So far, the redistricting power grab that President Donald Trump launched in Texas has ended in a stalemate for the parties and a huge loss for our nation.
After 10 months of out-of-cycle, coast-to-coast congressional redistricting, Democrats and Republicans control about the same number of seats as they did before the mess began.
Republicans have nine more GOP-controlled U.S. House seats, and Democrats gained seven and possibly more, depending on the outcome of a legal challenge to Tuesday’s redistricting election in Virginia.
Democracy and good government, meanwhile, are in negative territory. All of this has squandered public resources by requiring frivolous elections and special legislative sessions and abused the public’s trust.
The whole fiasco started last summer, when Trump leaned on Texas GOP leaders to redraw the state’s U.S. House districts to help Republicans keep control of Congress in the midterms. Gov. Greg Abbott and the rest of the Texas GOP fell obediently in line without regard for the obvious fact that Democrats would retaliate. Texas Republicans scratched out five more GOP seats at the expense of all of us.
Other states then joined the scrum. California scrapped a nonpartisan redistricting commission that had been a national model to add five Democratic seats. Legislatures in Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio redrew their maps. Florida is scheduled to start a special session on redistricting next week.
Virginia held its redistricting referendum Tuesday. Voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment to allow new, temporary maps that could give Democrats four more seats. It is disappointing but entirely predictable that the state’s new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, who ran as a centrist, strongly backed the referendum.
Within hours, a Virginia judge blocked the state from certifying those results. Virginia’s attorney general has promised to fight the ruling.
This is all so bad for democracy in so many ways. Americans have little reason to vote because candidates from the two main parties do not represent their interests and values. It’s obvious our political leaders care less about the country than their own parties. They have made it abundantly clear that whoever is in the minority doesn’t deserve a voice.
Candidates in highly gerrymandered districts become more extreme because they do not have to appeal to moderate or independent voters to win their primary — and the dominant party’s candidate almost always wins the general election. Meanwhile, candidates from the underdog party are often unqualified or unfit because they have little chance of winning.
Gerrymandering warps the balance of minority and majority rights. Both need protection; neither is supposed to dominate forever. That’s the path to tyranny.
Lawmakers in a few states have refused to bow to partisan diktats from Washington and are paying a price. Out-of-state, pro-Trump groups have targeted several GOP state senators in Indiana. Ten Republican lawmakers in Kansas have faced retribution from colleagues for rebuffing a redistricting effort there.
Courage and conviction mean having the guts and independence to say no to your own. We don’t know what that’s like in Texas anymore.
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