Nukes, submarines, and gerrymandering

The Supreme Court ruled while I was writing this.

The USS Virginia, one of our attack submarines.

Should we put nuclear weapons on our attack submarines?

This was a big debate last week on the Armed Services Committee. 

Right now, our attack submarines don’t have nuclear weapons. They’re nuclear-powered, but not nuclear-armed. 

To be clear, we do have submarines with nuclear weapons. They’re called ballistic submarines and they carry ICBMs, which are the biggest nuclear weapons we have. We’ve got 14 ballistic subs.

Attack submarines wouldn’t get ICBMS - they’d get lower-yield weapons called “tactical” nuclear weapons. We’ve got 53 attack submarines.

The argument is that Russia has many more tactical nuclear weapons than we do, they’ve been moving them forward in various ways, and so we should make sure we can match that threat.

But here was the argument on the other side:

First, doing this would cost at least $30 billion. Even by defense standards, that’s real money. 

Second, we do have a couple hundred tactical nuclear weapons and we have multiple platforms we can use to deliver them, attack submarines just aren’t one.

Third - and this I honestly didn’t know until this hearing - if we put nuclear weapons on our attack submarines, there are a bunch of countries that won’t allow us to port with them. A lot of our close allies will not allow submarines with nuclear weapons on them to port there.

And the thing is, the attack sub is supposed to be able to go anywhere on the globe. That’s why it’s been referred to as “the queen on the chessboard.”

That means that putting nuclear weapons on them would limit their mission in a big way - which is why the Navy isn’t even asking for this. Some individual commanders are, but the Navy’s not.

So I thought the cons outweighed the pros and voted against it.

But I lost. On a very close vote, it passed committee (as an amendment to the larger defense budget), will likely pass the House, and will then go to the Senate.

And this is why it can be helpful to have two chambers. My bet is the Senate doesn’t love this idea and it might not end up happening.

Moore v. Harper

As I was writing this email, news broke that the U.S. Supreme Court - in a 6-3 ruling - has fortunately dismissed the “independent state legislature” case that we had all been waiting on.

In short, this was a case brought by the majority party in the North Carolina state legislature that claimed that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures sole and complete power to draw legislative districts however they want - the courts would have almost no authority to get involved going forward.

Had this ruling gone the other way, it would have taken our existing gerrymandering problem and made it much worse. State legislatures would have been wholly unconstrained to use redistricting in an overtly partisan manner and it would have led to a gerrymandering arms race between red and blue states.

It also would have likely resulted in the handful of existing independent redistricting commissions across the country being struck down.

So how will this affect North Carolina’s upcoming redistricting later this year? 

Well, if the ruling had gone the other way, that could have made the gerrymandering situation much worse - but the fact that the case was denied won’t make it better. It’s a great ruling for the country because we avoided a disaster, but I don’t see it as a source of relief from the gerrymandering that is likely just around the corner for our state. My district, in particular, is very likely to be redrawn by the state legislature in a way that makes re-election a much greater challenge. It’s important for all of us to be realistic about that. We should see the new map by late August.

All for now.

Rep. Jeff Jackson

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