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In the middle of a $12 billion deficit that required cuts to education and health care, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Democrats will spend hundreds of millions on a ‘special election’ to convince voters to set aside state law and back a ‘constitutional amendment so they can gerrymander the state into 94% control over congressional seats for their political party.
How much will the special election to make California a near one-party state cost? The appropriations committee failed to present a cost. Despite not being able to appropriate funds for the special election or having any way to budget for it, Dems are still moving forward.
This point is all the more significant because a leading argument against the Newsom recall, undertaken in protest of the governor’s corruption and abuses during the pandemic lockdowns was how much money it would cost. California Democrats and media outlets like CNN and the LA Times claimed that the reported $200 million cost was a waste of money and began working to make it more difficult to recall Newsom and future Democrat governors to ‘save money’.
Now those same Democrats, who claimed that spending hundreds of millions to recall Newsom was a waste of money, enthusiastically advocate spending hundreds of millions to gerrymander the state, not for any benefit, real or imaginary, to Californians, but only to their political party.
Apart from the minor details of how much the gerrymandering special election will cost, California Democrats also claim not to know who drew the maps they want to present to the voters. This was also dismissed as an unimportant detail by Assembly Elections Chair Gail Pellerin who responded to a reporter’s question about who drew the maps with, “when I go to a restaurant, I don’t need to meet the chef.” And when drawing the maps to eliminate what’s left of democracy in California, the elections chair doesn’t want to know how the sausage gets made.
Pellerin also refused to release tens of thousands of comments opposed to gerrymandering.
Democrat Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry claimed that the “assembly” drew the maps and refused to answer who in the assembly specifically drew the maps. Assemblyman Steve Bennett of the Progressive Caucus hedged that “all kinds of things happened in the legislature” and insisted that “the legislative leadership wrote these maps”, but refused to name who actually wrote the maps, only a “team”, before the Democrat leadership cut off the debate.
By then it had been widely reported that the maps were really being drawn by the party’s ‘chef’: Paul Mitchell, the owner of Redistricting Partners and a vice president at Political Data, Inc, which had announced a few years ago that it would only work with Democrats and “progressives”. “It’s something we’ve been thinking about for years,” he said at the time.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reportedly paid for the maps.
No one elected Mitchell to anything, but an unelected political consultant drawing maps to eliminate any meaningful choices for voters even while elected officials lie in legislative sessions about who drew the maps is entirely consistent with the project’s mission to end democracy.
Mitchell, Newsom’s ‘mapman’ is a former Dem staffer who is married to Jodi Hicks: CEO and president of Planned Parenthood in California. At Newsom’s rally, Hicks appeared to threaten Republicans with gerrymandering, “you take away our freedom; we’ll take away your seats.”
By “we”, Hicks apparently meant her husband.
Hicks, whose total compensation is over half a million dollars, was brought in by Democrats to testify in defense of the maps that her husband was drawing without disclosing the fact.
Democrats repeatedly claimed that they couldn’t discuss details such as the cost of the special election, who drew the maps and any information about the process because it was a “state of emergency”. The supposed emergency is the redistricting going on in Texas, but the actual text of the state constitutional amendment declares that it will be triggered by any state’s redistricting. Including potentially fellow Democrat states. It was never about Texas.
There is no actual state of emergency. Gov. Newsom is manufacturing one for his own benefit.
Newsom’s state of emergency will require ramming rural Modoc County into Marin County for reasons that California Democrats aren’t even pretending has anything to do with either Modoc or Marin, but as part of a national war involving Planned Parenthood and Newsom’s 2028 presidential prospects. And the people of Modoc County have to lose their ability to choose their elected representatives to boost the partisan undemocratic agenda of the Democrat Party.
California Democrats won’t admit what the real state of emergency is, just like they won’t admit who really drew the electoral maps, but it’s easy to spot the actual emergency by looking at the 2024 election which even in California saw, according to a USC study, that “young Californians have begun to move towards the Republican party in recent election years”.
“Young registered voters of all racial and ethnic groups saw notably larger shifts towards the Republican party compared to their older counterparts. Latino youth, however, saw particularly large growth in Republican party registration between presidential elections.”
That is the actual emergency. The emergency is Democrats losing their grip on the future.
Gerrymandering is a tool of the narrow fading majority. California Democrats, make up 45% of registered voters, but control 82% of the congressional seats, and now want 94%. Rig enough of the system and 45% of the state can control 94% or 100% of it, but so can 1% or 0.001%.
Democrats are going along with Newsom’s illegal coup because they can feel the ground moving underfoot. They bet everything on demographics, but the demographics are betraying them, and so they are declaring an emergency to stage a coup against democracy in California.
Gov. Newsom wants to romp through the 2028 primaries by portraying California Democrats as firmly in control of the state due to his strong leadership when they’re actually shaky and terrified of losing power if Trump’s immigration crackdown drives away the populations of their ‘ghost districts’ inhabited by illegal aliens and other non-citizens, and are worried that they’re losing younger voters who are becoming sick and tired of living in a corrupt one-party state.
Newsom’s gerrymandering coup is meant to convince national Democrats of his power so that they will make him their nominee in 2028, but what it actually shows is his weakness.
