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Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast. As we mentioned in last week's episode, this is a pre-recorded episode, kind of a new thing for us.

Our co-host, my co-host, Kate Riga, is on vacation. So last week's episode is the last, you know, not we don't do them live, but, you know, kind of where we're recording them on the same day they're released. We're talking about the news of the day.

We thought we would do one evergreen episode for you, one that is not tightly focused on the news of the day, but on some, you know, kind of major, major question that comes up again and again in the political news. So we're going to do that today.

And as I said, Kate is on a, on a way for two weeks on vacation. So probably as I, we are broadcasting to you from the past. So as, as you listen, Kate is, you know, she's probably on an icebreaker in the Arctic, right, in her, in her adventure vacation.

But in any case, what we're going to talk about today is something that it's been in the news recently, but the sort of the broader issue that informs it is has kind of interwoven itself into political news, just a huge amount over the last couple years, especially.

But really going back 10, 15 years and that is what we're going to, we're going to sort of open this with is you know that, I don't know, a few weeks ago, God is probably more than a few weeks ago now.

You had these, they attempted to expel three members of the Tennessee State House. They did actually expel two members, two young African American men. I believe it was one from Memphis, one from Nashville.

So we know about that. And now both of them, I guess, are now back in the state legislature because they were initially reappointed by like, you know, the county council or something like that in their district. And I think they're now starting, you know, there's now campaigns now to, you know, to formally reelect them.

So there's that you may have also seen just the last couple weeks there, the Montana State House expelled a trans woman named Zoe Zephyr. I guess they didn't expel her. What did they, they basically, she could no longer have speaking privileges. Basically, so, okay, so it's not an expulsion, but kind of, right, if you take away one member's right to rise to speak.

This was because she had, they were debating a bill about trans rights. And she basically said, you know, this body is going to have blood on its hands, citing the evidence that teens who trans teens who are not able to get therapeutic support, whether that, you know, the range of that are have higher rates of suicide.

So that was the, that was the trigger of it, but they did this there. And together, these are, it's part of this trend we have seen in, you know, highly jerrymandered, very Republican-dominated state houses and, you know, state senate's too.

To basically just say, if you minority, and in this case, I mean numerical minority, Democrats, if you guys don't get along with us, we'll just kick you out or take away your right to talk.

And there are other things, this topic goes out in so many directions. Obviously, for you to be able to do that, you need to have, you basically have to have a super majority in that body.

Because in very few, I don't know, the rules in every single state, but in almost every state, you need a super majority to do that, to boot someone out, to do these kind of draconian punishments that Zoe's ever had in Montana.

But this gets back to another issue that we have talked about a lot, and that is extreme jerrymandering.

Now, extreme jerrymandering is something that is almost always easier to do if your base of support is in the exerbs and rural areas.

And there's, we've talked about this before. There's just, you know, you don't have the urban concentration of liberal voters and stuff like that.

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