana.”

And Missouri appears likely to get into this, too. Republicans have six of our eight House seats but apparently that’s not enough. Senate leader Cindy O’Laughlin has told the Missouri Independent that it is “likely” the governor will call a special session to redraw lines so Republicans would be likely to take away the seat held by one of our senior members, the Reverend Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City. He’s one of two Missouri African-Americans in our congressional delegation.

Missouri is not out of whack in the D/R balance of our congressional districts.  Last year, President Trump got 58 percent of the popular vote in Missouri. Kamala Harris and minor candidates got 42 percent.  A 6-2 congressional breakdown fits those results.

The Missouri legislature is more than 2-1 Republican so a walkout by Democrats similar to the Texas walkout wouldn’t stop the GOP from aiding and abetting Trump’s need to have a pliant Congress. The Missouri House Minority Leader, Ashley Aune of Kansas City, has told the Independent, “Everyone I’ve talked to, especially on my side of the aisle, expects to go down and get steamrolled…during a special session.”

In about a month, legislators will reconvene to consider overriding any vetoes dispensed by Governor Kehoe after the regular session and a special  session could meet concurrently with that veto session. It’s been done a few times before.

We can anticipate one of the arguments opponents will make. Our state constitution’s Article III, Section 45 says:

 When the number of representatives to which the state is entitled in the House of the Congress of the United States under the census of 1950 and each census thereafter is certified to the governor, the general assembly shall by law divide the state into districts corresponding with the number of representatives to which it is entitled, which districts shall be composed of contiguous territory as compact and as nearly equal in population as may be.

The average citizen is likely to think this language is clear—the state constitution provides for redistricting after each census but has no authorization for redistricting midway through a census decade. The language about “contiguous territory as compact and as nearly equal in population as may be” has been used from time to time to challenge redistricting plans that critics think wander too far from “contiguous” and “compact.”

Missouri has revised congressional district maps after the decennial census is taken beginning, as noted in the language, after the 1950 census. The only time the legislature redistricted between census counts was in the 1960s with a case that went to the United States Supreme Court that ruled against a redistricting map. A key part of the ruling said:

Missouri contends that variances were necessary to avoid fragmenting areas with distinct economic and social interests and thereby diluting the effective representation of those interests in Congress. But to accept population variances, large or small, in order to create districts with specific interest orientations is antithetical to the basic premise of the constitutional command to provide equal representation for equal numbers of people. “[N]either history alone, nor economic or other sorts of group interests, are permissible factors in attempting to justify disparities from population-based representation. Citizens, not history or economic interests, cast votes.”

If we understand Trump’s demands, he wants the Missouri legislature to create “districts with specific interest orientations.” The U. S. Supreme Court is much different than it was in the sixties so we’ll have to see if this precedent carries any weight with today’s Trump-dominated court.

Not all Missouri Republicans are in lock step with Trump. One is Senator Mike Moon of Ash Grove, a member of the so-called Freedom Caucus, a minority group within the Republican Party that took control of the chamber and blocked action on hundreds of bills in the last three years. Another is the Speaker Pro Tem of the House, Chad Perkins of Bowling Green who worries that “a 7-1 map is easily a 5-3 map in a year that doesn’t go the way that conservatives want it to go.”

Perkins also makes the point that Democrats should not moan and wail too loudly about Republican attempts to hold their advantage by changing districts in the middle of a decade because the Democrats in Illinois and California are doing the same thing to gain an advantage to offset any pick-ups Trump might make in other states.

The latest wrinkle in the planned rigging is Trump’s order for his Commerce Department to run a new census that does not include undocumented immigrants, the U. S. Constitution notwithstanding.

Article I, Section 2 does not seem to allow what Trump demands, at least for your observer’s untutored reading.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. 

The Constitution recognizes the census taken every ten years as the only legitimate census. By including “the whole number of free persons,” it does not exempt immigrants, which at the time the Constitution was written was a considerable number. Indians were not counted (although they were probably the freest people in the nation’s history until the Europeans showed up). Slaves WERE counted but since they were not free they were considered only three-fifths of a person—a provision the southern states demanded so representation would be balanced with states in the north.

And the article says the only census that will be constitutionally recognized is the one done every ten years.

Trump’s order is not helpful to his demand that new congressional districts be drawn. Right now. The first part of Amendment 1, section 2 says the districts will be drawn based on census figures.  The census has to come first, then the districts, a constitutional provision that seems to say Texas is jumping the gun and Missouri would be doing the same. Doing a census the way Trump wants it done could be pretty difficult and time consuming because a lot of Latino people whether here legally or illegally are making themselves as scarce as possible.

To coin a phrase, Trump seems to be engaged in unconstitutional bundling.

Trump’s political cynicism does nothing to reduce the general public’s distrust of our political system. In fact, he has played upon it to get elected.

Politics sometimes has been a mud-and-blood-and beer wrestling match although not as untrustworthy as many see it today. Some observers have suggested this state of decline began with Ronald Reagan’s inaugural remark 44 years ago that, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem.”

Reagan had it right but he sure didn’t foresee the much different way the statement is true today.

The central issue in this frantic competition to diminish a minority within a state’s congressional delegation is this:

We have a President and a GOP House and Senate that recognize their statements and their actions are counter to the public’s increasingly self-recognized best interests. They are uncertain that the public, if given the chance, will let them keep doing to the country and its people the things they are doing.

Thomas Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress had the answer many of today’s  politicians want to ignore:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Read that last sentence again.  When a despotic government becomes destructive of the inalienable rights of citizens like you and me, WE have the RESPONSIBILITY to resist and to form a new government that provides for our “future security.” The Trump bunch is afraid the people might want to do that now that the see that Trump was less than honest (to put it mildly) in his campaign.

Too many in today’s politics care less about life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than they care about power, especially power that can be abused to benefit the few by harming the many. Re-drawing congressional district lines by those focused on power more than on the government our forefathers imagined helps assure that the people have reduced chances for benefitting from their inalienable rights.

There is an odor of desperation in the air on the part of those who believe in power above service as they see public sentiment for them weaken.

The redistricting game is being played by people who have come to believe they cannot win if they do not rig next year’s elections for Congress—-and they’re flouting their ambitions right before our eyes when they consider a mid-term re-drawing of congressional district lines based on ignoring counting “the whole people” to protect a President who now seems far less confident in his future than he did six months ago.

They might be imperiling themselves if they proceed, these legislators, as we will discuss in our next entry.