[TV static drones]
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[cheers and applause]
- Welcome, welcome, welcome to "Last Week Tonight."
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Just time for a quick recap of the week,
and it has been frantically busy.
The Senate triggered the nuclear option
to put Neil Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court
and, therefore, a lobster onto our all-dog court.
Devin Nunes recused himself
from the House investigation of Trump's Russia Ties
after he himself came under an ethics investigation.
A classic Devin move.
And of course, on Thursday,
there was the biggest news of all.
- We are coming on the air right now
because President Trump has just ordered
a military strike on Syria.
- On President Trump's orders, U.S. warships
launched between 50 and 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles
targeting a Syrian government air base.
- Yes, a Syrian airfield this week
was bombed by President Trump,
two words that when placed in a sentence like that
are as downright unsettling as ham smoothie
or placenta kimono.
And before we get into what we did and why we did it,
it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge
some of the reactions to the airstrikes themselves,
particularly within the media,
which occasionally bordered on the orgasmic.
- We see these beautiful pictures at night
from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels
in the Eastern Mediterranean.
I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen,
"I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons."
And they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.
- What are you talking about?
It's a little ironic
to see Brian Williams on MSNBC talking about
"the beauty of our weapons,"
because that is not a phrase anyone would use
if they had, for instance, ever been in a helicopter
that was hit by ground fire.
And he wasn't even done talking
about whatever the fuck he was talking about.
- Because life imitates art,
there's a scene in "The American President"
where Michael Douglas, playing the fictional president,
is being told that an airstrike against a radar installation
is proportional and it's presidential,
and he chooses to think about the guy
who's coming on the night shift
as part of a cleaning crew
and how he's gonna lose his life
in this presidential airstrike.
Well, the same thing happened tonight, obviously.
- No, it didn't.
Because first, this is not a song.
It's not a movie.
We fired real missiles at an actual country.
And also, there is nothing obvious
about Trump expressing concern for another human being.
I am pretty sure the only time
he's ever thought about a cleaning crew has been to say,
"There's a fingerprint on this vase.
Don't pay them this week."
But it wasn't just the media who were excited.
Some of Trump's biggest critics had praise for the strikes,
with John McCain and Lindsey Graham saying
Trump deserves the support of the American people,
and Chuck Schumer saying it was the right thing to do.
While interestingly,
some of Trump's most prominent supporters
were significantly less happy,
including Alex Jones,
who even tried to weave a conspiracy around it.
- So paradoxically, Trump is really disintegrating,
in my eyes, on many levels.
But paradoxically, he's doing so much good
that I realize they're maneuvering him into bad
so they won't call him a Russian agent,
so he can look tough to the Russians,
so he can look tough to the Chinese,
and so he can shut down his critics.
But once you feed the pirate,
they're going to want more, more, more.
- Wait.
"Once you feed the pirate, they're gonna want more"?
Not only is all of that crazy, that is not even a phrase.
Oh, I'm against these strikes, 'cause you know what they say,
"If you want to skin a ferret,
you better bring your dancin' shoes."
And I mean it!
"Once you start washing an alligator, paradoxically,
you don't stop till it's dry."
But there are some serious questions
that need to be answered regarding these airstrikes,
which were in retaliation
against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's
apparent use of chemical weapons to target his own people,
which is undeniably horrific.
But as many have noted,
when Assad did the same thing four years ago,
Trump's response was significantly different.
- The attack also a startling about-face for President Trump,
who has repeatedly argued against
military intervention in Syria.
- Why do we care? Let ISIS and Syria fight.
And let Russia-- they're in Syria already.
- Mm-hmm. - Let them fight ISIS.
- Tweeting repeatedly after the last major chemical attack
in Syria four years ago
that the United States should stay out of the conflict.
- Is there anything Trump is doing now
where he didn't at one point tweet about doing the opposite?
I honestly would not be surprised
if in 2011 he tweeted,
"Only a stupid idiot would live in a big white house
"and sign bills into law.
#SAD."
