The Gerrymandering Gauntlet: Redistricting, Race, and Representation

All right, welcome back to what's going on with Earl Ingram.

You know, once again, I'm always privileged and honored to have my good friend, none other than Mr. Sandy Williams.

You know, let's send you.

So yesterday I was watching Johnny Carson, right?

Johnny Carson?

Hey, I'm a guy who likes reminiscing.

No, I even remember who he is.

Yeah.

And Sammy Davis was on and I was just going through this reminiscing and thinking about all those, how great the times those were.

And then I thought of you.

Whoa.

So I was thinking sidekick.

You know, when I was going to announce you and I'm thinking about sidekick because that's- I'm your Ed McMahon.

No, not quite.

But anyway, it's always good to talk to you and a lot to talk about Sandy.

You know, we're going through so many historical moments during this presidency.

and they're just piling up one after another after another.

And the norms, Sandy, are all being challenged.

And, you know, and I don't know if there's ever been a time that so many different norms have been challenged, you know, just rapid fire.

And today's no different when we're talking about the Voting Rights Act and redistricting.

many people may not understand and know the impact of what is transpiring here.

It's one of the things that I wanted you to be able to cover and that we should cover today because the impact of what is taking place right now is so monumental that all these different states now are starting to make moves based on a decision that was rendered.

by the Supreme Court, Sandy, your thoughts on what just transpired?

Well, it was sort of the last nail in the coffin with respect to the Voters' Rights Act.

I mean, I got to agree with Eleanor Kagan in her dissent.

in which she said, you know, this basically eviscerates the Voting Rights Act in terms of the ability of people to use it as a method for contesting how it is that state legislatures redistrict the voting districts in their state.

And, you know, the Voting Rights Act was set up in response and as a part of the civil rights movement in the mid-60s as a recognition that

the district in states had been handled in a number of states, at least in sort of an invidious manner, which was designed to dilute the vote in particular in the south of minority black voters in such a way that they would never end up with representation in Congress, and they would be underrepresented in their state legislatures.

And of course, you can do this, you know, we vote in voting districts.

And the lines that create the voting districts are created by the state legislature.

And those lines can be drawn in all kinds of ways.

And as we maybe can figure out from a mathematical standpoint, you can draw the lines in a manner that might have, if you could understand how people were going to vote, Democratic or Republican, you could draw those lines in a way that would make it more likely that, for instance, a Democrat would win in a particular district.

And you might be able to draw the lines in the whole state in manners that would make it more likely that you would have more of one party elected than another, just as the result of the predictably partisan nature of people who vote regularly.

It's become increasingly possible with the kind of data we have and the ability of computers to massage that data to predict how it is that people will vote and therefore to predict how it is that people will vote in districts.

as you draw the lines in various ways.

And in 2010, we developed a process of, there were computer programs that were set up, I think one of them is called Magnitude, that was designed for the very purpose of constructing congressional districts and state legislative districts that would be predictably outcome, would have predictable outcomes from a party standpoint.

You know Sandy the voters right the voting rights act As a young boy Watching my my dad Talking about the impact of of what this would mean, you know, I was too young to really understand the impact of it And really, you know, we certainly weren't taught about it

when I was in school and the impact of what would happen.

I'm a guy who was born in the North.

My dad was born in the South.

And so it certainly had, you know, for those who were born during that time, like my dad, this was, I mean, this was a monumental decision that was made to 15th Amendment.

The

14th Amendment was construed, and the Voters' Rights Act was deployed basically in furtherance.

It was believed at the time of the 14th Amendment to make sure that legislatures did not act in an invidious manner to vitiate the equal protection of the laws associated with voting and to make sure that the districting wasn't used to dilute the votes perniciously because of race.

And, however, that was a complicated

thing to accomplish, because, number one, it wouldn't be easy to accomplish, but for the fact that racial lines tend to predict voting behaviors relatively accurately.

So it's been basically understood for quite a while that the African-American, the black vote, is more likely to be democratic.

And so that has

has been a foundational element of the redistricting and the capacity to predict whether or not they'll have representation based on party vote.

But, you know, there have been trends as well that have tended to lead in the direction

that this ongoing gerrymandering has been, and that's been what's called the big sort.

