Second Helping with Grace & Katelyn - Legislating Genetics & Gerrymandering

Frogmore Stew - Second Helping with Katelyn Brewer - 2

Grace: 00:00:00

We have gotten a lot of feedback from last week's episode. Some people have asked all about the bill. Some people have asked more about the surgery. Some people have asked just basically about care. And I think that we did our job, right? People are talking about it. Exactly. I wanted to follow up, re-listen to all of the hearings and what I really feel strongly about is that there, there is not one issue on this planet that is 100%.

And that is why when you make laws, you have to make them based on the best thing for most, but particularly most of the people that you are directly affecting. So how is it that our legislators feel like they know better than the actual parent going through this situation? And that is really the piece. With this bill that they're looking parents in the eye and saying, I know better than you do what is best for your kid.

Katelyn: 00:01:09

Yeah, I don't think any parent wants to be told that.

Rep. McCravy: 00:01:11

We have a representative John McCravey to review the bill with us today. Um, you know, there are a few things we do as legislators that are more important than protecting vulnerable children.

One of those important legislative protections That has come to pass is to protect minors from so called gender transition procedures. What this bill does, the first thing it does is protect minors from the use of hormone drugs known as puberty blockers. Growing evidence shows that puberty blockers are not safe and result in irreversible physical, not to mention emotional damage. The FDA has warned that this carries a risk of a rare condition called pseudotumor cerebri.

Rep. Moore: 00:02:04

You're putting out a lot of stats. There's one, some, some clarification. You, you use the language not safe. Can you repeat the thing about the FDA as it relates to brain damage?

Rep. McCravy: 00:02:15

Yes, uh, the FDA has warned that these drugs, the puberty blockers, uh, carry a risk of causing, uh, that pseudotumor cerebri that I mentioned, uh, that has, uh, that's a severe disease. Uh, it's something that, that nobody wants.

Grace: 00:02:35

There was one thing that McCravey said that really sounded scary. It was called pseudotumor cerebri.

This is from the FDA. It said that there were six cases identified that supported a plausible association and they were ages 5 to 12. Five were undergoing treatment for central precocious puberty and one for transgender care. The onset of pseudotumor cerebri symptoms ranged from 3 to 240 days after they started taking the meds.

And symptoms included visual disturbances, headache, vomiting, blood pressure increase. At the time of the FDA's review, symptoms had resolved in three patients, were resolving in one patient, had not resolved in one patient, and one patient's status was unknown. Out of all of the kids in the U. S. that are undergoing, um, any type of puberty blockers or treatments, that there are six kids that this has happened to, it, it wasn't even really that much of an effect on them.

It just goes to show when people use the language of fear to take something that you don't understand and make you think, oh my gosh, as soon as they do this, they're at risk of dying. That just isn't the fact. Katelyn, like, how do you feel about this?

Katelyn: 00:04:02

I think about all the other medications that we take on a daily basis.

How many thousands of women across the country are taking birth control every single day? And the list of side effects from birth control are enormous. Blood clots alone. You shoot a blood clot and that's your tickets. And so for me, I think, every medication has side effects, and this isn't really about the side effects, uh, particularly when you talk about statistics as low as that. What this is about is a moral issue, and we need to be honest about why we're having that conversation.

Grace: 00:04:36

We will never run out of things to talk about, Kaitlin. Our legislature is just so fascinating. Whatchya got Katelyn?

Katelyn: 00:04:44

For those who haven't had a chance to listen to your podcast on Wednesday, a quick definition of gerrymandering is that it's the political manipulation of the electorate district boundaries with intent to create undue advantage for a party, for race, a socioeconomic class within that constituency. The basic rule of the game is that there are four ways that you can design a gerrymander. Cracking is basically the dilution of voting power, so the opposing party really can't gain traction. Packing is when you concentrate the opposing party's voting power into one district. Hijacking redraws the two districts so you force two incumbents to run against each other, basically eliminating one of them. That just happened in North Charleston. The city council, there was a huge redistricting debate and definitely gerrymandered for sure, but there was a lot of pushback. It's a great example of how paying attention to local politics is deeply important.

And then the fourth is kidnapping. Which literally means that you move the incumbent politician's home address into another district. And so reelection becomes incredibly difficult because the incumbent no longer resides in the district that they are currently representing.

Grace: 00:06:02

I think that sometimes they redraw the district so that if the incumbent wants to move to a different neighborhood but wants to stay that representative, they redraw the district so that person's neighborhood is still in the district.

