Do the Ends Justify the Means?
The GOP isn't playing fair. Should we go down that same road?
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Note: Everything in this post is my personal opinion. If you don’t agree, set up your own Substack. Or, leave me a comment.
Call your Congresscritters! Keep Calling!1
As I’ve said before, I didn’t originally intend this column to be All Politics All The Time.2
However, it’s my online journal and I promised myself that I’d write about whatever the hell I wanted to and not worry about things like readership or market share.
Right now, at this moment in our history I am most concerned about the state of our democracy. So that’s what I’m writing about.
Last Friday, August 1, 2025, our convict-in-chief fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she released a report showing very weak job growth for the month of July and revising the numbers down for May and June.
Commissioner Erika McEntarfer did not just pull these jobs numbers out of thin air.
The BLS has a large staff of skilled, non-political analysts that generate these numbers using a number of inputs.
It is very common for the BLS to release preliminary numbers at the end of a month then revise them later on as they receive better data over time.
There is no conspiracy here.
With Trump every accusation is an admission. By accusing the Commissioner and staff of the BLS of cooking the books to make him look bad he’s admitting that what he wants is a BLS staffed with Trump loyalists who will cook the books in his favor.
This is the same guy who wanted to stop testing for new COVID19 cases in 2020 because he didn’t like the fact that the number of cases kept increasing.
I think the technical term for this type of thinking is batshit crazy.
But that’s not what I really sat down to write about. Consider it an amuse-bouche for the rest of this article:
The Republican supermajority in the Texas State Legislature has decided they want to re-Gerrymander their already incredibly Gerrymandered US Congressional District map to try to pull five more MAGA Congressional seats out of thin air.
They are doing this because, given the disastrous policies of the current presidential administration there is a very good chance that MAGA will lose their majority in the US House of Representatives in the midterm elections next year.
Texas wants to put their thumb on the scale to try to ensure that MAGA hangs on to both the US House and the US Senate.
Republicans point to states like Illinois who have Gerrymandered maps in favor of the Democratic Party as justification for this move.
However, many blue states have implemented independent non-partisan panels to generate district maps in an effort to create a more level playing field.
My own state of California is one of those states.
The question is, should blue states that are trying to set an example by attempting to create a level playing field change tactics in the face of cheating by red state legislatures?
In my experience it is MAGA Republicans who seem to have the attitude that the only way they can stay in power is by cheating.
You’d think that appealing to voters with good ideas that will make their lives easier would be a better way to go, but apparently that never occurs to MAGAts.
They cheat by throwing voters off the voting rolls for no good reason,limiting the number of polling places in areas of their state where folks are likely to vote for Democratic candidates and generally making it hard to vote if you live in an area that’s likely to vote against MAGA’s road map to authoritarianism.
And, of course, remapping districts to make it harder for Democrats, progressive leaning independents or third party candidates to win.
In a true democratic republic you would ideally want to make it easy for every eligible voter to get their vote counted.
In Texas and other red states the attitude appears to be to only allow the “right” people to vote.
I have friends in Texas and they’ve told me it can be very hard to get registered and stay registered to vote there.
In California there is universal mail-in voting.
Last I heard in Texas you need a note from your doctor to get an absentee ballot. This is voter suppression, pure and simple.
It appears that as far as red states are concerned the “right people” are overwhelmingly white middle-class or higher Christians.
So they cheat, all the while complaining, without evidence, that liberals and progressives are cheating by somehow rigging the vote, registering undocumented immigrants to vote, and even weirder ideas such as using Italian satellites to change election results and ballots containing bamboo fibers flown in from China.
You can’t make this shit up!
Again, every accusation is an admission.
The fact that they can even envision this kind of nearly impossible cheating is evidence that they’d do the same thing if they thought they could get away with it.
So, should those of us living on Earth One who have actual ethics and are in favor of a level playing field go down the road of using MAGA tactics?
It feels like giving into the MAGA darkness to me.
And yet I called Governor Newsom this morning and told him I’d support a special election to at least temporarily allow partisan Gerrymandering in favor of progressive candidates.
If we’re going to do it it needs to be done very, very soon.
The primaries are only about 10 months away and we need to get new maps in place in plenty of time so ballots can be printed and distributed.
I wish it hadn’t come to this, but as near as I can tell the current administration is a clear and present danger to our democratic republic.
It’s time to let the ends justify the means, at least for now.
Call your Congresscritters! Keep Calling!
Trump lie of the week:
Lies our President has told recently. Not necessarily this week. I’m only posting statements rated “Pants On Fire!” by Politifact.
Musical Coda:
This seems appropriate. Cued up at the beginning of the song without all the drama in the first minute of the video.
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I think I stole the term Congresscritters from Jerry Pournell. But I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you can copywrite.
I actually started this column because I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The idea was to document my trip through cancer therapy. However, I was incredibly lucky that eight weeks of radiation therapy appears to have killed the cancer permanently. I am definitely not complaining.