After numerous posts peddling the Trump Regime Media narrative on Texas redistricting, the Media Research Center still wasn’t done. James Mortensen covered for the state in an Aug. 7 post:
On Monday, in a twist of irony, Texas Democrat Representative Jasmine Crockett, while rallying at a MoveOn event in Phoenix, Arizona, passionately called for an aggressive end to the Senate filibuster to protect voting rights, while praising her 51 Democratic colleagues’ dramatic filibuster attempt to block Texas’ redistricting vote.
Crockett’s defense of her colleagues’ quorum-breaking strategy of fleeing the state conflicts with the justifications offered by Texas’ Republican leadership for redrawing the state’s congressional map.
The reason for the proposed redistricting, according to Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, is they need to “redistrict because of constitutional concerns raised by the Justice Department over a handful of minority-dominated districts.”
[…]Despite the historical precedent in Abbott and Patrick’s claims, many Democratic lawmakers such as Crockett have dismissed the proposed redistricting as a Conservative attempt to tilt the House further in their favor.
Um, because that’s exactly what it is? Mortensen didn’t explain why having minority representation in Congress is a bad thing, and he didn’t mention that the redistricting was specifically demanded by Donald Trump to increase the Republican majority in the House, which further undercuts his attempt to whitewash it.
Clay Waters played whataboutism:
A redistricting arms race? Texas Republicans’ plan to redraw the congressional map and eliminate five Democratic-held U.S. House seats, which would help the GOP retain control of the House in next year’s midterm elections, sent Democrats in the Texas legislature fleeing to Illinois and New York to avoid a sufficient “quorum” in the chamber to vote on the measure.
The spat led off Monday evening’s PBS News Hour, including clips of Democratic governors from the states of Illinois and New York weighing in (more on those interesting choices of refuge later).
[…]Illinois and New York are certainly interesting choices to flee from the horrors of partisan redistricting. It was up to late night talk show host Stephen Colbert to gently bring up Illinois’s own bizarre gerrymandered maps with Illinois’s Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker on The Late ShowTuesday night. Colbert held up a map of Illinois’s currently Democratic-skewed congressional maps and asked Pritzker, “if you’re considering doing a little more redrawing in Illinois, you already have some crazy districts in Illinois.”
Indeed, in 2021 Democrats in Illinois used the new Census figures to squeeze out a Republican-held seat, taking an already overwhelming Democrat advantage (just five Republican seats) down to three. And in 2022 the Democratic-run New York state legislature intervened in the state’s redistricting process to redraw congressional maps in the Democrats’ favor. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the bill into law. None of this made PBS.
Alex Christy huffed:
Former Clinton strategist James Carville does a podcast with former Clinton cheerleading journalist Al Hunt, and on their Wednesday recording of Politicon’s Politics War Room, they reacted to the redistricting battle currently going on in Texas. While Hunt claimed Republicans are “fighting dirty,” Carville gave the game away and claimed that in order “to save democracy,” Democrats need to add states and Supreme Court justices despite the fact they tried to do that a few years ago, even before the current Texas situation.
Despite the fact that California is currently more gerrymandered than Texas, Hunt declared, “Democrats, starting with California, would be crazy to play by these rules and unilaterally disarm. Trump will keep playing dirty elsewhere. So, the big question is whether they can win or at least neutralize this. Maybe not, but with Trump, there’s no honor in American politics, so go after him every day.”
[…]Instead of complaining, Democrats should try appealing to people outside of the country’s biggest cities, where their voters are more concentrated.
Christy didn’t explain why he won’t criticize Republicans for gerrymandering if it’s such a bad thing.
Bill D’Agostino groused:
In 2021, the media were instantly lovestruck when Texas Democrats fled the state in order to block an election integrity bill from passing. Today, many of those same Democrats are hunkered down in Chicago, in a vain attempt to prevent their state from being redistricted, and once again, the corporate media have rushed to their defense.
MRC analysts tallied every interview with a Texas lawmaker that occurred on CNN and MSNBC from August 1 through August 6, between 6:00 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. In just six days, liberal cable networks rewarded the Democratic Texas legislators for their defiance with a whopping 45 sympathetic interviews. Meanwhile, Republicans from Lone Star State received just two argumentative interviews.
Predictably, MSNBC had the majority of Texas Democrats on: 29 interviews, or almost double CNN’s already-impressive count of 16. Perhaps equally predictably, both interviews with Republicans occurred on CNN.
D’Agostino curiously excluded Fox News from his evaluation without explaining why.
Craig Bannister once again checked in from his CNSNews.com propaganda ghetto — one article hyped how “The FBI has granted Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) request for help tracking down the dozens of House Democrats who fled the state, most of whom are hiding out in Illinois – a state that prides itself for protecting lawbreakers from federal authorities,” while another touted that “Texas Attorney General (AG) Ken Paxton has launched bribery investigations into leftist billionaire George Soros’ Texas Majority PAC (TMP) and former Democrat Representative Beto O’Rourke’s ‘radical group,’ Powered by People, for funding Texas Democrat lawmakers who have fled the state, rather than doing their jobs.”
Intern Ashley Taylor complained in an Aug. 8 post:
If you tuned into CNN’s Inside Politics on August 7th, you might have thought you were watching a live feed from a DNC strategy session. The segment, aimed at critiquing Republican-led redistricting efforts in Texas, quickly turned into yet another case study in media hypocrisy and a stunning example of the left’s performative outrage, with one commentator suggesting Republicans needed to “cheat” to win.
Gerrymandering has existed for centuries, with both parties doing their fair share of redrawing. Dana Bash, to her credit, even admitted on air, “Gerrymandering is done by both parties. And it has been done by both parties for a very long time.”
That should have been the end of the conversation. An acknowledgment that this has been a structural feature of American politics, not a scandal manufactured by the GOP. And perhaps a conversation about how to put an end to it across the board.
Instead, CNN contributor Nia-Malika Henderson launched into an accusation-fueled rant that Republicans must “rig the system,” stating: “They do have to essentially cheat, and rearrange some things in these states like Texas, which I imagine Indiana, all of these states where– they’re Republicans who, are sort of MAGA types.”
The conversation had far left the bounds of informative reporting by that point, and had now evolved into punditry masquerading as moral clarity.
Taylor presumably wasn’t trained by her MRC minders to point out right-wing punditry masquerading as moral clarity. Instead she complained:
Was CNN mad that gerrymandering exists? Or were they just mad that Democrats didn’t have the power to do that in a red state like Texas?
Because if it’s the latter, you’re not defending democracy, you’re just upset your team was losing.
Did Taylor criticize Texas’ gerrymandering crusade? Not that we saw.