Katelyn: 00:06:18

Nothing like writing a job for yourself, right?

Grace: 00:06:21

Seriously! There probably are a lot of different things that people would like to redraw their district for.

Katelyn: 00:06:26

Although, I, maybe we should just apply remote work to politicians just as much as we have to ourselves at post 2020.

Grace: 00:06:34

Yes, for sure. Get back to work. Okay. We talked a little bit about the history and how it started. If you listen to Wednesday's podcast, you'll get the, the quick backdrop on Elbridge Gerry and why he did that. But he did it in 1812 when you were looking at a map with a protractor. How much worse has it gotten, Kaitlin?

Katelyn: 00:06:56

You don't have to look too far into recent history to see the dramatic change. If one name in particular rings the bell, and that is Thomas Hofeller, who took gerrymandering to a whole different level and was hired repeatedly by the National Republican Party to help redraw lines across the country.

Vox Reporter: 00:07:18

Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters.

decade. When Hofeller died in: 2018

And if you want to understand why gerrymandering is such a big problem in the U. S., that's a good place to start. These new districts help Republicans get a stranglehold on power in the North Carolina State House. And over the next few years, they were able to pass crucial legislation. A strict new voter ID law in North Carolina.

can use in North Carolina. In: 2016

And the first big test for these new maps would be the 2018 election. Democrats were expected to turn out in droves. Democrats are vying for a potential blue wave. The wave that Republicans fear is going to wipe them out. So, how do the maps do? For state representatives, Democrats got 51 percent of the vote.

seats. A year later in: 2019

Grace: 00:09:13

One thing that I found very interesting is that this really started in state legislatures. It's been going on forever, but it was really hyper focused on after President Obama won. And the Republican Party did something called Operation Red Map. They decided the way that they would be able to keep control from Obama was to win the U. S. House and the U. S. Senate. And they needed state legislatures to be able to change the districts, and you change the districts every year that ends in zero through the census. They just went all in and they went after all sorts of small seats and put tons of money into those districts. And then they all gerrymandered their districts. They won in 2012, if you recall, they took over the house.

Katelyn: 00:10:10

And they've now rewritten this and done this for the better part of a decade and a half, installing state level legislatures that are conservative and Republican leaning. Even if the majority of the popular vote in those states tends to be Democrat.

Grace: 00:10:29

Yeah. And that's where cracking and packing comes in, right? You can split it up so that where the Democrats are moving, you can completely rip those districts apart. And it's becoming rural versus city, so they're splitting up the cities and then adding in the rural. Let's look at some of our districts in South Carolina.

Katelyn: 00:10:51

So in South Carolina, really what came under contention in the last census and redistricting were districts one and six. Federal districts.

Grace: 00:11:00

Yes. Because our state districts have already been pretty well gerrymandered.

Katelyn: 00:11:08

The two districts under contention in the case that we as South Carolinians most recently saw go all the way up to the Supreme Court, District 1 stretches from Charleston basically to the Georgia - South Carolina border along the coast and included parts of Berkeley and Dorchester County.

as well. And so based on the: 2020

So this goes back to what you were just saying, Grace, about rural versus city. We saw quite a bit of a migration prior to COVID. And I think Midlands has been struggling. In January of 2022, those maps were accepted by the governor. And shortly thereafter, the NAACP sued the state, claiming that this map was racially gerrymandered to dilute the black vote.

This is important to remember, this black vote racial component. This is why, specifically, it makes it to the Supreme Court.

Grace: 00:12:22

We talked extensively to Mac Deford earlier this season about that because he is running in the primary against Michael Moore. They're both running to be the Dem that runs against Nancy Mays for District 1, and one of the the main questions for this racial gerrymander is when you look at the Democrat numbers for South Carolina, 60 percent of the registered Democrats are people of color.

How do you decipher whether that was a racial gerrymander or whether that was a partisan gerrymander? It is legal to do a partisan gerrymander, but it is illegal to do a racial gerrymander. You're having to decide the intent of the mapmakers. Our state, in fighting this, has said, we had all good intentions.

We were doing this completely through partisanship.

Katelyn: 00:13:17

We have a lot of smart legislators who know how to get their goals accomplished, and they can, knowing full well that partisan gerrymandering is not illegal because the Supreme Court ruled that it should be left to the states, and racial gerrymandering is, there are lots of people who are going to be able to word things appropriately and create lines that don't look racially gerrymandered in order to use partisan gerrymandering as a proxy and a shield for race gerrymandering, and that leaves the court struggling to find the difference in these cases between race and politics.