Now, administration officials have said
that it was the gruesome images
of the chemical weapons attack that changed Trump's mind,
which, on one level, is absolutely understandable.
The images were truly horrifying.
Just as, again, they were four years ago.
But while it is natural
to want to take some kind of action in response,
it has to come in the context of a larger strategy,
or it's close to worthless.
Because though the strikes seem to have made
certain people feel better, what did they actually achieve?
- Does this change the facts on the ground at all, Martha?
- I don't think it really does.
I mean, this wasn't a strategic strike
and hurting Assad going forward.
It's this one airfield.
It is a punishing air strike.
It took out aircraft.
They took out fuel supplies.
They took out some of the surrounding infrastructure.
But he has many other airfields.
- It's true.
In fact, he apparently still has the one we bombed,
because Syrian warplanes were carrying out attacks from it
just hours after our missile strike.
And that is hardly a crippling blow.
Delta passengers experience longer flight delays
on a daily basis.
Look, maybe a symbolic airstrike
was strategically the best move for Trump,
but I don't think he's thinking strategically.
Because there is no indication that he's taken the time
to answer some fairly basic questions.
Like if this was a warning shot,
what are we warning against?
Do we only want to stop Assad using chemical weapons
or are we going to push for regime change?
If he does it again,
are we prepared to go to war to stop him?
If so, are we prepared for how significantly
this may deteriorate our relationship with Russia?
And how will that affect our fight against ISIS?
This is complicated.
And I am not saying there are right answers here.
I'm saying there needs to be a tangible strategy
acknowledging how difficult taking on Assad actually is.
Because right now we have a president
who feeds off praise,
and he just got a lot of it for bombing someone,
and that should make everyone very, very worried.
Or to put this in terms that Brian Williams can understand.
There's a scene in the movie "American Pie"
where the character Jim,
played by Jason Biggs, has sex with a pie
because he wants to feel like a big strong grownup man.
Well, the concern is
that if we blindly let him continue down this path,
Donald Trump could become that horny teenager,
and the whole world could become that pie.
So for now, let's move on--
[cheers and applause] let's move on to Fox News,
a series of Cialis and catheter commercials
occasionally interrupted by an episode of "The Five."
Fox News has been rocked
by sexual harassment scandals recently,
and this week brought one of the most damaging yet.
- This morning, new revelations
about sexual harassment claims
at Fox News aimed at the network's biggest star.
"The New York Times" finding Fox News and Bill O'Reilly
paid five women a total of almost $13 million
in settlements going back 15 years.
- Yes, Bill O'Reilly, who scientists hypothesize
is kind of a dense nebula of boner and racism,
has been paying out settlements
for alleged harassment for years,
and the details are pretty disturbing here,
with the victims claiming things like verbal abuse,
lewd comments, unwanted advances
and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O'Reilly
was masturbating.
And I hate to ask this, but what does that sound like?
Does it sound like a dog's jowls flapping
when it sticks its head out of the window of a moving car?
Or someone frantically stirring a bowl of cake batter?
Or was it more a subtle "tap, tap, tap"
like a mouse giving a round of applause?
I mean, either way, it's horrible.
And look, it's not just those five women.
Dr. Wendy Walsh, an occasional guest on O'Reilly's show,
came forward this week, claiming he took her to dinner,
ostensibly to offer her career advice,
but when she declined to come back to his room,
his tone noticeably changed.
- He told me, he complained about the--
I had ordered a soda water,
and he complained about the cost of the soda water and said,
"I wonder what they're charging for a cup of water here."
He told me my bag was ugly.
He goes, "That's the ugliest bag I've ever seen.
- Okay, okay, hold on.
She's saying when he got rejected,
he started negging her
by complaining about the price of seltzer
and then criticizing her fashion choices.
Apparently, in Bill O'Reilly's mind,
every woman wants to fuck her own mother.
Now--now it is--
it is hard for us, any of us, to imagine what it must be like
to be on the receiving end of dirty talk from Bill O'Reilly,
but it's not, as it turns out, impossible.