And the big sort is that we in the United States have democratically sorted ourselves so that liberals and specifically African-Americans have tended to coalesce in urban settings, and conservatives have tended to coalesce in more rural settings.

And so that's been a geographical shift that has caused

voting districts to become somewhat more defined and politically predictable just based on this big sort.

But then also there's been an ongoing process since the 60s.

of sort of this notion of gerrymandering, gerrymandering being designing the notion of designing district lines for state legislative districts and the congressional districts so that they would have predictable outcomes from a party standpoint and maybe also from a racial standpoint.

So Sandy, this divide that continues in this nation with

I mean, black people make up 12, 13% of the overall population.

So there's not going to be an equal division as it relates to the numbers of people who can vote.

If the majority of the population is white and a smaller percentage, only 12% is black, there's not going to be equality when it comes to the sheer numbers of voting.

And so that's part of the reason why this was crafted.

Is it safe to say that?

Well,

yes, but of course it wouldn't make that much difference if if African Americans were sort of equally Republican and Democrat.

because we only vote along for parties, right?

We vote for parties and elected officials.

But what's happened is part of this big sword has also been that we've tended to divide from a partisan standpoint along racial lines as well.

And so that has made, you know, and it used to be, well, I did some research into the history of gerrymandering.

And until World War II, the problem with districting in this country was that

We never redistricted.

We had, at the end of World War II in 1950, there were a number of states who had not redistricted even their state legislatures or their congressional districts since 1901.

And, of course, there had been a major demographic shift between 1901 and 1950 in every state, where many people had moved from very rural settings to much more

urban settings and we got to the point where in Tennessee

In 1950, there were some districts, state legislative districts, that had 175 people in them.

And in that same state, some other districts had 137,000 people in them.

And so it was very wacky.

And it was definitely not one person, one vote, because the way you achieve one person, one vote at the congressional level and at the state level is you figure out the number of people who live in the state.

And you divide that by the number of legislative districts.

And then you try to have legislative districts that are equally sized from a population standpoint, so that at least district by district, you've got a one person, one vote kind of an effect across the state.

So we didn't even start redistricting in this country at a very rapid clip until the 1950s.

And it wasn't until the 1950s and the early 1960s that the

that the Supreme Court began to look at this question of whether there needed to be one person, one vote, and whether that needed to be enforced.

The first says Supreme Court case dealt with state legislatures in the South and predominantly.

I mean, it was a Southern state that brought the case to the head.

And so then the Supreme Court said, you know, these state districts have to be one person, one vote at least.

And then, a couple of years later, we actually got around to the Supreme Court declaring the same thing for congressional districts.

And so, since the late 1950s, redistricting has been in a cadence that reflects the 10-year census changes.

And every 10 years, with the new census, we have a new head count, we have a new number of congressional districts established, and, well, not a new number total, but a new number for each state as they're allocated to the states.

And then you end up with redistricting in response to that.

So since 1960, we saw redistricting happen every decade until the 1990s and the early 2000s.

And in the early 2000s, 2003 to be specific, Tom Lay of Texas

decided that he would try to get the Texas legislature to redistrict in between this 10-year cadence in order to improve the headcount numbers in Texas.

And he did that.

And it was viewed as an extraordinary thing to be done.

It ended up with a Supreme Court case, with a court case contesting whether it had racial implications, which apparently it founded on that issue.

That was viewed as remarkable, because until that time, redistricting was always sort of done at least in the open, on the up and up.

And no one ever talked about, maybe it was done secretly, it was done in the dark, but no one ever talked about gerrymandering purely for the purpose of securing a partisan advantage, which

When I say those words it sounds remarkable today because today all we talk about when we talk about redistricting is securing a partisan advantage.

This is this is turned from a game of basketball where the ball transfers after the point to now we've got make it take it in in state legislatures and in elections.

If a state can get an advantage partisan advantage

They want to take it, meaning they want to take that partisan advantage and redistrict to the extent they possibly can.

to obtain greater advantage.

There was a famous quote of a state legislator, I think it was in Kentucky, where the congressional districts were being redistricted.

And he said he didn't want to try and go to 11 Republicans and two Democrats, only because he didn't think it was possible.

They were gonna redistrict to 10 and three, and that was the outcome that they were pursuing.

You know, Sandy, go ahead, Vince.

Well, now I'm saying, now we've got governors, president of the United States, competitively redistricting.