Grace: 00:13:54

So the difference in this too, uh, since the Voting Rights Act was undone in so many ways, is that pre-1965, if you were a disenfranchised Black voter, you had to prove that you were being disenfranchised. And what the 1965 Voting Rights Act did was flip that on its head and make it so that if you were of a state who had previously been keeping voters from voting, you then had to prove that your legislation was not racist.

By undoing it, now that's unleashed all of these questions of gerrymandering, there's almost no way to prove that the intent to racially gerrymander was there.

Katelyn: 00:14:37

And we're seeing long-held beliefs around race being undone by the Supreme Court.

Grace: 00:14:45

I think that the Supreme Court is saying they do not believe that the racial barriers exist any longer.

There's a great quote that I did at the end of Peace on Voting Rights Act by Ketanji Jackson. I'm paraphrasing, but just because the law doesn't say that racism doesn't exist, that doesn't equate to real life. So, one question I'm curious about is, we are a red state.

We do have more voters that vote Republican than voters that vote consistently Democrat. Why would they need to gerrymander the districts?

Katelyn: 00:15:23

The reason why is because they don't then have to worry about whether or not they are bringing out the moderate vote. When you listen to Pundits talk all over every 24 hour news station, the main focus is the moderate votes. There are a number of individuals who do vote Democrat who are moderate in South Carolina. Even that's not how we brand ourselves. And so the more you gerrymander, the less you have to campaign, the less you have to listen to your voters.

And quite frankly, back to Thomas Hofeller, his vision truly was that politicians pick their voters, don't pick their politicians. And I think that's why you gerrymander.

Grace: 00:16:06

Our state house currently has 88 Republicans and 36 Democrats. And yet in our national election, yes, we are a red state, but we are not a supermajority red state. The difference out of two and a half million voters in our last presidential election was 300,000 people. And then our state Senate is 30 to 16. So the House is considered a supermajority. The state Senate is very close. But for our federal districts, we have seven total House districts, and only one of them is a Democrat. And so how does gerrymandering affect the voting outcome?

Katelyn: 00:16:48

Unfortunately, voters don't feel like their acute needs are heard.

Grace: 00:16:52

That lowers the number of people that actually vote. For example, like in 2022, 35 percent of black voters voted and 51 percent of white voters voted.

That seems really low. Are we really a red state or are we just a state that not everyone is voting?

Katelyn: 00:17:12

Bing. Yes, we might be a red state, but as you pointed out, we are not as red as the House would allude to having two thirds majority, super majority of Republicans. And this goes back to American philosophy about voting.

It's not held on a weekend. We don't give the day off to go voting. Until the last 10 years, people had to take time off from their job to go vote or weren't paid. We're just not automatically registered to vote in our country. And my question back to you is, what do you see in the primaries?

Grace: 00:17:46

To give you some examples, in 2022, out of the 124 state house races, 46 did not have Democrats running for a seat.

That's a third of the races, and that was the case because those districts are unwinnable.

Katelyn: 00:18:04

If you're a constituent in a district where there is no opposition, what compels you to go out and vote? What compels you to say, my vote matters? There's nobody running.

They're running unopposed. All they need is one vote.

Grace: 00:18:16

And so then what happens if you are running in a solidly red district, then the primary becomes your actual race. There are four people say running against each other and they know that people voting in the primary are about 10 percent of the district.

I think each of our house districts, for example, has about 46,000 people. So you're really only marketing yourself in the beginning to 4,600 people. Those are the most passionate, the most extreme, the most vocal people. And so that's who you're trying to get to vote for you for that primary. So you and the three other people you're running against have to outdo each other in the crazy. And then we wind up with these politicians that are bonkers, that are so far extreme that in the general, we're all conditioned to vote straight party ticket because now we're all in these very far left and far right like spaces of I can only vote for Democrats because otherwise the world will end and the same thing happens on the Republican side.

We've been conditioned by the media to hear that over and over. If you vote for this person, the entire world is going to end. We go into the voting booth and we really haven't even paid attention to the candidate and you don't care how far radical or right they are. You just stay on your team.