Because in 1998 he wrote a book called "Those Who Trespass,"
featuring numerous sex scenes,
and he narrated his own audiobook.
And yes, we're doing this.
Here's a sample.
Hot.
That--that is a man
describing a woman's orgasm
who has clearly never seen a woman's orgasm.
And just on technical note,
you can't knead skin with your tongue, Bill.
You've confused making love
with making a rustic sourdough bread.
But wait, wait, 'cause we haven't even got
to the most stomach-churning part yet.
I am willing to bet that there has never been
a fictional character more happy to not actually exist
than Ashley Van Buren.
And yet--and yet, so far,
Fox News is firmly standing by their man
and is citing some pretty weak reasoning.
- Fox's parent company points out,
"No current or former Fox News employee
"ever took advantage of the 21st century Fox hotline
to raise a concern about Bill O'Reilly."
- So their defense is, he can't be guilty,
because no one called H.R. to complain.
But why would they?
I've always assumed that Fox News's H.R. department
is just a telephone in an empty room
being manned by a horny goat.
Now--now, O'Reilly denies the claims,
accusing these women of just wanting money,
but Wendy Walsh isn't even asking for money.
She just thinks everyone could learn
a valuable lesson from this.
- All men need to learn that a workplace
is not a mating marketplace.
And Bill O'Reilly, like the rest of us,
needs to just use Tinder.
- No, no, he absolutely does not need to do that.
That would be terrible for literally everyone,
except Bumble,
because they would have a rock-solid new ad campaign.
That's going to hit hard and hit well.
And look, whether O'Reilly is learning his lesson here or not,
his advertisers are not hanging around to find out.
- We have seen dozens of advertisers--
our latest count is around 60 advertisers--
go ahead and say we're not gonna run our ads
on "The O'Reilly Factor" anymore.
- Well, that is not good for Bill O'Reilly,
and I would that say he should call
his advertisers to apologize,
but the problem is, he might just start jerking off
while they're on the phone.
Tap, tap, tap.
Almost nobody is standing by Bill O'Reilly.
Nobody, that is,
apart from the President of the United States.
- I think he's a person I know well.
- Yeah.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
- Nobody gets to be surprised by that,
because it is entirely plausible that the hill
our president is willing to die on
is the one formed by Bill O'Reilly's workplace erection
poking up against his old-man slacks.
So to recap this story for you.
Bill O'Reilly needs advertisers,
and Donald Trump needs to understand sexual harassment.
And here is where we come in.
Because as you may remember,
our Catheter Cowboy has spent this year
appearing in ads on Fox News,
explaining everything from the nuclear triad
to the American Health Care Act.
And I think you know where this is going.
We have produced an ad to educate Donald Trump,
to air during the "O'Reilly Factor" in New York and D.C.
We submitted it to stations on Friday
but weirdly we haven't heard back from them since,
which is a little surprising,
because we're one of the only advertisers offering to buy time
on his show at the moment.
And I do hope they don't reject this ad,
but just in case they do, here's a sneak peek
of what we would like the president to see.
- Howdy again. I am a professional cowboy.
I use catheters, and there's two things I know.
I don't like pain when I cath,
and repeated unwanted sexual advances or obscene remarks
in the workplace constitute sexual harassment.
If there is a power disparity between the two parties,
well, that's about as inappropriate
as lubricating a catheter with hot sauce, partner.
Why would you do that?
I don't like pain when I cath.
And if you've got a friend who was accused
of something like that over and over again,
I might think twice about defending him.
'Cause that contributes to a culture
where women don't want to come forward,
and I know you might not care about that.
But on some level, you've got to know you are blowing this.
You're sacrificing the chance to make society a better place
on the altar of your towering ignorance and fragile ego.
You are blowing this.
That's all for now.
Good-bye, everyone watching this,
and definitely not one specific person.
See you next time.
[cheers and applause]
- Moving on.
Our main story tonight concerns democracy.
Undeniably, the best Greek export
that doesn't have fruit at the bottom.
