Six decades after Tom Lehrer adapted his songs on such then-current topics as the Second Vatican Council and the vice-presidency of Hubert Horatio Humphrey from NBC’s That Was the Week That Was into his final album That Was the Year That Was, it remains clear that his works will remain relevant weeks, and years, after his passing on July 26 at 97.

Even at 37, Lehrer agonized that “when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” The more contemporary composer Gustav Mahler had been decomposing for 53 when his widow Alma was memorialized by Lehrer.  An ongoing outpouring of letters to the editor testifies to the outstanding memorableness of Lehrer’s musical output, such as Stephen DeBock’s in the August 1 Wall Street Journal recalling how his “devout Christian mother, upon hearing ‘The Vatican Rag,’ begged me to play it again and again as tears of laughter streamed down her cheeks” — while the popular music of today makes even such then-edgier albums sharing the mid-Sixties Billboard charts with Lehrer as Whipped Cream & Other Delights seem as reverential as Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.

Admittedly, as LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik noted on Lehrer’s 90th birthday, writing about “racial conflict, pollution, religious intolerance, nuclear brinkmanship” ensured engaging issues that “have never gone away.”  If anything, Lehrer underestimated the political rancor to come.  The current wave of anti-obscenity legislation won’t be opposed as openly by either what Lehrer called “the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue … as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression” or by those like himself for whom “dirty books are fun!”  He quipped of the era’s Cold War enemies that “Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK, ’cause the balance of power’s maintained that way” and “China got the bomb, but have no fears; they can’t wipe us out for at least five years.”

In the 2003 book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, Lehrer is quoted as a self-described “wishy-washy liberal” who sees little mettle in playing one of his most-requested ditties since “everyone is against pollution.”  Yet the ozone layer was saved from chlorofluorocarbon corrosion in large part via staunch conservative Margaret Thatcher — and thus, as Carl Sagan pointed out, the British leader’s “early studies in chemistry” — while the Ronald Reagan Lehrer jibed years before winning elections initiated nuclear arms reductions influenced by the dramatized telefilm The Day After.

Lehrer foresaw a future where competition between nations produced nuclear weaponry “transistorized at half the price.”  Further exponential dwindling of costs, mostly in areas distant enough from politics for real market competition, has produced a world closer to the surreal exaggerations of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, in which “the Hendersons have the bomb” on the lawn next door. Properly harnessed for social cooperation, free choices can join neighborhoods and nations in harmony, without the chorus being Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “This is Still Tom Lehrer’s Week That Was” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 4, 2025

“Taking the Census” by Francis William Edmonds (1854)

“My bill,” US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) tweeted in June, “will require the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct a new census immediately upon enactment of the bill. In conducting the new census of the U.S. population, it shall require questions determining the citizenship of each individual, and count US citizens only.”

The money shot: “[T]he bill will direct states to immediately begin a redistricting of all U.S. House seats process using only the population of United States citizens.”

Naturally, US president Donald Trump supports the idea.

So does Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

Why? Because Republicans want to rig future  elections by re-drawing — that is, re-gerrymandering — the American political map to benefit themselves.

One problem with the idea: It’s wholly, completely, and unquestionably illegal. According to Article I, Section 2 of the “Supreme Law of the Land,” the US Constitution:

“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.”

The “Indians not taxed” and “all other persons” sections are no longer applicable. Native Americans became US citizens (and started getting taxed) in 1924; “all other persons” meant slaves, and chattel slavery was banned in 1865.

The Constitution requires the census to be conducted once within every ten-year period after 1790. It’s already been conducted for this period. An “interim re-do” would not be a valid census.

The Constitution requires an “actual enumeration” of every person in the country, citizen or not.

The Constitution requires apportionment of US House seats according to THAT “enumeration,” not to a count of citizens.

Constitutionally, MTG’s dumb idea is dead on arrival.

We don’t bother much with the Constitution anymore, though. And why should we? As Lysander Spooner noted in 1870, it either got us where we are now or didn’t prevent us from getting here. So it’s hard to argue with a straight face that it’s worth much.

But let’s roll the clock back to BEFORE the Constitution, to reasons for the American Revolution.

Does “no taxation without representation” ring any bells?

“Imposing taxes on us without our consent” featured in the Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances against King George III.

Non-citizens can’t vote, but the fiction used to justify shaking them down for taxes is that they’re “represented” in Congress  by virtue of being counted for House apportionment in the census.

MTG and friends want to abandon even that farfetched excuse in a ham-handed attempt to cling to political power for just a little longer.

And if it works, it WILL be for just a little bit longer.

They’re playing with fire, and when you do that you eventually get burned.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

It’s only mid-2025, but both “major” US political parties are already well into their campaigns to win US House and Senate seats in the 2026 midterm elections. They’re talking up potential candidates, trotting out actual candidates, and, in the case of the House, going all-out to ensure that those pesky voters don’t get in the way of partisan ambitions.

Their current election-rigging schemes revolve around the decennial practice of “redistricting” based on the most recent US census.

Their tool/tactic of choice is called “gerrymandering,” after a Massachusetts newspaper noticed that the boundaries of state senate district created under legislation signed by then-governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812 resembled a salamander.

In Texas and Missouri, Republican-dominated state legislatures are trying to figure out how to maximize the number of House seats held by the GOP, and minimize the number of House seats held by Democrats, after next year’s elections. In California, New York, and Maryland the parties’ positions are reversed.

One perpetual wrench in the machinery of redistricting is race. Historically, black civil rights groups have held that districts must be drawn so as to allow black voters to support “the candidate of their choice,” as if the race of a candidate is or should be the sole factor black voters consider in choosing a member of Congress.

Personal honesty compels me to insert here that I doubt the efficacy and legitimacy of “representative democracy” at all. Not only do I disapprove of giving government any significant power or authority, but I find the idea of a single politician “representing” the interests of BOTH myself AND the other 750,000 or so people in “my district” silly in the extreme.

That said, if we’re going to do this thing, partisan goals and ethnic divisions shouldn’t be part of the calculation. “Redistricting” should be this simple:

First, figure out how many House districts a state is entitled to.

Second, plug the state’s population data into software that chooses a random point within the state and draws the most compact districts possible, from that point, based on population density.

No accounting for partisan voter registration. No accounting for clusters of different ethnicities. One person, one vote, period.

We should no more draw congressional districts based on the proportion of Republicans to Democrats or the proportion of whites to blacks to Latinos, etc., than we should draw them on the proportion of plumbers to sous chefs or the proportion of Led Zeppelin fans to Swifties.

Gerrymandering isn’t about representing the interests of voters, whether as individuals or members of groups. Gerrymandering is about the desires of the country’s two main political parties to maximize their power at the expense of each other’s.

Ending gerrymandering wouldn’t solve the myriad problems with “representative democracy,” nor would it solve our biggest problem: The poverty of expecting political power to actually resolve our conflicts.

It would, however, reduce the “obviously rigged clown show” element in our elections, perhaps freeing up our time and energy so that we can start addressing those larger issues.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY