Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Boy, do local Democrats despise her.
That’s U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, R-Oakland, of course. She of the inflexible and strident conservative outlook who represents a portion of Champaign County in addition to a slew of others.
The local Democrats don’t dislike her as much as they do President Donald Trump. But their rage is in the same blast area.
But what can they do about a problem like Mary?
Nothing. Local Dems will have to get used to it.
Says who? Powerhouse Illinois Democrats who in 2021 drew new congressional maps that featured 17 gerrymandered districts — 14 for the Ds and three for the Rs.
To guarantee themselves 14 wins every two years, the Dems had to account for GOP voters. Because Illinois law unfairly bars Democrats from driving Republicans out of the state, map-drawers chose to lock up identifiable Republican voters in three districts: Miller in the 15th District, Michael Bost in the 12th and Darin LaHood in the 16th.
They drew the other 14 districts in winding, twisting ways that are the opposite of the required “compact and contiguous” guideline the law supposedly requires. Map-drawers, using computers for guidance, were able to include just enough Ds in them to generate winning election results through 2032.
(The map-drawing conspiracy begins anew in 2031 after the decennial census. There’s speculation that population woes will cost Illinois at least one — possibly two — House seats.)
The Ds were especially creative in drawing U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski’s 13th District.
Reviewing Budzinski’s snake-like district that runs from East Central Illinois to the Missouri border, the Washington Post called it the “most gerrymandered” of the nation’s 435 House districts.
Unfortunately, there were tradeoffs that currently anguish local Ds.
To get Budzinski, they also got Miller — from their point of view, a Lou Brock-for-Ernie Broglio fiasco.
There’s Miller — the conservative hard case who rejects pork-barrel projects even for her own district — and Budzinski — the liberal who speaks sufficiently fluent conservative to credulous constituents.
Miller didn’t have a cakewalk to the U.S. House.
Democrats arranged for a cage-match primary between two Republicans — Miller and former U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis — in 2022.
Local Democrats didn’t like Davis either.
That was best reflected when Davis, making an appearance at Parkland College, mentioned to a hostile crowd that he was among a group of Republican House members targeted for murder by gun-wielding Belleville resident James Hodgkinson.
“So what if you dodged a couple of bullets,” one crowd member responded.
Hodgkinson was shot and killed by police. But he wounded two officers and several others, two near fatalities.
Thanks to a late Trump endorsement, Miller defeated Davis in the 2022 primary.
Now she’s ensconced in a district the Cook Partisan Voting Index describes as “R+20.”
Two days into her first House term, Miller unwisely created a storm when she cited German dictator Adolf Hitler’s effectiveness in winning the “hearts and minds” of youngsters.
“Hitler was right on one thing: he said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future,’” she said.
Miller recently raised another stir when she misidentified a Sikh religious leader leading the daily House prayer as a Muslim and said it was “deeply troubling” that a Muslim was invited to lead the prayer.
Whatever her stances or comments, Miller is unbowed and unapologetic. She vows to “always vote no against the radical agenda of the left.”
That’s the equivalent of scraping fingernails across a blackboard to local Democrats.
Thanks to the map-drawing Democrats, Miller remains free to do just that.
