On April 21, a majority of Virginia voters said “yes” to a ballot measure allowing the state’s US House districts to be redrawn for the benefit of the Democratic Party.

The next day, a judge banned certification of the election results, calling the ballot language “flagrantly misleading” and asserting that state legislators didn’t follow relevant rules in putting the measure on the ballot.

Virginia is the latest battleground in a centuries-long war to “gerrymander” legislative districts such that the party in power at the moment retains an advantage in future elections by drawing those districts to minimize the number of seats its opposing party can plausibly win.

This year, the war escalated from decades of World War 1 style “dig in, the line moves a few yards this way or that every decade” to dual blitzkriegs. Texas Republicans decided to re-gerrymander their House delegation, California Democrats followed suit, and we’ve seen a nationwide domino effect as the two “major” American political parties duel for advantage in the upcoming midterms.

Normally, redistricting occur every ten years, in years ending in “1,” for the perfectly good reason that seats are apportioned to states by the US Census, which is taken every ten years, in years ending in “0.” But there’s nothing in the US Constitution or federal law to prevent additional re-gerrymandering in between. Republicans thought they saw opportunity, and Democrats reacted in kind.

But just as the Constitution doesn’t forbid mid-decade redistricting, it also doesn’t require “districts” at all, and in the early republic different states did things different ways.  Mandatory districts are a product of various, arguably unconstitutional, federal laws, the latest being the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967.

The absolute BEST way to end the gerrymander wars would be to abolish Congress (and the rest of the US government). I’m all for it, but I sense I’m in the minority on that suggestion.

There’s an easier — or at least simpler — way to get it done, while still catering to the fantasy that it’s possible for a politician to “represent” the rights and interests of the diverse populations who elect him or her. It’s a two-step process:

First, Congress repeals the Uniform Congressional District Act.

Second, each state goes from “single-member district” elections to “at-large statewide” elections with Ranked Choice Voting.

For example, Florida has 28 seats in the House. At the moment, the districts are gerrymandered such that 20 (71.4%) of those seats are held by Republicans and 8 (29.6%) by Democrats, despite the fact that Republicans constitute only 41.3% of registered voters to 30.2% for Democrats (the rest of the electorate claims “no party affiliation” or “minor” party affiliation).

Electing all 28 seats “at large” would end the ability to gerrymander a 70-30 representation split on a 4-3 party differential simply by virtue of happening to hold power when the gerrymandering occurs.

One problem, of course, is that without Ranked Choice Voting, one party could plausibly end up with all 28 seats because of minor advantages in voter affiliation.

Ranked Choice Voting would reduce that likelihood by using voters’ second choices to eliminate the candidates with the fewest votes. It still probably wouldn’t produce outcomes that fully align with declared party preference percentages, but it WOULD elect the specific candidates liked the most by the most voters.

Heck, we might even see some “minor party” candidates — Libertarian, Reform, Forward, etc. — win seats with high “second choice” ratings.

Another supposed problem is that candidates would have to conduct statewide campaigns. They’d have to reach, and successfully appeal to, voters further from where they live. I don’t consider that a problem. This isn’t 1789. It doesn’t take two weeks to cross a state physically. In fact, via broadcast and digital media, campaign communications are instant.

Those outcomes, though, aren’t really the point. The point is to remove one costly and contentious element —  constant redistricting fights — from the equation, producing “more democratic” outcomes.

Since I couldn’t care less whether the Republican or Democratic faction of the single state-approved party wins elections, what’s in it for me? Reduced annoyance and increased clarity. I prefer to see the “best version” of democracy given its chance so that when it fails too, others might finally give up on that fairy tale and start looking seriously at alternatives to political government.

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.

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“The longest government shutdown in US history!”

Apart from perfunctory stories about failed congressional votes to end it, that’s really all you’re hearing right now from mainstream media lately about the partial “shutdown” of the US Department of Homeland Security.

Wow! More than two months! Headed for three! It’s starting to sound like auctioneer patter: “Two, three, can I getta four, four, who’s bidding four, I’m looking for four …”

OK, so it’s dragging on. And on. And on.

But is there really anything else to notice about it? Anything that rises to the level of “news?”

Yes and no.

That is, yes, there’s something else newsworthy about it, which is that there’s really not much to notice about it.

For a little while, politicians managed to hype the negative effects of the “shutdown” by annoying air travelers.

