The same right-wing media ecosystem that has faceplanted on the pandemic.

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where the boys have finally made it through the wall.

Can we now all agree that voting for your local school board is important? Because local school boards have begun to lose their minds. For example, down in Tennessee, the McMinn County school board has become nationally famous this week for banning Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel, Maus. The minutes of the school board meeting leaked and, boy howdy, they are something else entirely. From the New York Times:

During the McMinn County board’s discussion of “Maus,” multiple board members discussed redacting profanity or said they did not object to teaching the history of the Holocaust. One of the board members, Mike Cochran, said he objected to the language and depiction of nudity. “We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history,” he said, according to the minutes. “We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history. We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

It is truly impressive, in a dark and stormy way, how the Right’s media octopus can gin up a national controversy over absolutely nothing. This whole thing began with an attack on the teaching of critical race theory in elementary and secondary schools, where it is not taught at all and never has been. Since then, the book-banners have run amok:

In Virginia, the Spotsylvania County School Board voted unanimously last year to have books with “sexually explicit” material removed from school library shelves. In York County, Pa., teachers and students protested against and overturned a ban on a selection of books told from the perspective of gay, Black and Latino children. And Republican lawmakers in Texas have pushed to reframe history lessons and play down references to slavery and anti-Mexican discrimination.

In Indiana, the yahoos in the state House of Representatives are taking a second try at pushing through a bill that would micromanage classroom discussion to a preposterous extent. The first one crashed and burned when its primary author opined that all political discussion in class should be scrupulously neutral, even a discussion of Nazism, on which history has rendered a fairly decisive verdict.

In Louisiana, the state House of Representatives passed a bill mandating that the Holocaust and World War II be taught in the public schools—take that, Indiana—but balked at an amendment that would have mandated instruction in important moments in Black history. This is a deadly combination for public education: parents plus legislators, both groups now subject to the whims of a media industrial complex that can’t even get it right on a worldwide pandemic.

Let us return to Tennessee for this week’s very special episode of Adventures in Gerrymandering, in which the Tennessee legislature has managed to leave the city of Nashville without a member of Congress to call its own, occasioning Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper’s retirement. From the Tennessean:

Cooper announced his decision Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after legislative Republicans voted in the House to approve the plan to divide Davidson County into three congressional districts. The Republican supermajority's plan sailed through committees and a Senate vote earlier this month…

Through the redistricting process, Cooper pleaded with planners to keep Davidson County whole, calling a plan to split the booming area "pure folly…The simplest rule is if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it," Cooper said earlier this month. "We’re clearly one of the most successful cities in the whole nation. Why mess with that formula of success?” Days later, Republicans in the Tennessee General Assembly revealed an aggressive plan to crack the county, parceling pieces of Cooper's 5th Congressional District into majority white, historically Republican 6th and 7th districts.

Remember that Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Rucho, said that what was clearly happening was not happening and that, even if it were happening, the courts had no place in devising a solution to it. Such a shame, but that’s the way it goes.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Our Man in the Bahamas, Friedman of the Plains, sends us the tale of how government works, but not for long. From OKPolicy.org:

The latest report on Oklahoma’s budget transparency showed that during the 2021 Legislative Session, Oklahoma lawmakers unveiled the Fiscal Year 2022 budget (for the year starting July 1, 2021) in mid-May during the last weeks of session. This provided Oklahomans — and even many legislators — only three days between the public unveiling of the $7.7 billion budget and Gov. Stitt’s approval three days later. OK Policy found that the average state deliberated about their budget for 82 days. The three days Oklahoma used for budget deliberations was the nation’s third shortest such timeframe last year, behind only Utah and Nevada at two days and one day, respectively.

In Massachusetts, we generally need the jaws of life to pry our legislators out of the State House every spring, so this form of quik-stop bill-passing is unfamiliar to me. Are there chips and snacks near the cashier? Lotto tickets?

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.