This week, Donald Trump — never a particularly subtle person and increasingly prone to just outright admitting his antidemocratic plots as he’s consolidated his power in Washington — said plainly that his MAGA coalition was “entitled to five more seats” in the House of Representatives. This by way of the extraordinary Texas mid-cycle redistricting process, through Trump ally Gov. Greg Abbott, intends to redraw that state’s districts to create five new such districts with double-digit majorities for Trump. In the process, this would also effectively disenfranchise a huge chunk of the state’s nonwhite population.
GOP gerrymandering is not new, of course. Much expertise and technology has been tapped over the years specifically to millimetrically draw lines to pick up seats in ways that are the opposite of representative. In 2019, the Supreme Court gave the thumbs up to partisan gerrymandering (as opposed to racial gerrymandering, though astute readers will realize the difference between those things doesn’t tend to be so great), clearing the way in part for Texas to be so transparent about its efforts to rig the map in the GOP’s favor. Not content to have gone halfway, SCOTUS has now indicated it will intervene in this case and potentially strike down much of what remains of the Voting Rights Act, potentially giving the green light to effective out-and-out racial gerrymandering.
A wake-up call for Democrats
The brazenness of this plot — which seeks to further cement permanent GOP House control after gerrymandering already arguably handed the Republicans their current slim majority — seems to have shaken some Democratic officials out of a holding pattern stupor and onto offense. California Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged to engage in his own redistricting to effectively counter Texas’. He was quickly joined by our own Gov. Kathy Hochul, who said she was “tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back” and proposed moving away from New York’s independent districting process and towards a more partisan one.
There are two ways to look at this: on the one hand, you can read it as an escalation. Democrats are failing to bring down the temperature, instead getting into an arms race that will end badly for everyone and the republic at large. On the other hand, you can see it as the Democrats finally engaging in some aggressive self-defense, leaving behind their penchant for unilateral disarmament, and grasping the stakes of this fight. I can see the rationale behind both perspectives, but in my view, the latter is not only more sensible but fundamentally correct in the sense that we’ve already gone far down the road towards a dismantling of our democratic order and to pretend otherwise is not only cowardly, but actually delusional in the literal sense — a refusal or inability to accept the plain reality of things.
Trump wants to cement a MAGA majority, and it’s no secret
Let’s state things plainly. The stated and open MAGA position here is to artificially create a majority that can advance Trump‘s ideological agenda in direct contravention to the public electoral will. That’s barely extrapolation from their own public statements; it doesn’t take much in the way of speculation to figure out where this is all going to lead. Already, with a razor-slim majority in the House, the MAGA majority has declined to take action to reel Trump in — letting him usurp their tariff powers to engage in a chaotic and economically ruinous tariff regime — while lavishing him with more power and ideological wins, like the massive budget bill that granted more funding for ICE than most national militaries while setting the stage for the largest upward transfer of wealth in contemporary American.
At a smaller scale, we’ve seen how this has played out at the state level in states where Republicans have already rigged up permanent supermajorities. The Florida that’s developed under Gov. Ron DeSantis — a national template of book bans, ideological control over universities, anti-immigrant policies and regressive criminal justice — has been enabled precisely because DeSantis’ gerrymander-enabled supermajority has effectively given him free rein to do as he pleases in the state.
Conservatives, don’t get it twisted — you’re in trouble too
One thing I think is important to point out is that this hurts you even if you consider yourself a conservative or putatively agree with certain of Trump‘s agenda items. A big part of the impetus for having a competitive form of government in the first place is that it is a system built on accountability, and in its absence, corruption and mismanagement naturally flourish. Obviously, the voting public is still well and truly capable of making puzzling choices and elevating incompetent morons to the highest offices in the land, but a competitive electoral system at least preserves the possibility that those people can be thrown out and replaced by better public servants.
Right now, Trump‘s congressional majority is populated by people who, for example, are supporting his firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics head over a jobs report that was weaker than Trump wanted — a direct attack on not just government systems, but the very information that is supposed to underpin our understanding of reality itself. So regardless of your particular ideological proclivities, I would argue that an unassailable permanent majority is bad news for you, particularly as we face the very real specter of an economic meltdown driven by the full impact of the tariffs as well as Trump‘s obsession with the Federal Reserve (and more recently the BLS) chipping away at investor and consumer confidence and the stability of the dollar and U.S. markets.
Anyway, the whole founding schtick of this nation is that we’re a country of free thinkers that want to make our own decisions. If you place any stock in that idea at all, it should be frankly offensive that one ideological movement is attempting to wrest control of an entire chamber of the legislature in service to the apparent goal of making one man a tyrant.
This is an attempt to dismantle the two-party system
To zoom out a little bit further, I have to say that I’m starting to get real tired about persistent framing of a resistance to Trump’s power grabs as a partisan issue. I suppose it’s literally partisan in the sense that one party seems to have been decisively captured by his movement, but this isn’t a political disagreement within the framework of our system. This is an attempt to dismantle that system,so we’re not talking about a political conversation as the media and our civic institutions have long understood them. It’s high time we got more comfortable with that framing, particularly in journalism and broader political discourse.
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