The coming arms race on gerrymandering

“I just want to find 11,780 votes,” President Donald Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during a recorded phone call two months after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s goal was to retroactively inflate his Georgia vote total in order win a state he’d lost and tip the Electoral College his way — to cheat his way to reelection, in other words, according to the Tribune News Service.

Raffensperger, to his eternal credit, refused that corrupt directive from a president of his own party. If only Republican state lawmakers in Texas, Missouri and other red states today had that kind principled dedication to the rules and norms of democracy.

But alas. Trump is currently engaged in a similar vote-cheating scheme but on a much larger scale: In an effort to hold onto the GOP’s slim congressional majority through next year’s midterm elections, Trump is pressing Republican-led states across the country to redraw congressional district lines that were just decided after the 2020 census. And unlike Raffensperger, key Republicans from Austin to Jefferson City and beyond are responding not with principled refusal but with: Yes, sir. Trump isn’t even pretending this is anything other than a calculated power grab. Because Trump easily won Texas last year, he told an interviewer this week, “We are entitled to five more (congressional) seats” from that state.

That’s not how it works, of course, but whatever. Democratic governors of California, Illinois and other blue states are now contemplating responding by redrawing their own district lines to give Democrats more seats from their states next year. This is what a redistricting arms race looks like — and it promises to sow even more chaos into America’s electoral politics than Trump already has.

The chaos is most evident in Texas, which is on the verge of redrawing its districts on direct orders from Trump. Legislative Democrats responded by fleeing the state to prevent a vote. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has welcomed them to hunker down in his blue state like refugees from some third-world dictatorship. Texas Republicans are threatening them with expulsion or even arrest.

Here in Missouri, Trump’s call for corrupt redistricting was initially rejected by top Republicans as an invalid scrambling of the normal process. This page even lauded them for their adherence to principle— prematurely, as it turns out.

Missouri Republicans who initially expressed reservations about the idea are now suggesting it’s possible, even likely, that Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe will call a special session to do Trump’s bidding. Kehoe hasn’t yet committed to that, but he hasn’t ruled it out, either.

Where (or where?) are the Brad Raffenspergers in today’s GOP? Ironically, there’s at least one of them in Congress right now: Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., has introduced a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting across the country. His motives aren’t purely principle, as it was clearly prompted by fears that California Gov. Gavin Newsom would carry out his threat to counter Texas’ redistricting shenanigans in kind, potentially unseating California Republicans such as Kiley himself. Still, the legislation (which faces low odds of passage) would at least put the brakes on this runaway redistricting train.

Is what Texas is doing and Missouri is contemplating even legal? Clearly it shouldn’t be. One person, one vote is a bedrock principle of our democracy. Gerrymandering generally erodes that principle — and gerrymandering that’s this blatant in its timing and stated motivation erodes it blatantly. But the US Supreme Court in a 2019 case (Rucho v. Common Cause) effectively punted on the issue, allowing that gerrymandering might be illegal but ruling that federal courts had no jurisdiction to decide the matter. But that doesn’t prevent Congress from imposing controls over the process like the one Rep. Kiley envisions, keeping redistricting as the once-per-decade process it’s always been. Better still would be reforms of the kind Common Cause and others have long envisioned (and that California, for one, has already enacted) taking redistricting out of the hands of politicians entirely and leaving it to independent entities using hard cold demographic data instead of partisan gamesmanship.