Posted on 06/07/2011 9:27:41 PM PDT by Republican Wildcat
"The plan that the legislature passed in Springfield and that the governor will likely sign in a few days puts just about all of us in political danger," freshman Rep. Adam Kinzinger told HUMAN EVENTS last week, the "us" being himself and the eight other Republican U.S. representatives from Illinois.
In what could fairly be labeled the most blatant case of political gerrymandering this year, the Democratic-controlled house and senate in Illinois recently unveiled a redistricting plan for the Prairie State's 17 congressional districts...
...The most dramatic change to come out of the new Democratic plan is to put Representatives Joe Walsh and Randy Hultgren—both freshman Republicans and both stalwart conservatives—into the new 14th District. The new district roughly comprises one-third of the territory from the present districts of Walsh and Hultgren, and about one-third from neither's district.
...
According to several published reports, Kinzinger would move into the new 16th District (Rockford) now held by 10-term Republican Rep. Don Manzullo.
(Excerpt) Read more at electadam.com ...
Don’t be surprised if every surrounding state goes bright red in 2012: Indiana, Missouri, Iowa and yes, even Wisconsin...
...thanks in part to former Illinois residents.
Don’t be surprised if every surrounding state goes bright red in 2012: Indiana, Missouri, Iowa and yes, even Wisconsin...
...thanks in part to former Illinois residents.
Gerrymanders don’t always turn out the way the mapmakers think that it will.
It’s amazing to me how everyone in those cemeteries is a registered Democrat.
wku man wrote: “My brother once said the GOP looks at politics as a chess match, played at the gentleman’s debating society hall, while the ‘Rats look at politics as guerrilla war. Truer words were never spoken. The Pubbies stand smug and sanctimonious on their moral high ground, while the ‘Rats are tunneling it out from underneath.”
There’s a lot of truth to that statement.
The flip side of it is that conservative Republicans (and those few conservative Democrats who are left, mostly in the rural South) generally understand that we’re living in a country that is supposed to be run by laws and not by men. Unlike the 1960s radicals and their “community organizing” heirs who look to Saul Alinsky and his “Rules for Radicals” for guidance, we realize that we’re not revolutionaries and we need to follow the rules.
We should be as aggressive as possible, within the framework of the Constitution and the settled laws of the land. Yes, that includes using Republican majorities, where they exist, to “gerrymander” Democrats out of their seats. That’s a legitimate tactic of redistricting going back to the 1800s, and it’s a **WHOLE** lot better than the preceding British system we rejected, which for a very long time kept parliamentary districts with very little relationship to actual population changes. There is a reason why our Constitution calls for a census every ten years.
However, even if our opponents treat politics as a street brawl with no rules, we cannot operate that way as conservatives who are supposed to respect the laws and the institutions of government.
“Don’t be surprised if every surrounding state goes bright red in 2012: Indiana, Missouri, Iowa and yes, even Wisconsin...”
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I think that is what is happening. I live in Indiana. The Mid-West has some great examples in Michigan and now Illinois of anti-business, high tax, high regulation and intrusive government. Why would anyone want what has happened in Michigan to be in there state?? Why would anyone want to have the corruption found in Chicago?? Indiana has now placed billboards near the Illinois state line, encouraging businesses and citizens to move to the hoosier state.
My wife’s family lives in relatively conservative Kankakee County. If this gerrymander goes through, their new rep is going to be Jesse Jackson Jr.
Talk about hell on earth.
It was Chicago that lost +/-200,000 residents. People fled Chicago to other states or moved to RED Suburbs and/or Counties. As such, it should be Chicago that looses two Congressional Seats. Not any other County or District in IL. So if I was part of the IL GOP leadership I'd have filed a Federal Lawsuit against the IL Democratic Party (aka: Mike Madigan) the moment this new map was made public.
As it is per this new map, I now have NO Rep in the US Congress! So if this map doesn't violate my Constitutional rights, or the Voting Act of 1965, I'll eat my Stetson -- without salt.
This map is reverse Jim Crow and 'Disenfranchisement' x 106.
On Wednesday, June 08, 2011 7:02:05 AM, ScottinVA wrote: “My wife’s family lives in relatively conservative Kankakee County. If this gerrymander goes through, their new rep is going to be Jesse Jackson Jr. Talk about hell on earth.”
I know very little about this county except for some of the people in Momence Christian Reformed Church or who have left for the URC or OPC. From what I do know, Kankakee County is a conservative and mostly white area, so I realize up front that maybe what I’m suggesting wouldn’t work.
