Just over a year ago, your faithful columnist pointed out that the unveiling of 2020 census data was about to unleash a geyser of partisan political manipulation. I predicted that gerrymandering, a process “fraught with corruption, hypocrisy and Machiavellian intrigue,” would only add fuel to the toxic spiral of extremism that characterizes this era.

That admittedly obvious prediction has come true in spades. If anything, I underestimated the enthusiasm state legislatures (from both tribes) would bring to the practice of tilting the playing field to favor their team.

Ultimately all the voting maps born of these partisan impulses are challenged in State and Federal courts. But rather than playing their intended role of neutral arbiters, many of those courts have increasingly rendered partisan verdicts – further reinforcing the populist perception that the judiciary is simply a different style of cage match between red judges and blue judges.

Gerrymandering disenfranchises voters by replacing natural geographic and community affiliations with maps tortured to produce specific imbalances. Those calibrated imbalances increase the number of legislative districts that are “safe” for the party in control of the mapmaking.

As a result, the primary election effectively becomes the only choice voters get; the general election is a foregone conclusion. Ultimately, this fuels extremism, as incumbents can only be unseated by more radical primary challengers from the right or left.

Multiply this effect by hundreds of races and amplify it with the algorithmic radicalism unleashed by social media and you have the ingredients for unrelenting polarization.

Because of this toxic formulation, political discourse today is overwhelmingly national in nature; geography, so core in the Founders’ conception of a bicameral Congress, has been all but eliminated from the equation.

Gerrymandering is a way for politicians to choose their voters instead of enticing voters to choose them. Another way of choosing your voters is to manipulate who can vote.

In addition to infecting countless millions, COVID-19 spawned a pandemic of tinkering with voter eligibility. In many states the first wave of manipulation loosened the criteria for voter registration, vote-bymail eligibility and early/late voting deadlines.

All of this was couched in a shroud of epidemiological practicality. But regardless of their public health benefits, the initial wave of voting access reforms was beneficial to Democrats, who apparently were more comfortable with mail-in and early voting, the major reforms of the period.

In a two-party political system, every pendulum swing generates the energy for an opposing stroke. Even before the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies declared war on the expansion of voting access. Lacking a principled reason to oppose increased enfranchisement and convenience, they opted to conflate easy access with the potential for voting fraud.

Trump’s anxiety about growing enfranchisement was justified. Voter participation surged in 2020, contributing to Biden’s historic accumulation of 81 million votes. Of course, Trump’s demagoguery, vulgarian nature, and endless partisan trolling surely played a role in swelling turnout as well.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act made Jim Crow-style voter suppression illegal. Those who wanted to keep the “wrong” people from voting had to resort to piecemeal tactics. Most of the time those attacks played at the margins and were not enough to qualify as sweeping disenfranchisement.

After 2020 legislatures in Republican-leaning states unleashed a second wave of manipulation that sought to restrict who can vote, when, where, and how. Blue activists see all these changes as voter suppression. Many of them, like Texas’ blatant new voting law, fit that label. Others are better understood as restoring the procedures used prior to Covid.

In a Washington Post article, Paul Waldman wrote that recent voting changes by Republican state legislatures represent an immoral brand of disenfranchisement, fueled by “an extended attack on voting rights by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a new GOP consensus that rejects the idea of universal participation, sees only Republican electoral wins as legitimate, and justifies almost any tactic to defeat liberalism.”

A historical axiom states that “all politics is local,” but in the past decade even elections for school boards and the county clerk have been dominated by national culture war issues. Curiously, the revenant practice of “earmarking” Federal budget appropriations may be the start of a countervailing trend.

Stuffed inside the $1.5 trillion spending bill Congress enacted in March were nearly 5,000 legislative earmarks totaling over $9 billion. Earmarks went extinct back in 2011, when congressional rule changes eliminated their use.

Earmarks amend appropriations bills, directing spending to a specific project or beneficiary. By inserting them, members of Congress can circumvent the budget authority of the agencies that would normally have jurisdiction over those funds.

The term earmark is a colloquialism from the livestock industry, where animals grazing on public land had their ears marked to signify ownership. The terms “pork” and “pork barrel” have similar origins.

Proponents of reviving earmarks claim that they increase congressional interest in legislating and increase bipartisanship by providing incentives for vote-trading.

Under the congressional rules passed by Democrats for this session, earmarks have been rebranded as “community project funding” and are capped at 1 percent of the total amount of spending being appropriated. Requests must be posted publicly online, with a letter explaining the need for the project. Each lawmaker also must sign a form attesting that they had no personal or family connection to it.

While their ultimate impact on bipartisanship remains to be seen, over $600 million of the earmarks in this budget had bipartisan sponsors according to data from the New York Times. Separately, Democrats secured over $5 billion for their states compared with $3.4 billion for Republicans.

Colorado’s congressional delegation is effectively split on earmarks. Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper sponsored $120M and $101M of earmarks respectively in this budget. GOP Representatives Buck, Boebert, and Lamborn sponsored none. Buck and Boebert have signed a pledge to abstain from using earmarks. Democratic Representatives Crow, Neguse, Perlmutter, and Degette did not sponsor any in this bill, but each successfully inserted roughly $20 million of earmarks into the Invest in America infrastructure bill passed in 2021.