Now, there is understandable concern at the moment
about the personalities harming our democracy,
but tonight, let's talk about
one of the major structural problems.
And it's something Democrats in particular
love to complain about.
- We have seen Republicans
rig the system with their gerrymandering,
often illegal gerrymandering.
- There is gerrymandering to a fare-thee-well in states
controlled by the Republicans.
- Listen, political gerrymandering is probably
one of the greatest threats to our democracy right now.
- Well, slow down. That is a bit much.
The greatest threat to our democracy right now is clearly
whatever tweet the president has planned
for Cinco de Mayo this year.
We don't know what it'll be.
We don't know which Spanish words will be misspelled,
but we can assume it will be horrifying.
But gerrymandering is a real problem.
It's the practice of drawing voting districts in a way
that creates unfair advantages
for whoever happens to be drawing the lines.
Which it does sound mundane,
but the results can be significant.
Gerrymandering is partly responsible for giving
Republicans such an edge in the House of Representatives.
Because take a look at what happened in some states
where they drew the district lines.
- In Pennsylvania, 44% of the voters
chose democratic candidates
for the House of Representatives in 2014.
But 13 of the 18 districts, more than two-thirds,
are represented by Republicans.
In Ohio, about 40% of the voters chose Democratic candidates
for the House of Representatives.
But 12 out of 16 seats, three-quarters of them,
are represented by Republicans.
- Those numbers are way out of proportion
to what people should expect.
You wouldn't accept Neapolitan ice cream
that was 75% strawberry.
How is that okay?
What perverts voted for this?
So whoever draws the districts has a lot of power.
And thanks to technological advances,
it's possible to use that power in very precise ways.
- In the age of computers,
you can gerrymander with scientific precision.
You can run in and out of alleys and up and down streets,
so carefully include and exclude whichever voters you want
in one district and not in another,
so it's become a very precise science.
- He's right about that.
Gerrymandering has become a very precise science.
And interestingly,
it's one of the few remaining types of science
in which the Republican party currently believes.
Now--now, there are different reasons
politicians engage in gerrymandering.
It's done to disadvantage voters
based on race or on political party
or to shore up seats for incumbents,
sometimes even within a party.
Take Hakeem Jeffries.
In 2000, he ran a strong challenge
in a Democratic primary for the New York State Assembly.
And he planned to run again in 2002,
but the Democrats had done something interesting
to the map.
- The map that was drawn was absolutely fascinating.
They drew a map that literally carved out the block
on which Hakeem Jeffries lived from Assembly District 57.
- I remember shaking my head in disbelief.
There were a lot of people hoping to vote for me
but were surprised to find
that they no longer lived in the assembly district
that they had been living in for years,
if not decades.
Brooklyn politics can be pretty rough,
but that move was gangster.
- Yeah, it was gangster.
And remember, the threshold for "gangster" in Brooklyn
is the Notorious B.I.G., whose debut album
begins with songs that are, respectively,
about armed robbery, gun violence,
armed robbery and gun violence,
and being prepared to die by gun violence
while committing armed robbery.
And this is by no means a new problem.
Even the term "gerrymandering" goes back centuries.
- It gets its name from a 19th-century politician
named Elbridge Gerry.
As governor of Massachusetts,
he helped shape a congressional district
so blatantly one-sided
that one critic said it looked like a salamander.
No, another replied, a gerrymander.
- Now, that counted as a joke in 1810,
back when your entertainment options
were sunsets, Washington Irving novels,
and getting kicked by a horse.
And quick side note, you're not wrong to notice
that the "Gerry" in "gerrymander" refers to a guy
whose name was actually pronounced "Gary,"
because literally everything about gerrymandering
is stupid and wrong.
And look, there's nothing inherently wrong
with re-drawing a voting district.
It's actually necessary.
They need to have around the same number of people in them,
and populations shift over time, as people move or die
or emigrate to America because their stand-up careers
have endured what might be best characterized
as a "pogrom of indifference."
And that is why, every ten years, we have a census,
after which, lines are re-drawn for both
the U.S. House and state legislatures.
