Reedy Creek replacement board says it's relegated to "maintaining roads and infrastructure"

“This essentially makes Disney the government,” board member Ron Peri said. “This board loses, for practical purposes, the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintaining the roads and maintaining basic infrastructure.”

Well no ****, that's all the district was ever supposed to do!

I'm wondering when someone is going to follow the money and relationships between DeSantis and these law firms that are spending all kinds of public dollars on things that are never going to fly beyond scoring base points for DeStupid. The lawyers are the same ones that tried to beat down the cruise lines' vaccine and testing requirements, which they obviously lost.

I can not believe no one figured this out until now, especially with the public meetings. To quote a famous Disney character:

Impressive, Most Impressive.

Now it’s the Governors board that has to go to court and Disney maintains the status quo for the foreseeable future while the battle rages in court, and it’s going to take so long the 2024 Presidential Election Season will come and go.

This is a good story to bookmark when I tell people why politics are stupid

Because there really is no serious interest in providing a better service to the people it’s meant to serve.

I love the part about the will of the voters. The "voters" are Disney. Literally no other voters are stakeholders here.

I can't find any precedent, but I don't imagine the courts would care about a change in government officials relative to agreements set by the jurisdiction. And also, yes, that the Disney blogger idiots completely missed this demonstrates how non-serious they are about understanding grown-up things.

Jeff it wasn’t just the Disney bloggers, it was also the Governors office and legislature that dunked the passage of their takeover bill. No wonder Disney came out the day after and announced they will happily work within the new framework.

Meatball Ron strikes again!

That's less surprising. They aren't interested in outcomes, only headlines. The entire MAGA movement is about outrage, not results. Look at the Kentucky anti-trans law passed today. There's no universe where that withstands court challenges. Doesn't matter, looks like they're doing something to the base. Keep going after books and drag shows while guns actually kill children.

The MAGA shtick may play in the primaries but it doesn't in general elections. Don't believe me? Georgia has two Democratic Senators.

There was a NYT article about Michigan politics today where some DNC party official said the same thing. It gives me some hope, not that I want the nation to go all Democrat necessarily, but more that the MAGA faction is relegated to obscurity. I'm not saying that I like the policy of old-school Republicans, but it was still more palatable than the outright hate and bigotry perpetrated by the wackos. Being an ideologue is one thing, but being an ideologue whose beliefs are rooted in hate is not OK.

Touchdown:

No wonder Disney came out the day after and announced they will happily work within the new framework.

Disney played the Matador to DeSantis' Bull.

Olé!

The Michigan thing has been brewing for a while now, and the playbook might be replicable to a handful of other states, but it is probably not general enough to apply everywhere.

It starts by observing that the state had a window where statewide elections were pretty reliably D, but the legislature was locked up by Rs through very effective gerrymandering. A few cycles ago, a constitutional amendment that created a non-partisan redistricting commission was put up for a vote, and passed. That was done early enough to put in new maps after the 2020 Census re-apportionment. That took the power of drawing State House, State Senate, and US Congressional district lines out of GOP control. The resulting maps are pretty close to "fair" in that the composition of each of those three bodies is now a lot closer to the underlying statewide vote than it had been before.

This probably doesn't work if one party (a) wins statewide elections (b) controls the body that manages redistricting. In that scenario, it's probably a tougher sell to make redistricting non-partisan, though I happen to think it's a good idea.

I imagine one of these idiot board members angrily screaming into a phone, "You told me this was about the gays, Ron! When do we get to the gays???"

Brian Noble:

This probably doesn't work...

I've been kind of wondering about that. After the popular vote of two straight presidential elections landing squarely in favor of Democrats, does the system over-compensate for the minority? I can't think of any other way that the bizarre authoritarian nationalism rises to such prominence. But also, shame on the minority party for embracing that stuff. I've said it before, but being an ideologue about policy that overlooks institutional discrimination realism is one thing, but embracing it and doubling down on it is something else.

The data clearly demonstrates that there's a Republican bias throughout federal elections. The Electoral College had a 3.5 point GOP bias in the last election - Trump would have prevailed over Biden had Biden won the national popular vote by < 3.2 percentage points.

By now, Democrats’ disadvantage in the Electoral College is well-documented. President Joe Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points, yet he won Wisconsin — the state that gave him his decisive 270th electoral vote — by only 0.6 points. In other words, Biden needed to beat former President Donald Trump nationally by more than 3.8 points in order to win the White House outright. (However, Trump wouldn’t have won outright unless Biden had won the popular vote by fewer than 3.2 points, thus losing Pennsylvania as well. The Electoral College’s Republican bias in 2020 thus averaged out to 3.5 points — but either way, it’s the most out of sync the Electoral College has been with the popular vote since 1948.)

And of course the bias is more extreme in the Senate, because not only was it designed to represent smaller, less populous states as equal to larger, more populous states, there's also since been an urban shift of the population, resulting in the Senate representing a minority of (white, rural) voters, giving Republicans a 5 point advantage.

...despite Biden winning the national popular vote by 4.5 points, Trump won the median Senate seat by 0.5 points. That 5.0-point Republican lean makes the Senate the most biased institution in the federal government.

Because they recognize that demographic shifts mean they are increasingly unlikely to gain office according to the popularity of their policies (because their policies are largely and increasingly unpopular - see Roe vs Wade), the Republican party has weaponized the Senate imbalance to shape the Nation's courts according to this minority rule.

...the current minority party, Republicans, has so far been incredibly successful at appointing judges to the federal courts: From 2017 to 2021, more than 220 judges, including three Supreme Court justices, were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a Senate that a majority of voters didn’t choose.

The House bias is less extreme, giving Republicans only a 2.1 point bias, but that's still enough to allow them minority rule in some cases. And as Brian notes with regard to Michigan, this has allowed Republicans to gerrymander to their heart's content.

...the clustering of Democratic votes in urban areas has made it harder to draw maps that benefit Democrats rather than Republicans. But another reason is engineered by Republicans themselves. The GOP has taken full advantage of its many opportunities to draw boundaries that give them an unfair advantage. For instance, after the red wave election of 2010, Republicans drew more than five times as many congressional districts as Democrats, and they used it to push their structural advantage in the House to record levels.

And as Jeff mentioned, it's one thing to use this bias to push unpopular legislation. But quite another to use it to enable violent authoritarian white nationalism, which Republicans have fully embraced.

It will be interesting if the Ds in Wisconsin try to follow Michigan's lead. The gerrymandering there makes Michigan's previous attempts look positively tame. I suspect anyone thinking about it would like to see a slightly larger popular vote advantage before trying it---and I'm not even sure Wisconsin has a similar mechanism for amending their constitution.

The current election for their State Supreme Court will be worth a watch.

https://www.nytimes.com/202...ction.html

Getting back to the topic at hand, this comment (which I cannot find the source for) wins the Internet today:

"The new board members were popping the champagne bottles only to find out they're filled with Beverly."

Brian the first step to getting that to happen in WI occurs this coming Tuesday.

"You think you're hot **** in a champagne glass, but you're really cold diarrhea in a Dixie cup!" - The Monarch, Venture Bros.

djDaemon:

And of course the bias is more extreme in the Senate, because not only was it designed to represent smaller, less populous states as equal to larger, more populous states, there's also since been an urban shift of the population, resulting in the Senate representing a minority of (white, rural) voters, giving Republicans a 5 point advantage.

Not to mention the filibuster. Even with a narrow majority you can't get anything done outside of budget items.