One of the problems with gerrymandering for the gerrymanderers is that it puts people into districts which have a majority of one party, but not overwhelmingly so. Rather than just accepting “hell on earth” for ten years, it it possible that you could find a solid conservative black businessman who is angry about government interference in his business, or even better yet, an inner-city black pastor who is angry about lousy inner-city schools and the huge numbers of black babies being aborted by white doctors?
Maybe you can’t defeat Congressman Jackson, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give Rep. Jackson a bit of what he’d like to dish out to you. Perhaps you can find some common cause with inner-city black conservatives who now have very few people listening to them in a congressional district that’s mostly inner-city Chicago, but who, with help from rural and suburban conservatives, might be able to mount a serious challenge to Congressman Jackson or at least do enough organizational work to force Jackson to pay attention to his constituents and not take them for granted.
It is a liberal lie that minorities have to vote Democrat. Inner-city churches may not look or feel like a rural conservative church, but in many cases their pastors are sincere Bible-believing Christians who might be willing to switch parties or at least vote for some Republicans based on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and bad inner-city schools. When it comes to inner-city black-owned businesses, their owners have many of the same concerns as any other businessman and except for those who have minority set-aside contracts, there’s no rational reason they should still be Democrats.
When you get dealt a lemon by the other side, sometimes making lemonade works — and sometimes squirting the lemon juice in the other guy’s eye works even better.
Even when it doesn’t “work” in the sense of defeating the other side, keeping him pinned down and focusing on local issues and constituent service is not a bad thing, and it may keep him from focusing on national political issues or being viewed as a national leader. People who have to work hard to get re-elected can’t necessarily vote the way they’d like or the way their party would like them to vote, and that in the long run can be quite damaging to their political futures in the Democratic Party if they’re not in a safe district.
That is a good bet. I left Illinois in December for Missouri.
It was very difficult to find a large moving truck available in Illinois, many had been rented and taken out of state.
“What shocks me is that Republicans hold almost half of the seats in a whacked out leftist state like Illinois.”
Republicans 11 - Democrats 8. With most of the 11 vulnerable now, this is going to hurt. It’s going to be hard to make this up in other states.
Why all the hand-wringing here? This is a GREAT outcome for the state of Illinois.
It is about to become Chicago-ized, writ large.
I can’t think of a better way to crash and trash the whole state than to put the Rats in charge from stem to stern.
Give the Dem voters there what they have voted for.
The TX (R) delegation did that. They split Travis county into five districts instead of three. Lord dog nuts is ticked off. His base is in central Austin, and the new districts extend into the more conservative rural areas.
I agree.
Of course, the dodo-heads here in Florida let one of those idiotic redistricting amendments pass last year that limits the ability to gerrymander. We had literally the best year ever in Republican results, but this boneheaded amendment passed. There should have been a clear message sent on the negatives of this amendment, but even a lot of Republicans voted for it...out of ‘fairness’. Oh, well.
Wonder if Rahm Emanuel will parade his nuclear missiles on May Day, and get more "resources" by shaking down Wisconsin and Iowa with nuclear blackmail?
He wouldn’t dare. He knows that we’d begin tapping Eastern Kentucky for some more hillbillies to move to Chicago and he’d wish he’d never left Washington DC.
Check this out:
In Texas, the big Tea Party wave gave the GOP something like 2/3's of the Texas house of representatives. OK? That's a 2:1 majority.
But what has happened is that the Dems have formed a working alliance with a clutch of suburban RiNO's and the RiNO speaker of the house (he's a Jewish "moderate" Republican from the suburbs of Dallas), to vote out a reapportionment map that pits the eight most conservative Republican representatives against one another.
The RiNO speaker and his buds are working with the 'Rats to scrag conservative Republicans. It's a massacre, and the new map guarantees that there will never be as many Republican state representatives again. Eventually, uncontrolled Mexican immigration will flip the whole State of Texas Democratic and drive the GOP from statewide office.
Here you have a pluperfect example of the RiNO's doing whatever it takes to fight off challenges from conservatives, even though they are guaranteeing their own expungement from state office thereby.
High taxes; Democrat corruption; out of control growth of state government ~ all of these things have contributed to making much of the Midwest less than hospitable to people.
Notice that the more Conservative states ~ Kentucky and Indiana ~ held their own in this census.
One does hope the Democrats create utterly Gerrymandered districts that hook Republican areas downstate to Democrat dominated areas in Cook County.
Although people imagine that gives the Democrats an automatic victory, the fact is many of those Chicago people ARE NOT GOING TO VOTE in the next few elections. 40% unemployment is teaching them a brutal lesson about tieing race to political power.
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