Katelyn: 00:19:40

One example of that on the Democratic side here in South Carolina is the Deion Tedder district. We knew once that primary was over that Deion was basically going to win the Senate seat. And we have not trained voters. To think about the primary in the way that we think about the general election. But you're right. The real contest is moving to the primaries.

Grace: 00:20:04

The final point we should make here is the Republican Senate draws the districts and they don't have to really get approval from anyone, right?

But in other states, they have independent nonpartisan redistricting committees. The districts wind up being more fair and then every vote counts. In order to do that in South Carolina, for us to get that, how do we get a referendum? South Carolina is one of 24 states that does not have initiative and referendum. So what does that mean? That means the initiative process that allows citizens to collect the signatures to place a new statute or constitutional amendment on the ballot. That's part of it. And the second part, the referendum process, which is also called a veto referendum or a citizen's veto, allows citizens to collect signatures to ask voters whether to uphold or appeal an enacted law. But guess what? We do not have that. I feel like we are not an extreme state. We just really aren't. And I know we're not. It's hard to believe that people hear that and they're like, no, you're deep red, you're deep South, but we really are not.

We are a moderate state and right now the effects of gerrymandering have taken over our House and Senate. What I think needs to happen is over the next seven years before the next census, we need to pay very close attention on the primaries. Everyone needs to vote in the primaries to ensure that we put moderate minded people into our state legislature.

Katelyn: 00:21:42

In theory, that's very clear and understandable roadmap. The reality is that relies on behavior change with the electorate.

Being a behavior change professional, I know how hard and quite frankly how expensive behavior change campaigns are. The Democratic Party, who in this state would be the party to push for changes in the drawing of redistricting, because right now it's working in favor for the Republicans, would have to have infrastructure and funding that, quite frankly, the Democratic Party just doesn't have here in South Carolina.

So how do we get this done?

Grace: 00:22:21

Always goes back to bipartisanship, right? I think that the moderate Republicans are just as frustrated with what they're seeing in our state. You have to vote in the state primary in June. All of these federal offices affect us in a variety of different ways, but the people that affect you directly in the most specific ways are the people that run your state.

And I would argue that most of the moderate Republicans in this state would say, yeah, there are some things that we're doing that are ridiculous. I could name five of them right now from what our state treasurer is doing to what our school boards are doing.

I would argue that there is an exhausted majority of people that just want the state to function properly. I want my kids to be well educated. I want the government to stay out of my business, and I want my taxes to go for things that are efficient. I think all of those things are the things that most people in this state would agree on.

And yet, we have bills in our house right now that are taking us to places that many of us are very uncomfortable with, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. And I think our democracy depends on our ability to both criticize our government and to believe that we can legitimately elect a different set of leaders to advance different policies.

If we lose that concept of opposition, then we've lost everything. We've actually lost democracy. Right now, we are rapidly reeling toward that place.

Katelyn: 00:24:01

It is a sobering thought, but it is 100 percent accurate.

Grace: 00:24:06

On that note, I am going to say we should wrap this up, but I have something, my thought of the week that is actually a clip that has been sent around over and over by many of my liberal leaning friends. It is of Dean Phillips, who is a Democrat. He's a US House member. He is running against Joe Biden on the Democrat primary ticket. He went on CNN. And he made some comments that people are flipping out about. He said that he had a meeting that was about to start, but he looked across the street and he went to a Donald Trump rally and he had never been to one.

And he saw a line of people waiting out in the cold for hours. And he was like, I want to go talk to these people. And so he walked over and he was like, I want to be the kind of leader who invites everyone and doesn't condemn them. And he said he met about 50 Trump people waiting in line and every single one of them were thoughtful, hospitable, friendly, and all of them were so frustrated that they felt no one was listening to them except for Donald Trump.

So the thing that's been so controversial today on Twitter, on TikTok, on Instagram, one of the things he said in the CNN interview was, my party is completely delusional.

Katelyn: 00:25:28

Oh! Oh! He said the thing out loud.

Grace: 00:25:33

He said the thing out loud. We live in a state where we have a lot of Trump voters. I live my every day around Trump people. I have many in my life, but that's not the first thing that I learned about them when I met them. To his point, last night I was at an event. And I've just met this woman, and it was an event in support of a non profit and she was a lovely woman. We'd had maybe three seconds of introduction and one of the very first things that she said to me was, we moved here because of the schools.

