So, the ballad of Texas’ Democratic legislators is moving into a new verse.
And, like most ballads, it’s been completely predictable.
Our heroes, having apparently believed that the villains of the piece are done simply because the first act is over, have returned to Texas only to be immediately set upon and imprisoned by the usurper’s forces. So, fleeing to prevent the obvious next step of the gerrymander being immediately passed in another special session is not going to happen.
It’s actually quite Shakespearean, in that both the heroes and villains are total idiots who appear to have no object-permanence at all.
Seriously, nothing in this story would have surprised anyone 500 years ago.
Hell, it wouldn’t have surprised anyone 1,000 years ago. Or 5,000 years ago.
Epic stories of the fall of great civilizations always seem to center around complete idiots.
As I pointed out when this started:
It’ll be hard, since they can’t trust a Republican promise not to raise the issue again if the Democrats return; they’ll have to stay out of the state indefinitely, since the Governor has made it clear that he’ll take this as far as it needs to go to get his way.
Well, they did not stay out of the state indefinitely and now their part of the story comes to an ignominious end.
And the story will leave them behind and move on to the Democrats of California.
And other states’ Democrats too, but California seems to be getting all the attention.
Newsom is currently trying to get a special election scheduled to pass a one-time gerrymander that would probably shift 4 or 5 seats to the Democrats. This would probably not be enough to actually achieve anything useful even if the Democrats could be trusted to actually try to achieve anything useful.
So, consistent with the norms of an epic narrative we have the purported heroes waffling around.
I’ve always hated the waffling around phase of the “hero’s journey” stories.
It all just seems pointless.
Especially since the Democrats are such a poor excuse for heroes.
To be honest, if I thought the Democrats were the actual heroes of the story, if I thought they would use the power properly rather than simply as an opportunity to pursue their personal and party interests, I’d support all the Democratic states saying “fuck it” and just appointing 100% non-Republican congressional representatives rather than bothering with the fig leaf of making new gerrymanders.
Seriously, just collect a bunch of trustworthy non-Democrats, get them to publicly promise that they’ll vote “no” on anything other than immediately holding a Constitutional Convention and just appoint them to Congress.
Because frankly this has already gone far enough that holding onto the forms of the United States doesn’t seem particularly meaningful.
And it’d be nice to see a great civilization avoid the whole “collapse” part.