Airport “security” gropers and oglers were “forced” to work without pay (scare quotes because they were always free to quit and go find productive jobs in the private sector), instead of getting sent home, permanently, so that airports and airlines could provide cheaper, more effective, and less annoying private-sector “security screening.”

After politicians figured out that taxpayers were even MORE annoyed  by having to wait in line longer to get felt up and hear orders barked at them, US president Donald Trump invented a workaround and the paychecks started arriving again.

Better for air travelers, worse for the claim that the “shutdown” portends apocalypse.

What we HAVEN’T seen is any noticeable uptick in  threats to the “security” of the “homeland.”

No hijackings.

No bombings.

No “national security” related hostage situations.

Just life, as usual, minus paying out big bucks for a useless bureaucracy that we got along just fine without from 1789 through 2002 … and can clearly get along just fine without now.

Even starting a war with Iran wasn’t enough to give DHS anything visibly productive to do. Political and media hysteria over supposed “Iranian sleeper cells” quickly dissipated after it turned out that those cells either don’t exist or didn’t set their alarm clocks.

Any sane policy discussion, at this point, should center around how quickly DHS can be defunded permanently and abolished entirely.

My more politically astute friends tell me that “there just aren’t enough votes in Congress to pass that kind of bill.”

But there aren’t enough votes in Congress to fund DHS either.

I guess that will have to be good enough.

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.

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I don’t care much for politicians and their works. Political government is a stupid and evil way of doing things. It makes us all less happy, less healthy, less prosperous, and less safe than we’d be if we abandoned it for voluntary means of living together.

Nonetheless, I occasionally try to “give credit where credit is due” when a politician departs, for even a moment, from evil and stupidity. At other times I seek the most charitable explanations I can find for that politician’s actions. This is one of those latter times, and the question at hand, as you might expect is:

What is it with Donald Trump?

First, a note: I occasionally receive hate mail and comments opining that I suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and have never levied the same criticisms, for the same types of actions, against other presidents.

That’s not true, and you don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve been writing political commentary since the 1980s, and you can easily find almost all of that commentary from the early 1990s on  with a quick search engine query. I’ve been, on balance, at least as critical of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush,  Barack Obama, and Joe Biden as I’ve ever been of Trump.

I’ve even said some nice things about Trump for, among other things, talking with the North Koreans, feinting toward US withdrawal from Syria, negotiating the US surrender in Afghanistan, advocating for an end to taxing tips, etc. He hasn’t always followed through, but he’s sometimes come up with good ideas.

There’s something those good ideas have in common, and it occurs to me that those things may be of a piece with my “most charitable explanation” for ideas that weren’t as good.

Some commentators look at Trump and the MAGA-dominated Republican Party and conclude that “the chaos is the point.” That is, the purpose of some of the weirder and wilder actions of Trump’s administration is to build an omnipotent totalitarian state by sowing fear, discord, and confusion — to keep their opponents on perpetual tenterhooks, disorganized and unable to effectively respond, as new authoritarian measures roll out.

But what if it’s not that?

In the mid-1990s, Clayton M. Christensen introduced the idea of “disruptive innovation” into the public lexicon. By the early 2000s, nearly every tech start-up touted itself as “disruptive,” in a good way although not usually in precisely the way Christensen seems to have intended.

Around that time, Mark Zuckerberg coined a motto for how Facebook approached building itself as a social media platform. “Move fast and break things.” In other words, if you have an idea that seems like it might produce really good results, pull the trigger and see what happens.

As goes biz buzz, so goes political thinking.  Quoth the late Scott Adams:

“What Trump does is he shakes the box. He just wants to see where the pieces land, because wherever they land is a different situation than the one he’s in.”

Since the 1930s, with their penchant for technocracy, American politicians and bureaucrats have generally been disruption-averse. They prefer to tweak the system, messing around at its edges with minor “improvements.”

Trump prefers “disruptive innovation.” While he’s unwilling to attack the central problem — political government itself — he’s big on “disruptive” experimentation, both in general (consider, for example, the DOGE episode) and when he’s in a situation that seems to call for distraction (“Epstein? Who’s that? Hey, look, Iran!”).

While I’m usually not ecstatic with the results,  “shaking the box” may be a better explanation than “he’s more stupid and evil than previous presidents.”

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.

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