When did declining to do something openly corrupt become a profile in courage?
Indiana Republicans on Tuesday refused to advance the president’s mid-decade gerrymander — which is to say, a handful of state senators in Indianapolis chose not to redraw their Congressional map for the second time in five years in order to engineer two more safe seats for a coalition that already controls the chamber. They said no. The morning shows called it a rebellion. Politico called it a rupture. A man on a podcast my brother listens to called it Indiana’s Bull Moose moment, which is the kind of thing one says about Indiana when one has never been there.
At Eliza’s on Wednesday — she’d done short ribs, the kind that fall apart if you look at them sideways — a man I will describe only as a bipartisan lobbyist called the vote “encouraging.” He said this while studying his cufflink, as if the cufflink were also encouraged.
Encouraging. The bar, as of Wednesday evening, in Georgetown, over a Barolo nobody could pronounce, was four state senators declining to do the kind of thing we used to call — and I will be old-fashioned here — cheating. Four. In one chamber. Of one state. After a phone call from the White House, a flight from the vice president, and a press release from a man whose business cards, within living memory, read “consultant.”
My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent thirty-one years at the National Archives and has views on what does and does not constitute precedent, asked whether anyone at the table had actually read the proposed map. No one had. We had read tweets about the map. We had read a thread, by a person whose handle was a number, summarizing a thread by a person whose handle was a different number.
The lobbyist said it was “the system working.” Judy said the system, in her professional experience, tended to work the way an old furnace works — loud, intermittent, and only because someone was downstairs hitting it with a wrench.
The story, of course, is what happens next. A second vote. A primary threat. A friendly call from a donor whose name appears on a wing of something. The four senators who said no on Tuesday will be reintroduced, on a Thursday in February, to a version of the question that has been tenderized. They will discover, as legislators tend to discover, that they had misunderstood the question the first time.
I am told this is what spine looks like now. A handful of state legislators in a state the president carried by nineteen points declining — for one week, pending further pressure — to commit a procedural offense against their own voters. We are grading on a curve a high-school teacher would be fired for handing out.
The lobbyist said the holdouts would “come around.” He said this the way one says the dishwasher will come around. Confidently. Without looking at it.
Eliza changed the subject to a piece in The Atlantic that nobody had finished. Judy poured another glass and said, very quietly, that the maps in the Archives were drawn in ink, and the ones being drawn now were drawn in pencil, and that this was the part she found, professionally, the most discouraging.
The short ribs were extraordinary. We asked for the recipe. Nobody asked what happens in February.