XPost: alt.politics.usa.congress, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics
XPost: alt.politics.republicans, tx.politics
https://apnews.com/article/trump-congress-house-republicans-texas- redistricting-d18e8280a32872d9eefcbb26f66a0331
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is pushing
Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps to create more
House seats favorable to his party, part of a broader effort to help the
GOP retain control of the chamber in next year’s midterm elections.
The president’s directive signals part of the strategy Trump is likely to
take to avoid a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the House
just two years into his presidency. It comes shortly before the GOP-
controlled Texas Legislature is scheduled to begin a special session next
week during which it will consider new congressional maps to further marginalize Democrats in the state.
Asked as he departed the White House for Pittsburgh about the possibility
of adding GOP-friendly districts around the country, Trump responded,
“Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Trump had a call earlier Tuesday with members of Texas’ Republican congressional delegation and told them the state Legislature would pursue
five new winnable seats through redistricting, according to a person
familiar the call who was not authorized to discuss it. The call was first reported by Punchbowl News.
Some Texas Republicans have been hesitant about redrawing the maps because there’s only so many new seats a party can grab before its incumbents are
put at risk. Republicans gain new seats by relocating Democratic voters
out of competitive areas and into other GOP-leaning ones, which may then
turn competitive with the influx.
“There comes the point where you slice the baloney too thin and it
backfires,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Democrats will have a hard time retaliating
Congressional maps drawn after the 2020 census were expected to remain in
place through the end of the decade. If Texas redraws them at the behest
of Trump, that could lead other states to do the same, including those controlled by Democrats. In response to the Texas plan, California Gov.
Gavin Newsom wrote on social media: “Two can play this game.”
Still, Democrats may have their hands at least partly tied. Many of the
states the party controls have their state legislative and congressional
maps drawn by independent commissions that are not supposed to favor
either party. That’s the case in California, where Newsom has no role in
the redistricting game after voters approved the commission system with a
2008 ballot initiative.
Newsom on Tuesday afternoon floated the notion of California’s Democratic- controlled Legislature doing a mid-decade redistricting and arguing it
wouldn’t be expressly forbidden by the 2008 ballot initiative. Democrats already hold 43 of the state’s 52 House seats. He also proposed squeezing
in a special election to repeal the popular commission system before the
2026 elections get underway, but either would be an extraordinary long
shot.
“There isn’t a whole lot Democrats can do right now,” said Michael Li of
the Brennan Center for Justice. “In terms of doing tit-for-tat, they’ve
got a weaker hand.”
Li noted that Democrats are backing lawsuits to overturn some GOP-drawn
maps, and there’s a chance some of those could be successful before the
midterm elections. That includes in Wisconsin, where the new liberal
majority on the state supreme court declined to immediately overturn the state’s GOP-drawn congressional maps earlier this year. Democrats and
their allies have filed suit in a lower court hoping to beat the clock and
get new maps in place by next year.
Democrats also have litigation in Utah and Florida.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case out of Louisiana
that seeks to unravel one majority Black district mandated by the Voting
Rights Act. The case could lead to sweeping changes in longstanding rules requiring mapmakers to ensure that racial minorities get a chance to be an electoral majority or plurality in some areas.
The high court is expected to rule in that case by next summer.
Re-opening maps undermines ‘free and fair elections’
Redistricting is a constitutionally mandated process for redrawing
political districts after the once-a-decade census to ensure they have
equal populations. But there is no prohibition against rejiggering maps
between censuses, and sometimes court rulings have made that mandatory.
The wave of voluntary mid-decade redistricting that Trump is encouraging, however, is unusual.
It’s also left some Democrats fuming that their party has ceded much its mapmaking power to independent commissions in states it controls,
including Colorado, Michigan and Washington.
“Reformers often do not understand the importance of political power,”
said Rick Ridder, a Democratic strategist in Denver.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries wouldn’t comment on whether
nonpartisan systems should be rolled back, instead saying Trump’s push
will “undermine free and fair elections.”
“Public servants should earn the votes of the people that they hope to represent. What Republicans are trying to do in Texas is to have
politicians choose their voters,” Jeffries told reporters.
Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, whose district includes part of Austin,
also criticized Texas Republicans for focusing on redistricting after
floods killed at least 132 people, and with more still missing.
“Redistricting, this scheme, is an act of desperation,” he said.
Texas lawmakers will consider a new map during special session
The special Texas legislative session scheduled to start Monday is
intended to focus primarily on the aftermath of the deadly floods.
An agenda for the session set by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott put forth
plans to take up “legislation that provides a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Republicans in Ohio also are poised to redraw their maps after years of political and court battles over the state’s redistricting process. The GOP-controlled Legislature is considering expanding the party’s lead in
the congressional delegation to as much as 13-2. It currently has a 10-5 advantage.
Still, there are practical limits as to how many new seats any party can squeeze from a map. That’s why some Texas Republicans have been hesitant
about another redraw. In 2011, the party’s legislators drew an aggressive
map to expand their majority, only to find seats they thought were safe
washed away in the 2018 Democratic wave election during Trump’s first
term.
In response, the map in 2021 was drawn more cautiously, mainly preserving
the GOP’s current outsized majority in its congressional delegation. There
are 25 Republican House members from the state compared to 12 Democrats
and one Democratic vacancy that is scheduled to be filled by a special election. A five-seat shift into the GOP column would mean the party holds
30 of Texas’ 38 seats after winning 56% of the vote in last year’s
presidential election.
Both parties see potential advantages
In Austin, Republican lawmakers said they embrace the opportunity to
redraw maps.
State Rep. Brian Harrison, who served in the first Trump administration,
said lawmakers can do it in a way that’s “thoughtful and constructive.”
“This is something that we can do, and something that we should do,”
GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn said he expects a new map will lead to
“significant gains,” in part because Latino voters have been trending
toward Republicans in recent elections.
But Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Tuesday that there was no way to redraw the boundaries
without exposing more GOP incumbents to a possible Democratic wave. When a party wins the White House, it usually loses seats in the midterms.
“Any new map that Texas Republicans draw will almost inevitably create
more competitive districts,” DelBene told reporters. “This scheme to rig
the maps is hardly going to shore up their majority. It is going to expand
the battleground in the race for the majority.”
___
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the name of the
chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
--
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.
Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.
Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
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