And they're doing it in a manner that suggests that we might do it every two years or every four years.

Whenever it can achieve a political advantage, it will be carried out.

And the Supreme Court has finessed that issue in a recent decision, where they decided that

partisanship was not something they would review in the redistricting process.

And they left open the question of how much partisanship is too much.

But they basically said, look, we're not going to review districting and the district lines just because they achieve partisan favor.

So Sandy, this slippery slope that we are on is only going to get worse.

and because the Supreme Court had an opportunity to kind of corral it and really kind of massage it the right way and they chose to open it up to even more Wild Wild West.

Why would you think they would do that when they had a chance to...

To what I would say would be in the best interest of our nation and voting in general They could have put that where it should be where people would not be questioning as much Well,

it all came it all came down to the to the racial issue and the question is whether race race could be considered

And the Voting Rights Act was premised on the notion that race had been invidiously considered for so long that it was necessary to take remedial steps on an affirmative, proactive basis to reverse that effect.

So I think there were 13 states under the Voting Rights Act originally.

That might be the wrong number, but it was around 13 who were put under a process in which if they were going to change

their districts, they needed to have it reviewed by the Department of Justice to make sure that their redistricting was not invidiously racial in its purpose or in its outcome.

And then there also was a test that was basically in a state if the outcomes of the elections were clearly different than might be that might be

the state might be predisposed to based on the racial mix of the electorate, then that was a basis for reconsidering the districting.

And for instance, in Louisiana, in Alabama in several states, that outcome test resulted in required redistricting.

In fact, as recently as 2023, in the Milligan case, it was decided that the, I think that was the Alabama outcome,

based on the results required there be a redistricting.

And when the redistricting occurred, there was an additional probable black representation district created.

But now the test, after this decision this week, this CalA decision, is that in order to upset a district done by a state legislature, you have to prove their intent was racial.

And of course, that's going to be particularly hard.

It's going to be particularly hard where the electorate has sorted itself racially between Democrats and Republicans.

Because if all you can prove is that they were seeking to get Republican advantage, then that can subsume the racial issue, right?

Because if all we're trying to do is get more Republicans elected, the invidious effect might be that we'll get fewer.

Democrats elected and of course getting fewer Democrats elected makes it less likely as well that you'll have fewer blacks elected and so There you go.

I mean, you know the Supreme Court has has gone from and and this basically is a decision that kind of springs from a decision in the 1990s 1993 there was a Supreme Court decision that basically said You can't let race alone be the reason

that you redistrict.

There has to be a purpose beyond race.

And so you have to show some other problems associated with the districting, because race alone would be violating the Constitution.

And so that set the table for

the Calais decision that just came out this week.

And the surprising thing was that in 2023, essentially the same Supreme Court reached a different outcome with respect to looking at a results-oriented kind of basis for reversing.

So in three years, that part of Section 2 of the Voters' Rights Act, which allowed you to look at

outcomes as the basis for contesting elections fell apart.

So Sandy the Supreme Court back then that made the decision that these that gerrymandering and that race did matter and that blacks needed to have an opportunity to have representation and they made the decision to to allow that to occur because

clearly, they were looking at it from a different perspective.

Hey, these black Americans don't have any representation.

They are American citizens, and we have to do something because they're American citizens.

And the Constitution that they're talking about now is the same Constitution, but those Supreme Court justices saw it through a different lens than the Supreme Court justices today.

How is it?

So in your mind, in your eyesight, what did they see differently than the Supreme Court justices of today?

Was it the fact that time had, you know, gone on and now all of a sudden, you know, whites could say, hey, we're being discriminated against.

This is discriminatory against us.

What was the

impetus?

Well, interestingly, that is going to be the basis of lawsuits, probably in Alabama, I think one's already been started, to try and redistrict there, because some white voters are saying race alone was the basis for the redistricting that was accomplished that created these districts.

And so we need to redistrict on a basis that is not premised singularly on race.

Yeah, I think the outlook changed.

But the Voters' Rights Act is really what was

the precipitating move, it wasn't a Supreme Court decision.

The Voters' Rights Act created the basis for some conduct, which subsequently was validated by the Supreme Court in terms of developing tests under the Voters' Rights Act for determining when it was being violated and what the remedies for it were.