The problem is, in most states,
the lines are drawn by politicians.
In fact, in 37 states,
the drawing of state legislative districts
is primarily controlled by the legislators themselves,
and they have a pretty clear vested interest there.
And if you think that seems crazy, you're not alone.
- Every fall, I speak to five or six members
of the British Parliament that come over
to shadow members of congress,
and one of the things I have to explain to them is,
"Here's how you get elected to the House."
I have, you know--
I see these shocked looks on these British faces,
and one time, one stood up and said,
"Well, that's terrible!
"That's not the voters choosing their representatives.
That's the representatives choosing their voters."
- First, that's racist.
And--
And second--second,
even I find it difficult
hearing advice on map-drawing
in a British accent that once said,
"I don't see why one scrap of dust
"is any different from another.
"So I ended the border here,
"because that's where my pen ran out of ink.
"They'll learn to like it.
What's the worst that can happen?"
But it is true that if your party
holds the redistricting pen,
it wields substantial power,
and there are multiple techniques at its disposal.
- There are a couple of ways
that you can reapportion people
and put them into districts,
and there's a thing called packing,
and there's a thing called cracking.
- Yes, "packing and cracking."
Not to be confused with the teen drug trend
of "cracking and packing,"
which is when the teens hollow out a cucumber,
fill it with crack,
and put in their anus to absorb it faster.
I saw it on the local news, which means it's real,
and every teenager is doing it right now.
But in this context,
"packing" means cramming as many opposition voters
as possible into just a few districts.
And "cracking" means spreading them out thinly
over a bunch of districts,
so they can't gain a majority in any one of them.
Either way, it dilutes their impact.
Try and think of it as table assignments at a wedding.
You can either break up your eight awful relatives
and spread them out over different tables,
or you can pack them all together
in one insufferable table of the damned.
"The Washington Post" showed how this can work.
Look at this hypothetical state.
It's 60% blue voters, 40% red,
and it needs to be carved up into five districts.
Now, proportionally,
you would want three blue and two red districts,
but if you draw the lines like this,
you can get three red majorities and two blues.
And if you draw it like this,
you could get five blue majorities and no red.
And if you draw lines like this, it looks like a dick,
which is irrelevant to this discussion,
but it is objectively very funny.
And--and if you are thinking,
"Shouldn't all of this be illegal?"
Well, that's complicated.
Because if you're gerrymandering to disadvantage minorities,
yes, that is illegal under the Voting Rights Act.
But if you're gerrymandering to disadvantage voters
of an opposing party, that has generally been allowed.
So racial gerrymandering?
No.
Partisan gerrymandering?
That's kind of okay.
And it's led politicians to be pretty brazen
in their behavior.
Like in North Carolina last year.
Their congressional map was thrown out
in federal court for racial gerrymandering,
which is wrong.
So they had to redraw.
And while doing it,
State Rep David Lewis went out of his way
to explain that the new map
would not illegally fuck over minorities.
It would just legally fuck over democrats.
- We want to make clear that we,
to the extent are going to use political data
in drawing this map,
it is to gain partisan advantage on the map.
I want that criteria to be clearly stated and understood.
- "I need you to understand this is not a race thing,
"because it can't be.
"We just want a map that churns out Republicans
"like it's Ann Romney.
"That is all we're saying.
"That is all we are saying here.
Please let me understand."
And that map worked.
In 2016, despite Republicans winning
just over half the votes in House races,
they wound up controlling 77% of the state's seats.
That is a more blatant disregard for what people want
than the asshole who gives out Bazooka Joe on Halloween.
Oh, great.
Gum from the Roosevelt administration
wrapped in a comic
from the other Roosevelt administration.
At least the guy handing out
Snickers stuffed with razor blades
actually gives you a Snickers.
And Republicans elevated this technique to an art form
with a plan called REDMAP,
or the Redistricting Majority Project.
They poured more than $30 million
into state-level races ahead of the last redistricting,
gaining huge numbers of seats,
and that paid massive dividends.
