Dem
47
GOP
53
In 2004, Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. There he said: "There is no red America and no blue America, only the United States of America." He has now decided that he was wrong. There is only red America and blue America and he has endorsed the plan of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) to make California even more blue than it already is. Unity is so passé.
Donald Trump is making it abundantly clear that he is not the president of the United States of America. He is president of the Red States of America. He doesn't give a rat's a** about the blue states. They are the internal enemy to be crushed like a bug. No previous president, of either party, has acted this way in a moment of crisis. Even Lincoln, while he was waging war against the Confederate states, regarded himself as president of them, and wanted to bring them back into the fold. All previous presidents have tried to bring the country together when there was a crisis. Trump sees this as a weakness. He sees the country as divided into two camps: his supporters and his enemies.
Trump is not the only one. Steve Bannon tweeted: "Trump is a wartime president now focused on eradicating domestic terrorists like ANTIFA." Back in 2016, Bannon said that unity was not a goal at all. He said: "We didn't win an election to bring the country together." OMB Director Russell Vought has complained that the appropriations process is too bipartisan. He doesn't want the minority party to have any role in it at all.
Few things expose the bugs in the Constitution more than the provision letting the partisan state legislatures determine how their representatives will be chosen. Not surprisingly, they have largely chosen to maximize how many seats the majority party in the legislature will get in Congress. Even a political genius like James Madison missed this.
In fact, we are about to enter an era in which the House becomes like the Electoral College. In the Electoral College, whichever candidate gets the most votes gets all the electoral votes (except in Maine and Nebraska). Soon, whichever party controls the state legislature, will get all the House seats in its state. Think of it as an electoral high school. The Supreme Court has already punted on it and said House districts are up to the political branches and there is nothing the Court can do about it—unless it changes its mind, which it does regularly. (V)