What Blue States should do if Red States super-gerrymander - Robert Reich

[justaprogressive]

Friends,

When Democrats gathered in Philadelphia eight years ago, Michelle Obama famously declared, “When they go low, we go high.”

But now that Texas’s Governor Greg Abbott — at the presumed direction of Trump, — has gone so low as to seek to super-gerrymander Texas’s congressional districts to come up with five additional Republican seats in order to maintain Republican control of Congress after the 2026 midterms, Democrats appear to be giving up the high road.

Good!

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is threatening to redistrict California.

Some fear this tit-for-tat will turn into a race to the bottom that will further erode American democracy. With control of Congress hanging in the balance and the Supreme Court giving its blessing to partisan gerrymandering, they see California’s move as dangerous.

Wrong. California’s threat is actually a means of saving our democracy — a way to keep Republicans from sinking it. As long as Democrats threaten to do exactly what Republicans do — and no more — they could prevent Republicans from utterly destroying democracy.

Call it a mutually assured counter-balance (roughly analogous to the so-called “mutually assured destruction” that’s kept Russia and the United States from launching nuclear war on each other). Blue states must credibly threaten to counter-balance any new gerrymandering by red states — thereby eliminating any new red-state advantage.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-blue-states-should-do-when-red]

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Newsom.has it as a dead man's switch

Maryland or NJ should just do it to thumb our noses at Trump.

NJ - because of Bedminster.