Welcome to Washington: The Redistricting Wars Begin

It seems as if every ambitious politician from New Jersey to California and everywhere in between is preparing to jump into the fight for redistricting this year. Governor Abbott’s decision to draw five Democrats out of the U.S. House of Representatives is kicking off what could become an all-out war — one that Republicans are favored to win. Welcome to Washington, from which House members and senators have gone home for the annual month-long August recess and much attention is now being paid to those state-level lawmakers from Texas who have fled to Illinois in order to stall Mr. Abbott’s redistricting push. Texas Republicans, with the help of the Trump administration, have already advanced their new congressional map, which would turn five solidly Democratic districts into Republican ones. With Democrats needing only to flip three seats in the House to win the majority, Texans are trying to do their part to keep the gavel in Speaker Johnson’s hand. “This is nothing more than a rigged map,” the top Democrat on the state legislature’s redistricting committee, Jon Rosenthal, a state representative, said Saturday as his panel considered the new map. “This is going to create a ripple effect around the country. What we do here will affect what happens in the United States of America.”Those words may prove prescient. On Sunday, 51 Democrats serving in the Texas state house of representatives fled their state, hoping to deny the Republican majority a necessary quorum in order to bring the new map up for a vote. “Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress,” a state representative, James Talarico, who is considering a run for the United States Senate next year, said in a video posted to X. “If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters.”Messrs. Abbott and Trump are likely to get their way, despite Democrats’ protests. For every day that lawmakers refuse to return to do their legislative work, they will be fined $500. The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, says the house members should be arrested. “I support the immediate arrest of these rogue lawmakers who’ve fled their duties. These radical Democrats are spitting in the face of every Texan they swore to represent,” Mr. Paxton said in a post on X. The situation is escalating quickly. Democrats have made clear they want to keep this fight going. Governor Newsom says he is prepared to call a statewide vote that could empower his legislature to redraw the maps for 2026 in order to target some of his state’s nine Republicans. Senator Booker told CNN on Sunday that he would support a similar effort in New Jersey. Of the 12 House seats in Mr. Booker’s home state, three are held by Republicans. Governor Hochul implied she would be on board with a similar move in New York. “If there’s other states violating the rules” and “trying to give themselves an advantage, all I’ll say is, I’m going to look at it closely with Hakeem Jeffries,” Ms. Hochul said at a recent event, namedropping the House Democratic caucus leader. Other states run entirely by Democrats like Illinois and Maryland could also revisit their maps before next year. Although Mr. Abbott, with the president’s blessing, will be the one to have kicked off the fight, Democrats’ eye-for-an-eye strategy is unlikely to yield any positive results. Should Mr. Newsom move ahead with redistricting in California, other red states appear to be preparing for additional redrawing of maps. The Republican leader of the Missouri state senate, Cindy O’Laughlin, said this week that she and her colleagues were “likely” to look at redrawing her state’s map, according to the Missouri Independent. The state currently has one district protected by the Voting Rights Act centered around St. Louis, though another Democratic district on the other side of the state would be on the chopping block. Republicans could “crack” the city into two or three separate districts, creating an additional favorable seat for the GOP. Indiana, too, has the opportunity to redraw its map to eliminate either one of both of the districts currently represented by Democrats. Governor DeSantis in Florida told reporters this week that he may take another crack at redistricting, though he could face legal challenges in state courts.

Welcome to Washington: The Redistricting Wars Begin

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