- When Republicans won the majority
of state houses in 2010,
it ensured they'd be redrawing the maps in those states.
And lo and behold, it paid off in 2012.
Nationwide, Democrats running for congress
got 1.1 million more votes,
but Republicans sent 33 more members to the house.
- Exactly.
So the maps they drew
put Democrats at a significant disadvantage.
It's like if instead of Tim Duncan,
the San Antonio Spurs had had to use Tim Burton.
It's not technically impossible to win,
but it's going to be much, much harder.
And look, to some extent, Republicans got lucky,
because 2010 was a wave election for their party,
and I'm not saying Democrats are angels here.
By no means.
When they have had control,
they've gerrymandered the shit out of districts
in states like Maryland,
and they've been pretty brazen too.
Take Illinois.
In 2001, the Democrats won the right
to redistrict there after, and this is for reasons
too complicated and too stupid to explain,
a name was pulled out of a replica
of Abe Lincoln's stovepipe hat,
but--but just watch as one Democratic lawmaker
made the least convincing promise ever.
- Well, we'll sit down and draw a very fair map.
- Come on.
Come on!
That's an inherently suspicious look on his face.
That's the exact expression of someone who just urinated
in a public pool.
"Water's warm today, huh?
Enjoy your swim."
So how do you know if your district
has been drawn with nefarious intent?
Well, that's tricky.
Because too often, people will just
lazily point to districts that have a weird shape.
- North Carolina's 12th district
looks like spilled coffee.
Pennsylvania's 16th is flexing its muscles.
And one commentator compared Maryland's 3rd
to a broken-winged pterodactyl.
And then there's this.
They call it the earmuffs.
- Ah, yes, an earmuff district,
not to be confused with "the" earmuff district,
which is a one-block area of Manhattan where sketchy men
sell accessories made from the fur of endangered species.
You should go. You should visit.
But while it is tempting to see
something suspicious in an odd-shaped district,
there is a pretty good argument
against prioritizing tidy lines above all else.
- Dropping a bunch of squares seems fair.
It seems like if you could just draw a grid like "Tron"
that you could put people into districts
and there wouldn't be any sort of manipulation in the process.
But Americans don't live, with the exception of Montana
and, you know, a few other square places,
Americans don't live in squares.
Our communities are irregular and random.
- Yeah, that's true.
American communities are not square.
They're like jazz music.
They're free-form, free-flowing,
and they contain a troubling amount of opioids.
And there's no one right way to draw a district.
Reasonable people will disagree.
Some might prioritize a district being politically competitive.
Others might favor compactness.
Others want to keep so-called
"communities of interest" together.
The problem is, it may be physically impossible to do
all three of those things in one place.
In fact, take that earmuff district.
The thin line connecting the two halves is just a single road,
and people love to make fun of that.
- In Chicago, squeezed between two freeways,
this narrow strip is needed to connect
two halves of a gerrymandered district
to keep it contiguous as is required.
This is the way congress gets around the contiguous rule
because there's obviously nobody living here.
I mean, unless they're homeless people, I guess.
Anybody here?
Any congressional voters out there?
- Now you may laugh, but a few seconds later,
an entire ghost baseball team from the early 1900s
walked out of the tall grass
and beat him to death with their ghost bats.
And he kind of deserved it.
But--but here is the thing, though.
It is drawn like earmuffs for good reasons.
Because the northern and southern parts
are two Latino communities,
and the district in the middle
is predominantly African-American.
Both are Democratic, so it's not about partisan advantage.
It's about ensuring that both communities
have representatives servicing their interests.
And it's criticized a lot,
but redistricting experts absolutely love it.
In fact, two of them actually put it on their wedding cake.
That is a real wedding cake.
And I'm guessing that the bachelorette party cake
was something like,
"One more night of packing and cracking!"
So--so to break it down,
not all weird-shaped districts are bad,
and not all normal-shaped districts are good.
And there is one more thing.
Gerrymandering is not the sole reason
for the mismatch between our popular vote percentages
and our representation.
Some of that is due to where Democrats choose to live.
