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In the early days of the Great War, later to be known as World War I, there existed a distinct set of rules for conducting warfare by submarines against civilian shipping. After all civilian ships are not military combat vessels and it was considered a crime to sink civilians without warning. Undersea Boat, U-Boats, were, when attacking a civilian shop, expected to surface, announce that the ship was targeted to be sunk, and provide the crew and passengers time to abandon the ship in their lifeboats, and once that evolution had been completed, then the sub would sink the vessel. All very proper and civilized warfare.
England, an island nation, quickly discovered that losing tons of shipping weighed heavily on both their economy and their population. They took drastic action to save their crucial shipping, inventing the Q-ship. A Q-ship, converted from a standard commercial vessel, boasted deck guns that could be hidden from view. (And the reason the department of hidden and special gadgets is known as Q-branch.) Once an enemy U-boat surfaced and made its intention to attack known, the hidden guns would be deployed and the submarine sunk. Imperial Germany responded rationally and stopped providing civilian ships with any warning, sinking them on sight in unrestricted submarine warfare, pushing the United States of America to enter the war.
When the sequel war came about no nation attempted restricted submarine warfare, instead sinking enemy vessels of every type without warning or mercy – evidence that any standard or norm once abandoned is forever lost.
The Constitution of the United States requires that every decade the federal government performs a census and based upon that the congressional districts for the House of Representatives are drawn.
In 2003 after the Republicans gained full control of the government of Texas, they sought to replace the district maps that had been drawn following the 2000 census, breaking the norm of only redrawing the districts each decade. Democratic members of the Texas government even fled the state in an attempt to deny a quorum and prevent the redrawing of the lines but ultimately failed to kill the scheme. In 2006 the mid-decade redistricting got the seal of approval from the US Supreme court when they interpreted the constitution as requiring a redistricting every ten years but not forbidding it at other times. Further exacerbating the issues of congressional districts is a pair of Supreme Court decisions, 2019’s call that the issue of drawing lines for partisan purposes lies beyond the scope of Federal courts to address and this year’s call that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require majority-minority districts throws open the season for unrestricted gerrymandering warfare. Districts drawn to advantage one political party that just happen as a side-effect disadvantage any particular racial group are now perfectly constitutional.
As with submarine warfare a civilized norm once abandoned is dead. With early votes in the primary already cast, Louisiana is seeking to redraw their districts to eliminate Democratic seats and states with Democratic trifectas are speaking of drawing lines that eliminate every Republican seat within their states.
I despise the current and proposed gerrymanders, but I am also a realist and understand that the current Republican party, headed by a vainglorious buffoon who hates above all things being held in the slightest manner accountable will never ever reach a consensus to ban the offensive practice of politicians picking their voters. The only hope that exists is for the GOP to lose their hold on the Federal government and for the Democrats, should they hold all three branches in 2029, be forced, and they will have to be forced because like the ring of power having the seats is powerfully seductive, to fix this with Federal laws.
