A gerrymandering arms race is coming

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 U.S. 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.

The game Trump and his loyalists currently play is the polar opposite of that kind of reform — and they may well come to regret it.

We’re not ready to encourage blue states to get down in the gutter with red states and scrap the norms of redistricting for the sake of raw power. But imploring Democrats to endlessly play by the rules while Republicans incinerate them isn’t a viable long-term strategy. At some point, Democrats can’t be blamed if they decide to fight fire with fire.

Think about the process that would threaten to usher in: Instead of states redrawing their congressional districts every 10 years based on census data, they would draw them every two years, before every congressional election, based on nothing but partisan power politics. Does any rational Republican think the normalization of such a chaotic and ever-shifting process won’t at some point come back to bite them?