And it's that analysis that has been put to the test now, and it's the same.

kind of analysis that has put affirmative action under assault from a constitutional standpoint.

And it is true that the Constitution does basically provide with the 14th Amendment that race shall not be the basis for governmental action.

And that was essentially punctuated by the notion that race has been the invidious

a source of government action for so long that the Voters' Rights Act was necessary to reverse all of that invidious outcome.

And that was the purpose, for instance, of putting these several southern states under a special watch of the Department of Justice, in which they were not permitted to redistrict or otherwise change their Voters' Rights Acts without Department of Justice review.

And that was the first

leg of the Voters' Rights Act to fall under the Supreme Court, in which they said, well, that's no longer required.

And that mandate is no longer in place.

And without that mandate, now we're left with the question of whether partisan gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court decided was basically permissible, was OK.

And if it is OK, then how do you figure out

whether partisan gerrymandering is being done for racial purposes or simply for partisan purposes.

And the fact is that doing it for partisan purposes probably has the collateral damage effect of achieving bad racial outcomes with respect to representation.

So Sandy, this is just complex.

It's complex from the standpoint that the federal government

should have had oversight over these things.

And states had to, if they were attempting to do this, they had, did they have to get acceptance from the federal government?

Or is it that we are at a point now where the states are saying, hey, we don't need the federal government to come in to play with this.

We're gonna challenge that.

We're gonna make the moves ourselves

separate.

Well, under the Constitution, the states don't require any review by the federal government.

It was the Voters' Rights Act, which created then this category of states which were believed to have had a history of kind of pernicious conduct where they had had racial motivation under Jim Crow period, the Jim Crow period in particular, for diluting

the representation of blacks by blacks in particular.

And so they had drawn lines that had that outcome.

And so they put these states that had been viewed as having that history under a watch list.

And that watch list was...

eliminated by the Supreme Court in the decision several years ago.

And I don't think that was in 2013.

Ever since then, there have been further mitigation of any of the impacts from the Voters' Rights Act.

And the Voters' Rights Act, like affirmative action, does have a bit of a tenuous edge to it with respect to the Constitution and the 14th Amendment.

demand that there be no racial basis for decision making.

And so the conservatives have decided to seize upon that, whereas the liberals had seized upon it in the past to get federal law and both from the Supreme Court interpretations and from Congress to try and remedy things that had been done invidiously for racial purposes.

And now what's happening is that it's

now required that this racial purpose be an intent that can be proven, which of course is difficult, particularly difficult in an environment in which racial lines can run the same direction as partisan lines.

If the racial lines were the same as the national political demographic,

And if the same percentage of blacks were Republican, as were Democrat, as resided in the nation generally, much of this problem would

not exist.

You know, Sandy, the voter's right bill was not just for blacks.

It was for disabled people.

It was for others.

Why is it that this now just appears to be it was solely created just for blacks?

There are others.

That was

covered under it.

It's the black elements of it that have been attacked.

It's racial.

You know, they haven't attacked the notion that voting places have to be accessible to the disabled.

They haven't.

There hasn't been any attack on those portions of the voters rights act.

So those portions exist and are still enforced.

But of course, they aren't terribly important in terms of what happens in Congress with respect to Republicans and Democrats.

And, you know, now we've got the Supreme

Court, which has fully embraced, at least from a majority standpoint of the Supreme Court, has fully embraced the notion that to the extent that you're going to try to pursue a lawsuit based on invidious racial intent, you're going to have to prove intent.

And you're going to have to prove it at the legislative level.

And that becomes

much more

difficult.

It's

impossible.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's particularly impossible.

It would be possible if you were distrusting to achieve that outcome and the parties were equally divided amongst the demographic party groups, right?

But we aren't racially divided that way.

We're racially divided.

Democrats are, include most of the racial minorities, including the blacks and Republicans, are a predominantly white party.

And as a result, if partisan gerrymandering is permitted, then if that can be the stated rationale, which it has become, the publicly declared rationale for it, then it's going to be very hard to prove and to upset districting at

all.

throw another wrench monkey wrench into this Blacks aren't the number one minority anymore.

It's Hispanics right and so and so What about the Hispanics that the voter the voter rights bill includes them as well, right?

Yeah, and the contest so far have not been brought on their behalf with respect to representation And it's not clear the extent to which

gerrymandering has occurred in a manner designed to thwart the value of their vote.

