Oh Fred Fred Fred

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Oh, Fred, Fred, Fred … It starts with getting those calls returned from Dan Quayle’s office and it leads to this.

Fred Barnes has a new piece out in the most recent Weekly Standard on the dust-up down in Texas. (I can’t link because it’s subscribers only.) He tells readers that Democrats have no legitimate complaint since: “There’s a word for what Republicans want to do–gerrymandering. But of course that is quite normal. When Democrats controlled Texas, they regularly gerrymandered …” The rest of Barnes’ article is devoted to pushing the argument that Democrats — shrieking in a wilderness of public disapprobation — are devoted to “extreme measures that break sharply with the routine course of politics and governing … order of the day.”

Now there is one detail in this saga that Barnes somehow forgot to mention: mid-decade redistricting — absent a voting rights lawsuit — has been virtually unprecedented for the last century and entirely unprecedented since the mid-1950s, in Texas and every other state in the union. You might even call the bar on such gerrymanderly double-dipping part of the “routine course of politics and governing.”

Fred, let’s not give tendentiousness a bad name, okay?

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