- Democrats live in the wrong places basically.
They've decided to cram themselves in cities
and that just makes it really hard to have a winning coalition
when your people do that.
If you are college-educated,
if you want to work in the creative economy,
you move to a city,
and those places have enough Democrats already.
Democrats need to make places like Des Moines or Columbus
or Raleigh, North Carolina, cool so that those young people
move there, but that's kind of outside
of the typical realm of political strategy.
- Wait.
What do you mean "make" Des Moines cool?
They've already got the Des Moines Heritage Carousel,
the most badass, balls-to-the-wall carousel
in the whole Midwest.
And yes, according to their website,
it is closed for the season of spring,
which is not a good time for carousels,
but when May 28 rolls around,
it's gonna be an all-out carousel fuckstravaganza!
Until 8:00 P.M.
But it is true, Democrats are basically
packing themselves into districts,
and that is not likely to change anytime soon.
But there is a broader, non-partisan point here,
and that is that in a democracy,
the question of who gets to draw the map
should not have as much significance
as it currently does.
Now, there's actually a Supreme Court case coming up
involving a redistricting in Wisconsin
that was so partisan, a lower court struck their maps down,
and the Supreme Court may, for the first time,
actually issue a clear ruling
putting limits on partisan gerrymandering.
So all our hopes are now in the delicious claws
of Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But even without a ruling, many experts argue
we should simply be taking redistricting
out of the hands of politicians
and give the task to independent commissions,
and that's a pretty good idea.
In fact, a handful of states already do some version of that.
And it's not perfect.
It is tough to completely remove partisan biases,
a fact that one state lawmaker brought up
to shoot the idea down.
- If I felt there were any way in the world
that I could stand before my constituents and say,
"I believe that it's possible
"to come up with a group of people
"who have no political bias whatsoever
"who will simply sit down in a room
and magically create districts,"
I'd be behind it.
I'd be behind it 100%.
But those people don't exist.
- Now if you recognize that guy,
it's because you saw him about ten minutes ago,
reassuring everyone that his intent in drawing districts
was to gain partisan advantage for Republicans.
So he's essentially arguing "nobody's unbiased,
"so let's use me,
the most brazenly biased man in the universe,"
which is pretty much arguing,
"No babysitter's perfect, so let's just use Slenderman."
But while independent commissions
might not be perfect,
they would definitely be better.
And the truth is, it's hard to come up with a worse system
than the one most states currently have,
and there is something very important at stake here.
Lawmakers should not be allowed to dilute our votes
by drawing their own lines
and essentially picking their own voters.
And you know-- you know what?
I will tell you why.
The foundations of democracy are built on the idea
that everybody's vote should count equally.
Everybody's.
That is what America is all about.
That everyone--every one of us should get an equal chance
to make a bad decision
which fucks things up for everybody else.
Whoever we are,
however poor our decisions,
whether you are a Juggalo.
- Whoop whoop! - Stop it.
Or a 47-year-old Quidditch player.
- It's a sport!
- Or someone who bought that stupid $6,000 jacket
I wore on the show last week.
It's horrible.
Our voices should be fully heard
even if we're Scientologists or Parrotheads
or guys who ride unicycles
as their primary mode of transportation.
In this one context, we should all be relevant
regardless of our questionable life choices.
Whether you're an EDM bro... - Yeah.
- ...or a guy jamming a knife into a toaster
or a Washington Redskins fan... - Whoo!
- ...or even a Jill Stein supporter.
- She would've won! - How would she have won?
What process could she have used to--
The point is, her voice should count
as much as anyone else's.
As much as a guy in a fedora
or a baker of erotic pastries
or a SantaCon attendee
or everyone's racist grandma.
Don't say anything.
Because at the end of the day,
that is the point of this country.
That's what made America great.
Because think about it. [cheers and applause]
Election results should not be the fault
of lawmakers' crazy lines.
They should be the result of our own crazy decisions.
Am I right? [all cheering]
That's our show.
Thank you so much for watching.
We'll see you next week.
Good night.
She could not have won.