And like I said, this big sort issue, the geographic location of us in terms of our racial location has had a big impact on the outcome of districting, independent from this purposeful kind of gerrymandering districting designed to achieve

partisan outcomes and maybe designed to achieve racial outcomes.

My sense is that even in the South, what has become much more fundamentally important driving this gerrymandering has been partisan outcome, the collateral effect of which has been to affect racial outcome.

But because

race and party, at least from the black standpoint, have become such an identity.

They're an identical outcome.

The result is the same.

Well, Sandy, you know, just from the perspective of a black person who is watching this and with people that I've had conversations with who

you know, from your and my age demographic, this is a monumental, that was a monumental decision that was made.

And so there are people who think that this is just going to create just a hostile environment that is going to create, you know, some horrible, horrible outcomes.

and racial outcomes and overtones in this nation, as if there wasn't already those issues.

It is really going to be, especially the black congressmen and senators who really are going to, there's going to be a lot of pushback on this.

Nobody's going to take this sitting down.

Yeah, it's interesting.

This is a norm that basically was a post-World War II norm.

In 1946, there was a decision to coalgrove versus green.

Justice Frankfurter, one of the Bastion liberals of the New Deal Supreme Court, said that...

Waiting, having the courts weighed into apportionment, the redistricting, was a political thicket and a non-judiciable question.

And so from that decision until the 1960s, the Supreme Court basically kept its hand out of it.

I've got the data here with respect to the extent to which districting was screwy.

The Nevada Senate, before reform in the 50s,

The smallest district had 568 people.

The largest had 127,000.

In Tennessee, a vote in rural Moore County was worth 19 urban votes in Hamilton County.

So things used to be very screwy, and we just let it happen.

And it wasn't until the 60s and the Warren Court that we rolled up our sleeves and began to work on it.

And some of those decisions were

The bulk of them, three of them, were before the Voters' Rights Act was actually implemented.

We had the one person, one vote extended all the way by 1964 before the effective date of the Voters' Rights Act.

But since then, this gerrymandering was a secret.

It was the quiet part.

We did it.

We did redistricting, but we didn't describe why we were doing it.

We always said we were trying to reflect by the shape of the districts, the community of interest, or some such thing that justified the irregular shapes that we were creating for the districts.

And it wasn't until 2010, until the election of 2010, when the Republican Party had a thing called the Redistricting Majority Project, which they announced.

And interestingly, the acronym for Redistricting Majority Project was REDMAP.

And REDMAP was taken out to the Republican State Leadership Committee.

And taken around the country, fundraising was done in pursuit of it, a great deal.

And the funds used for it were all dedicated towards the purpose.

of trying to turn as many state houses as possible in the direction of the Republican Party, so that the Republican parties could purposefully redistrict their states to advantage Republican elections.

And that was the stated purpose of it.

It was the first time that the quiet part was spoken out loud.

Everyone knew that there was this kind of secret being carried out.

to number one in reapportionment to help incumbents maintain their position, but also probably to have a partisan outcome that was favorable to the party in power that was doing the redistricting.

But it couldn't be too obvious.

It was felt that if it was obvious, it would be legally vulnerable.

And it was legally vulnerable until the Shelby County case in 2013 at the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court said, you know what?

We aren't really going to get into this partisan question of whether there's a partisan purpose behind it, because kind of going back to Justice Frankfurter, that's a sticky, that's a sticky thicket, and we're not going to go there.

You know, Sandy, and for those who are listening, I don't know.

Six months ago or so, you did a very artful and insightful couple of shows on the Earl Ingram show.

when I was doing, we were doing radio and about project 2025.

And so all of these things that are transpiring right now like dominoes falling, all of these, these things aren't happening by happenstance.

These things have been on the docket and they've been waiting for the right opportunity.

to bring all these things to light, Sandy, and this is another one of those.

Now, absolutely.

Ever since the 1990s, with the Republican Congress and the Speaker of the House at that point, that there has been a clear objective with respect to particularly Republican strategies, and I have to commend the Republican Party for

having a plan, number one, and number two, sticking to it very forcefully and being effective in achieving it.

