The Redistricting Mess Shows How Our Election System Doesn't Work [View all]

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-08-08-redistricting-mess-shows-election-system-doesnt-work/



This was the week when America learned that there are no “good” arbitrary lines on a map indicating the boundaries of a congressional district. They are all instruments of politics and subject to change if the situation warrants. This is actually useful in thinking about the post-Trump world: A genuine “good government” action on district lines would not make them “fair,” but make them irrelevant. The context for this revelation, of course, is the flight of legislative Democrats from Texas to safe houses across liberal America, in an effort to block a quorum and deny a vote on new congressional maps that are likely to cost Democrats up to five seats in the 2026 midterm elections.

If you believe Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), there’s now an FBI manhunt under way for them, in addition to multiple attempts to expel the wayward Democrats from the Texas House. I don’t see how this necessarily helps Republicans, because it ties the whole matter up in the courts, where it will fester beyond the special session of the legislature that ends August 20, and maybe beyond Texas’s December deadline for filing for next March’s primaries, at which point district lines must be set. As Christopher Hooks notes, Texas Democrats have tried this breaking quorum gambit before to deny votes they were sure to lose, and it has never fully succeeded. I do think things are different this time, however, in a couple of respects.

First, there is a new willingness among Democrats to challenge Donald Trump’s authoritarian maneuvering. It was the national party that encouraged Texas House members to leave Austin; Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), a potential 2028 candidate, was encouraging the move for weeks. And second, the goal isn’t as much to deny a vote in Texas as it is to steel Democrats across the country for the fight ahead, one where the good-government approach of anti-gerrymandering efforts is dead and buried.



Though they face more hurdles in unwinding independent redistricting commissions and the impulse to produce “fair” maps, Democrats are now recognizing that they can’t win with unilateral disarmament, and the Texas situation has set off a chain reaction. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has already planned for new maps in California that would offset moves in Texas; this would involve a special election in just three months that would be “triggered” only if Texas moves forward with their plan. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is talking about the same thing in New York.

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