Last week, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map in a 6-3 ruling that effectively killed off what was left of the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement mechanisms, which had been hollowed out by earlier decisions by the court under Chief Justice John Roberts.
The new ruling will make it far easier for states to draw obviously racially discriminatory district maps, not just for Congress but for state and local elected bodies. It also added a new dimension to the broader redistricting fight kicked off last year by President Donald Trump. He instructed Texas lawmakers to essentially engineer five additional Republican congressional seats via a rare redistricting process coming midway through the usual 10-year cycle. Texas did as he asked, and the Supreme Court upheld those maps. Some Democratic states responded in kind, and as of now eight states have drawn new maps, with several more considering the option. Florida lawmakers had already been engineering their maps in anticipation of the SCOTUS ruling, and approved a new map designed to net Republicans some four seats just hours after it came down.
One of the states considering its own push is New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul has put the idea on the table after some pressure from the state’s Democratic congressional delegation. But doing that in New York would be more complicated than it was in Texas – it would require a constitutional amendment to unwind the independent commission process created in 2014, meaning that the earliest that lines could be redrawn would be 2028, long after the current midterm cycle. That’s part of a pattern of blue states having built in greater protections against partisan gerrymandering that are now stopping them from responding in kind to the MAGA push to lock in a congressional majority.
The latter point is what all this is really about: Republicans contemplating an unfavorable electoral panorama have decided the best path forward is to sidestep the tough work of actually winning elections and instead try to rig an unbreakable majority in the House of Representatives. Holding onto the House would affect everything else on either party’s agenda. For instance, Trump’s growing federal paramilitary, spearheaded by ICE, is reliant on the gobs of money that the slim MAGA bloc in the House keeps pushing. The court reform many Democrats long for is impossible without control of Congress, as is real accountability for Trump’s dismantling of the executive functions of government. Redistricting might seem somewhat inside baseball, but it’s really about whether the transfer of power through elections remains feasible.
Beyond the state by state details, I think the spread of the redistricting fight is a crucial political development: It’s the first time I’ve seen evidence that Democrats understand that they’re on a tilted playing field – and that they have to tilt the field back just to maintain fairness.
Since Trump’s rise, it’s become a commonplace that institutional Democrats have clung to rules and norms and decorum as Republicans exploit their gullibility and set the system on fire.
There are dozens of examples: from Mitch McConnell refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s pick for a vacant Supreme Court seat in 2016, ostensibly because the presidential election was mere months away, and then rushing to have Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to a Court seat under two weeks before the 2020 election, to Trump refusing to concede after that vote and launching the Jan. 6 coup attempt.
Yet even after all that, President Joe Biden waved away calls for Supreme Court reform and appointed as Attorney General the preternaturally cautious Merrick Garland, who oversaw glacially paced investigations into Trump and his attempt to subvert a presidential election — all in the name of bipartisanship and regularity. The result of that restraint? Trump back in the White House, weaponizing all levers of government, including efforts to investigate and prosecute political foes (just as Republicans had continuously and baselessly accused Democrats of attempting to do), with a Supreme Court majority that seems to have fully bought into his agenda.
I understand the Democrats’ impulse to avoid getting dragged into the mud. Some people have characterized old-guard Dems as just out of touch weenies, hopelessly enamored with the political system of decades past, getting rolled by shark-eyed conservatives who extend a hand when convenient and then use it to slap them at the first opportunity. But I really do grasp the thinking that if everyone is bending the rules then there’s no one left to safeguard the institutions that undergird our society — the whole “we’d be just as bad as them” mentality. The problem is that a principled refusal to bring a gun to a gunfight means you still get shot.
On redistricting, it seems like this realization finally clicked . I honestly believe that Trump kicked this fight off in Texas and that most Republican leaders nationwide complied because they thought their Democratic counterparts would make a lot of noise but ultimately refuse to respond in kind. But they were wrong.
The ultimate goal behind the Democrats’ aggressive countermoves is that the tactics will eventually make themselves obsolete. If Democrats can head off this possibility of an artificial permanent GOP congressional majority and instead take back the House, Senate, and eventually the White House in 2028 — which, given recent electoral results and Trump’s plunging popularity, seems increasingly likely even if MAGA “wins” the redistricting fight — then they can just pass anti-gerrymandering federal laws and, if they have the backbone for it, break the conservative Supreme Court stranglehold so that these laws won’t be knocked down. The idea is to force an even playing field, which paradoxically is only possible through a forceful and concerted effort to tilt it back in their favor now.
For their part, MAGA Republicans have no compunctions about using every tool at their disposal to keep that from happening. In Virginia, a redistricting meant to help Democrats that was approved by popular referendum is on hold after Republicans sued, while in Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry moved to suspend primaries already in progress after the SCOTUS ruling came down, to pave the way for redrawing district lines to eliminate one seat seen as safe for Black Democrats. Virginia Democratic State Sen. L. Louise Lucas — the body’s president pro tempore, who led the redistricting efforts — just yesterday had her office raided by the FBI in what was ostensibly a corruption probe, but one with very suspicious timing. Might the investigation have any merit? Maybe, but this Justice Department’s Trump vendetta prosecutions have killed off any benefit of the doubt it might normally enjoy.
Of course, floating above all this is Trump’s threat to “nationalize” elections, which has state and local officials on edge. The executive branch has no legal role in how Congressional elections are run, but that doesn’t mean that Trump can’t mess things up or do a lot of damage. Administration officials have mused openly about having federal agents deployed in a way meant to intimidate voters headed to the polls, a low-tech way of tainting results. And remember, Trump already refused to accept the results of a crucial election once before.
Ultimately, the best way to safeguard the vote is through overwhelming victory. Counter-redistricting efforts of the sort being floated in Albany represent one avenue toward that, along with electing candidates who will get serious about fighting the authoritarian MAGA wing’s fire with fire. Otherwise, there won’t be a system with norms to respect.
