The Republican state legislature in Texas is in the midst of doing something terribly wrong in redrawing the state’s congressional districts to produce more GOP-leaning constituencies. The Democratic state Legislature in New York’s lame attempt to join them in undermining representative government will not work.
What is happening in Texas is awful. It’s awful for democracy. It’s awful for the people of Texas. Absent a court order to remedy some problem or another, congressional districts are left in place for a decade following the decennial federal census, the last being 2020, with the most recent lines being produced for 2022. So the next round should follow the 2030 national count, meaning new maps for 2032.
But under the command of President Trump to boost their slim margin of control in the House of Representatives, they are this week creating new maps for the state’s 38 districts, where the GOP now holds 25 seats. Considering that Trump carried the Lone Star State with 56% last year, the party’s current 25 seats comprise 66% of the delegation. But now they have concocted a mid-decade map that could net them 30 seats, which would be 80% of the state’s congressfolk.
That might be good for the Republican Party, but it’s bad for Texans. If Texans want to elect 38 Republicans to Congress or if they want to elect 38 Democrats or anything in-between, that is their choice, not partisan GOP pols in the Texas State Capitol in Austin with the connivance of Gov. Greg Abbott.
As for the New York Democrats who are talking about fighting fire with fire and redrawing this state’s 26 congressional districts before 2032, they are just blowing hot air. They haven’t learned their lessons from the last protracted round of redistricting following the 2020 census, when their effort to rig the lines to favor their side backfired badly.
New York had the biggest swing back and forth in House seats in the country during the decade from 2012 to 2020 when we had very fair lines drawn by court-appointed Special Master Columbia law Prof. Nate Persily. After the Legislature and Gov. Hochul illegally tried to violate the state Constitution’s sound anti-gerrymandering provisions in 2022, the courts appointed Special Master Jonathan Cervas from Carnegie Mellon.
Cervas’ very fair maps were used in 2022 and 2024, when the choices of New Yorkers again carried the day. In 2022, a bad Democratic year, when Lee Zeldin ran a closer than expected race against Hochul, winning 47% of the vote, the GOP picked up four House seats, helping them win the chamber.
But in 2024, the Democrats won back four seats in New York, including two rematches. That’s exactly how it should be. In New York and in Texas.
However, the Albany Dems want to do something, or at least be seen as doing something, so in order to alter the state’s congressional lines before 2032, the New York Constitution would have to be amended and so the Democrats have produced an amendment. But it will take years to go through the amendment process and even if they succeeded, the amendment keeps in place requirements like this:
“Districts shall not be drawn to discourage competition or for the purpose of favoring or disfavoring incumbents or other particular candidates or political parties. The commission shall consider the maintenance of cores of existing districts, of pre-existing political subdivisions, including counties, cities, and towns, and of communities of interest.”
And any mapmaking before 2032 will still have to utilize the same data from the U.S. Census Bureau collected in 2020, so the lines aren’t going to be much different than what exists now.
We hope the Texas GOP scheme to make new partisan maps fails and if it does succeed, that Texas voters reject the effort to twist their choices. As for New York, we are lucky that fair elections are here to stay.