And I was like, oh, you moved here, where are your kids in high school? And she said, we moved here during COVID because we lived in Virginia and we were in that whole Loudoun County where they wouldn't reopen the schools. And so we moved here because we knew the schools were open. And then she followed it up with, we are very conservative.

And she wanted me to know that. I guess because that to her is a really important part of her identity. And what I realized was that in that moment, I consider myself center left, is listening to somebody say, I'm really conservative, this is the most important part of who I am that you should know.

I think the people that are super conservative or moderately conservative or even just considered center right that are in my life, I've, I knew way more things about them before I knew what their politics were. I really don't care what your politics are. If you and I have a connection on a level about something that we're both doing, we both ride bikes, we both play tennis, whatever, that's our connection.

I don't need to know what you think about abortion for us to be friends. And that's what Dean Phillips, I think, was trying to prove in this interview is that we have to stop making our politics the central piece of who we are. Had we talked about 15 other things before she told me she was conservative, we would have made connections on probably 10 of them.

We both have kids in high school. She works in nonprofit. We have all these things in common, but I didn't find that out really until after she told me that she was conservative. I just think that's what he was saying, and I applaud him for saying it. I think we all need to hear more of that.

Katelyn: 00:27:50

I have so many reactions to that story. Generally, although I've lived all over the world, from New England, which quite honestly, is back when I grew up, I voted for Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, moderate Republicans. And I probably would have registered Republican if I felt like the party sat in that space nationally. So like you, I consider myself a left leaning moderate and I'm registered as a Democrat.

I do think that moving from New England to the South, it made me a better American. Now, does that mean that my opinions have changed? Actually, probably not, they're the opposite. I was never really an LGBTQ advocate until I moved to the South because my identity was never really in question in New England.

I think your point about being able to have a conversation, I'm not just gay. I'm also a professional and a sister and I speak French and all these other things that I can connect to someone on regardless of whether they are conservative and believe that my marriage is legitimate and people listening to that might have a really visceral reaction.

How can you speak to someone who doesn't think your marriage is legitimate? I think that having conversation is how things change. And the more we stick our heads in the sand and avoid people who don't agree with us, thank you, social media, the worse things are going to get. And so while it's tough, and it does take a lot of emotional energy for me to live in a state where I'm constantly thinking about who I am.

I still believe what you said, which is there are amazing people in South Carolina who are very moderate and do not believe in the 24 hour news cycle of fear that is being placed upon us. And because of that, I have called South Carolina home and I love living here.

Grace: 00:29:52

And frankly, that's exactly why we started this podcast. Correct. Because I look forward to having guests on this podcast that have a variety of opinions and views that may differ from our core listeners or may differ from you or me. I think that the conversation is always important, but I do think that the takeaway for me last night was that we have to stop identifying specifically as one thing or the other because no one is 100 percent one thing or the other. And so Dean Phillips, I applaud you. Katelyn, any more for today's second helping of Frogmore stew?

Katelyn: 00:30:35

I just wanted to quickly comment on New Hampshire's primary, if only because my sister lives in New Hampshire. Still. And she went to vote in the primary and Biden wasn't on the ballot.

And I thought that was absolutely hysterical. He won anyway. So clearly his brand is working. Everybody knows he's president. But the Democratic Party decided not to participate in the primary because South Carolina is supposed to be the first Democratic primary happening February 3rd, and the Democratic Party has made a big push.

Second gentleman's been here, President Biden was here once, we'll be coming again at the end of the month. VP Harris has been here many times, Jamie Harrison has come back. There, there has been some serious power. So, I just thought it was quite cute that New Hampshire held their primary anyway. It's very much the brand of New Hampshire.

There are about 15 candidates on the Democratic ballot. And my sister texted me and just said, I don't even know who to vote for. What do I do?

Grace: 00:31:38

Did she write Biden in?

Katelyn: 00:31:40

No, she voted for somebody else. And I gotta be honest, I have never heard of the person. They're a little bit younger. And she just felt, even though she knows Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, she thought, why not vote for somebody who I actually agree with on more things?

Grace: 00:31:56

I'd be so curious to hear from their Democratic party officials in New Hampshire, how pissed they are right now at Jim Clyburn, because he's who got Biden to do that.

Katelyn: 00:32:07

Without a doubt.

Grace: 00:32:10

And more power to Jim Clyburn.

Katelyn: 00:32:12

And listen, South Carolina has to be the first in something. If it's the Democratic primary, then I'm here for it.

Grace: 00:32:19

We're number one. We're number one.