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Comment by bdhe | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but this is almost a parody of the enlightened centrism meme.

The Democrats have attempted to pass several anti-gerrymandering bills. One in the Senate in 2024, one in the House in 2021. Both stonewalled by Republicans.

The Republican SCOTUS appointees allowed partisan gerrymandering, the Democratic ones were in the dissent.

California's prop 50 was IN RESPONSE to an unprecedented mid-term gerrymandering effort by Texas at the behest of Trump.

I just picked one example, but I could easily write similar responses that show very stark differences between the parties when it comes to wars, stacking the court, war with Iran, and more.

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Newsome proposed a ballot measure to allow the government to draw a more Democrats friendly map. hHochul treated redistricting in New York and supported efforts to do so.

The difference in many case was that legal challenges in blue stated tended to stop the gerrymandering where courts in red states tended not to. The end result is different, the political intent was not.

And Newsome did that is response to what again? Oh right, as a threat of 'if you do it we will do it to' to try and contain unchecked Republican gerrymandering. Kind of a important detail to leave out.

I can't speak to his intent, I just know that he specifically said the state legislation should redraw California lines to favor his party.

I can't include every detail in such a format, but its worth noting that I did clearly call out the Republicans doing it first. Its not like I was saying "democrat gerrymander" out of context there.

No, not really. Two wrongs don't make a right. It doesn't matter who started it (especially since each party claims to be responding to the other, and the only thing they differ on is where to draw the zero point), it is still not acceptable to continue in kind.

It does matter who started it and responding meekly to being wronged just makes you a sucker. And conservative morality being what it is, suckers are going to be bullied for fun.

> Two wrongs don't make a right.

It is ok to respond to gerrymandering by gerrymandering. It is not kindergarten. The court said it is legal, GOP will continue to do it. If the other side does not engage, they will honorably loose all ability to influence politics.

There's a nuance you're missing. These are not two comparable wrongs.

The CA proposition was put to a vote. Literally direct democracy. The TX legislature had a special session to put this in without voter input.

The CA proposition is time bounded, the TX one is not.

The CA proposition was in reaction to the TX one. If TX did not mid-cycle redistrict I am confident CA wouldn't.

Can you still really claim the two were equivalent?

I'd argue that in this case two wrongs literally do make a right, because AFAIK game theory proves tit-for-tat to be the most effective strategy in a two-player prisoner's dilemma (which this boils down to). Since the few instances able to prevent such voter repression had already proven their defection to the side trying to repress voters, Newsom's approach seems to objectively be the best one to defend democracy.

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