But their plan has been to focus on state houses, to focus on state Supreme Court elections, where a Supreme Court are typically elected rather than appointed.

to focus on state-house elections and it by 2010 to publicly declare that the purpose for that is to take control of districting so that the redistricting could be as favorable from a partisan standpoint to Republicans as possible.

And then the outcome of those redistricting lines would be reviewed by

the Supreme Courts of each state, which again had been focused upon by the Republican Party to turn them in the conservative direction.

And so we get to 2020 and you look backwards in time and you can realize the effectiveness of that overall strategy simply by looking at the outcome state by state.

You know, Sandy, and having lived through those changes and watching

those things occur.

The Democrats clearly, you know, got checkmated because apparently, I don't think they could have ever thought that the opposition or that the Republicans, because a lot of this sand is kind of anti-American.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, the question, what is American?

You know, we have this republic.

It's not quite a democracy.

The people who make that distinction are probably somewhat correct, unfortunately.

We have this concept of one person, one vote, but that doesn't really fly when you get to the U.S.

Congress or when you get to the House in each state where, and the U.S.

Congress in particular, where senators are elected statewide and every state only has two of them, so that that's not a one person, one vote.

element of our of our and we have an electoral college which is diluted from one person one vote in the way we select our president.

And and then we have a process which for almost the entire history of this country redistricting has been viewed as being subject purely to the process of the state legislatures whether it be partisan or not.

We had a 70-year period subsequent to 1950, where...

where we began to redistrict on a regular basis, and where gerrymandering was not viewed as being an open war from a partisan standpoint to secure advantage.

But like I said, that game has turned into make it take it.

And now the party with power in a state, like in California, is capable of redistricting in a manner that's favorable to their democratic representation in Congress, in Texas.

So now we have a

a state-by-state sort of partisan war going on for constant redistricting to secure advantage in Congress.

And it's become particularly important because the representation in Congress is so evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats that an advantage that you can secure in one or two states of five or six seats is enough to swing the entire Congress.

You know, my friend, you always say something.

that makes me stop and think and pause.

And you did it again.

What is American?

Right?

What is it?

Right?

Because we've had this romantic view that has been painted of what our nation is and that it's going to be different than other nations.

It's going to offer all these great things.

fairness and all those kind of things were supposedly, that's what we lead people to believe that we are.

But you are absolutely right, Sandy.

There is a challenge to what an American is

now.

Well, I think what America is emerging at right now is a wild and woolly

partisan country, where wild and woolly partisan politics rule the day.

And we can see the extent to which then has begun to destroy norms.

It's begun to create a great deal of volatility in terms of our national policy, both on a domestic and an international basis.

And it's also creating a situation in which

I think the most recent count in 2020 was only 35 congressional districts out of the 470 some districts we have in the country.

Only 35 of them are competitive from the standpoint of having an unpredictable outcome from a partisan standpoint.

So Sandy meaning that the election.

results lie typically within a 5% range between Republican and Democrat, 35 districts like that.

Whereas the number used to be a full 35 to 40% of our districts used to be competitive.

So Sandy, it makes me wonder that almost 50% of the populace of this nation who's

who are eligible to vote, don't vote.

And it is because of these things.

And I don't know if the people who don't vote know these things that you're talking about and alluding to, but Sandy, they stink to high heaven.

Well, one of the outcomes of this is that it's the primary election in almost every...

congressional district that matters, not the general election.

So, if the general election doesn't matter, most people have figured out, I don't need to vote.

It doesn't seem to matter.

You know, particularly if you're in a district where you're constantly voting a losing vote, your candidate never wins.

It's like, what the hell?

Why should I bother Tuesday morning to go and cast a ballot, which doesn't matter, because this

This contest is already predicted and predictable, and nothing I do matters.

And so, yes, it frustrates that kind of involvement.

It also creates a great deal more polarity within the parties.

And it also creates a circumstance in which, instead of representing a mixed group, when a congressman person goes to Washington, do they have to worry about being

defeated by the other party, do they have to mitigate the way they vote based on a national interest or a broader interest, or do they simply have to represent the partisan interests that elected them?

And we now have all but 35 seats in Congress who basically must conclude, all I have to represent is the partisan interest that gets me nominated for office, because once I'm nominated as a Republican, I win, or once I'm nominated as a

Democrat, I win.

I'm only going to vote that interest.

And what we see in Congress is that

very outcome.

