Kansas Crimson

Feral wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 10:08 am Words fail me to describe the lengths "small government", "conservative", "law and order", "constitutionalist" republicans will go to in order to obtain and hold on to power. This is a fascinating story of how the cynical years-long republican effort to deny and discourage American citizens their right to vote was further revealed, in large part, by accident.

I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

tia

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.





But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

...Mr. Hofeller was survived by a daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, from whom he had been estranged since 2014. In an interview, Ms. Hofeller said she learned of her father’s death by accident after searching for his name on the internet, and returned to her parents’ retirement home in Raleigh, N.C., to see her mother, Kathleen Hofeller.

Sorting through Mr. Hofeller’s personal effects, looking for items she had asked her father to save for her, Stephanie Hofeller came across a clear plastic bag holding four external hard drives and 18 thumb drives, backups of data on Mr. Hofeller’s Toshiba laptop. Her mother gave Ms. Hofeller the backups, which turned out to hold some 75,000 files — family photographs and other personal data, but also a huge trove of documents related to Mr. Hofeller’s work as a Republican consultant.

...Ms. Hofeller said her decision to open her father’s files to his opponents was a bid for transparency, devoid of personal or political animus. Although she believed he was undermining American democracy, she said, their estrangement stemmed not from partisan differences, but a family dispute that ended up in court. Ms. Hofeller described herself as a political progressive who despises Republican partisanship, but also has scant respect for Democrats.

Her father, she said, was a brilliant cartographer who was deeply committed to traditional conservative principles like free will and limited government. As a child, she said, she was schooled in those same principles, but every successive gerrymandered map he created only solidified her conviction that he had abandoned them in a quest to entrench his party in permanent control.

“He had me with the idea that we are made to be free,” she said. “And then he lost me.”

dolomite wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 1:25 pm

Feral wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 10:08 am Words fail me to describe the lengths "small government", "conservative", "law and order", "constitutionalist" republicans will go to in order to obtain and hold on to power. This is a fascinating story of how the cynical years-long republican effort to deny and discourage American citizens their right to vote was further revealed, in large part, by accident.

I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

tia

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.





But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

...Mr. Hofeller was survived by a daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, from whom he had been estranged since 2014. In an interview, Ms. Hofeller said she learned of her father’s death by accident after searching for his name on the internet, and returned to her parents’ retirement home in Raleigh, N.C., to see her mother, Kathleen Hofeller.

Sorting through Mr. Hofeller’s personal effects, looking for items she had asked her father to save for her, Stephanie Hofeller came across a clear plastic bag holding four external hard drives and 18 thumb drives, backups of data on Mr. Hofeller’s Toshiba laptop. Her mother gave Ms. Hofeller the backups, which turned out to hold some 75,000 files — family photographs and other personal data, but also a huge trove of documents related to Mr. Hofeller’s work as a Republican consultant.

...Ms. Hofeller said her decision to open her father’s files to his opponents was a bid for transparency, devoid of personal or political animus. Although she believed he was undermining American democracy, she said, their estrangement stemmed not from partisan differences, but a family dispute that ended up in court. Ms. Hofeller described herself as a political progressive who despises Republican partisanship, but also has scant respect for Democrats.

Her father, she said, was a brilliant cartographer who was deeply committed to traditional conservative principles like free will and limited government. As a child, she said, she was schooled in those same principles, but every successive gerrymandered map he created only solidified her conviction that he had abandoned them in a quest to entrench his party in permanent control.

“He had me with the idea that we are made to be free,” she said. “And then he lost me.”

I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

Racist!

jeepinjayhawk wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 1:30 pm

dolomite wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 1:25 pm

Feral wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 10:08 am Words fail me to describe the lengths "small government", "conservative", "law and order", "constitutionalist" republicans will go to in order to obtain and hold on to power. This is a fascinating story of how the cynical years-long republican effort to deny and discourage American citizens their right to vote was further revealed, in large part, by accident.

I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

tia

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.





But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

...Mr. Hofeller was survived by a daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, from whom he had been estranged since 2014. In an interview, Ms. Hofeller said she learned of her father’s death by accident after searching for his name on the internet, and returned to her parents’ retirement home in Raleigh, N.C., to see her mother, Kathleen Hofeller.

Sorting through Mr. Hofeller’s personal effects, looking for items she had asked her father to save for her, Stephanie Hofeller came across a clear plastic bag holding four external hard drives and 18 thumb drives, backups of data on Mr. Hofeller’s Toshiba laptop. Her mother gave Ms. Hofeller the backups, which turned out to hold some 75,000 files — family photographs and other personal data, but also a huge trove of documents related to Mr. Hofeller’s work as a Republican consultant.

...Ms. Hofeller said her decision to open her father’s files to his opponents was a bid for transparency, devoid of personal or political animus. Although she believed he was undermining American democracy, she said, their estrangement stemmed not from partisan differences, but a family dispute that ended up in court. Ms. Hofeller described herself as a political progressive who despises Republican partisanship, but also has scant respect for Democrats.

Her father, she said, was a brilliant cartographer who was deeply committed to traditional conservative principles like free will and limited government. As a child, she said, she was schooled in those same principles, but every successive gerrymandered map he created only solidified her conviction that he had abandoned them in a quest to entrench his party in permanent control.

“He had me with the idea that we are made to be free,” she said. “And then he lost me.”

I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

Racist!

So, you like it when DC lies to you?

dolomite wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 1:31 pm

jeepinjayhawk wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 1:30 pm

dolomite wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 1:25 pm


I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

Racist!

So, you like it when DC lies to you?

WTF?

dolomite wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 1:25 pm I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

Racist!

feral wrote:...I'd be surprised if DC doesn't monitor this forum on an at least occasional basis... If you're watching, DC, would you do us a solid and repeat your previous assurances that republicans have not and are not conducting a nationwide campaign to suppress the votes of people of color?

tia

Feral wrote: ↑Thu Jun 06, 2019 9:44 pm https://twitter.com/dmataconis/status/1 ... 4331387906