Fast Takes: Gerrymandering lessons, who really flooded Gaza and more
“The GOP was dumb, and Democrats owe the Justices another apology,” concludes The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board of the “self-defeating fiasco” of the Republican gerrymandering gambit.President Trump demanded states “redraw House districts” for extra seats, but that meant “Republicans spread GOP voters thin,” letting Democrats carry districts “thought to be safe.” Now “the left is chortling” over “the magnitude of the GOP gerrymander bungle,” yet (contra hysteria about “the return of Jim Crow”), black Dem wins in majority-white districts debunk “the left-wing conceit that racial gerrymanders are needed to elect black politicians.” And so much for Justice Elena Kagan’s claim that the high court had “blinded itself to the very deleterious effects” of partisan maps.
As Dems now “gerrymander their state maps to entrench the new House Democratic majority,” be sure “you won’t hear them — or their media cheerleaders — complaining about” the Supremes’ hands-off approach.Don’t blame Israel; “it was Hamas’s cannibalisation of Gaza’s infrastructure that made the current floods so bad,” explains Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill.Gaza lacks basic drainage because “Hamas spent years ripping water pipes out of the ground to turn them into rocket fuselages” — even boasting, according to The Telegraph, about bending “30 miles of water pipelines” funded by the EU into “an arsenal of home-made rockets” while diverting aid into a “350-mile tunnel system.” For 20 years, “Hamas chose to build not a functioning society but a staging ground for slaughter.” In promoting “the moral absolution of Hamas,” Western activists treat Palestinians as “wide-eyed, child-like victims.”“Outdated” rules make union-decertification elections “harder to hold” than necessary, and harder than federal law requires, gripes Mark Mix at The Hill.
His group, National Right to Work Legal Defense, has “petit...