You know, Sandy, and that's an internal rot.

Just to be honest with you and the listening audience, when you're talking about the average American, be he black, white, and spent whomever, the average person who's struggling in

This what they call the greatest nation on earth the average person who's following the rules trying to do all the right things Sandy, but can't move forward And and who and who has been around a little while and and has you know white hair like you and I You just get more and more frustrated because you don't seem to be able to

to get our nation to understand this is not good.

This is

not right.

Well, I think once we even get people to understand that, and I think a lot of people do understand that, the question is,

What do we do about it?

What can

be done?

I think one of the issues is the extent to which the parties have decided to reflect polar positions.

There is a growing tendency towards some centrist positions and people who want the center or something that's more central to be represented.

I just don't know.

whether the independent party movement moves us in that direction, or whether the parties need to start representing a broader, and maybe the trend will be that, as both parties tend to not represent 50 percent of the public, and both parties are smaller than 50 percent of the public, but as their positions become more polar, it becomes more difficult for people to embrace that party as a

party voting member.

And as they become more narrow, let's say that without being reflective of the actuality, let's say that both the Democrats and the Republicans come to represent 30 percent of the public, each one of them.

And 40 percent of the public then has decided that they aren't either Republican or Democrat, because they are turned off by the polarity of the positions being taken.

They might begin to insist on different things.

different districting and different representation and Can that happen in the political process we currently have it's not going to happen in the two-party process we currently have and and so then the question is whether the two-party process fails by Basically becoming minority parties that in which there's something else needs to be represented.

You know Sandy it's Again it goes back to money in politics

And I just look at the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin right now and the primary.

And the amount of money, again, that's being spent in a primary for the governor of the state of Wisconsin.

And the fact that the average citizen is not gonna be able to give enough money to a candidate.

the persons who are gonna give them the most money aren't the average citizen.

So how's the average citizen, even though the average citizen is the one who votes and actually puts those people in office, they should be getting representation from their elected official, even on the congressional levels or all of those.

It's not the average citizen that they're responding

to.

We get to the same point when we talk about all kinds of issues.

Money in politics has warped our capacity to fix our health care system.

It's warped our capacity to rein in our defense expenditures.

It's had all kinds of impacts.

I suspect that we can have a number of podcasts in the future in which we focus on the issue of, is the American system destined to fail?

Or is it going to self-heal in some manner?

And if so, what are the ways in which we end up with a self-healing process that causes our trajectory to change?

We need to change the vector of our trajectory so that it's moving in a direction that is more sustainable, because I think we can all agree when we think about it that the current trajectory

is putting us in a direction of an unsustainable socio-political scene that's quite

troublesome.

You know, Sandy, clearly we've got to address those issues.

You just, you know, are articulated because it's inevitable that that's the outcome if things don't change.

And again, you know, what it's going to take to change it.

the two parties don't see any problem with it.

Well like I said the problem with the world generally and democracy in particular is the status quo is what's primarily represented and the two parties are the status quo and they are the power centers of the status quo and they're about the least likely to reinvent the system in a manner which will dilute the power which they seem to be achieving.

Now

You know, to some extent, Donald Trump proved that the Republican Party itself was not terribly powerful because he was able to commandeer it and basically redirect it.

turn it from a party into something that is much more driven by personality.

And so maybe that's a demonstration of the extent to which parties have become less effective.

I think Schumer, the leader of the Democrats and the Senate and the tenuousness of his position and the dissatisfaction generally of those who are Democrats in the country with the manner in which the party is being led or the results that it's achieving.

is further proof that there is a potential breakdown of the party system, which could maybe be part of the self-healing process.

And I think we should post that kind of discussion for a future podcast.

You know, Sandy, it's always eye-opening.

You know, when I had these conversations with you, you kind of reach a part of me.

wake me up and shake me and make me realize that our nation is going to continue to evolve, be it in the right way or in the wrong way, it's going to evolve.

It's never going to stay the way that it was.

And so you and I both see this thing as always, what about the grandchildren?

What about the great grandchildren, right?

You know our time we've been able to overcome a lot of these things.

We've been fortunate baby boomers, but man This this battle has to take place and be waged in one for those who are coming after us Absolutely.

All right.

That's none other than my good friend Sandy Williams.

That's a wrap for what's going on with their lingering.

See you later