My friend Kurt Schlichter, in a column at Townhall earlier this week, was spot-on in defense of gerrymandering as a political act, and in advocating its aggressive use in red states:

Gerrymandering is good, and we need more of it. It’s especially beneficial because mid-census cycle gerrymandering, currently being executed in red states, is likely to increase the number of Republican House seats significantly. Democrats object to this on purely moral grounds that they’ve already massively gerrymandered blue states, and therefore, this would hurt them, thus making it bad for Republicans to do it. We should laugh at them and shaft them as hard as we can.

Gerrymandering means creating sometimes bizarrely shaped legislative districts designed to make it more likely to elect a member of a particular party. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of unwise people, there is nothing wrong with doing that. It’s a moral necessity. It’s a good thing. The states decide on their own districts, and they should decide that the way that they decide everything else. That is, they should do it in the way that the winning political party wants – majority rule. Yes, they can leverage it so that the out party gets less representation in the House of Representatives. So what? We have to decide on district boundaries somehow, and we ought to decide on them through votes. And we should vote in our self-interest.

This is where the fake do-gooders start whining like little princesses. They tell us that we’re supposed to put politics aside. Except we’re not. What they mean is that we’re supposed to put the choices of the majority of voters aside and redistrict the way the whining people want us to do. I prefer we do it my way.

Kurt is a Californian, and he’s well aware of how this process works in the hands of the Democrats. Republicans are 40 percent of the California electorate and yet there are just 17 percent of that state’s congressional seats which are held by Republicans.

The number might have been larger but for a handful of races last fall in which the Republican candidate held slim leads in election night counting only to see those slip away over the next two weeks.

So absolutely nobody ought to be complaining that Texas decided to play the game by the Democrats’ rules this week and redrew its congressional map in order to crush five blue districts into red ones:

Biggest changes in this map:

-Trump won both of the South Texas gains (28 & 34) by ~10 points, but 28 is much closer in PVI
-New TX 9 takes from TX 2 & 36 in Harris County
-Paired Al Green and the vacant TX 18 into one seat (18) that is a lot closer to, but not the same, as the… https://t.co/qWXskyXXFM

— Brad Johnson (@bradj_TX) July 30, 2025

I remember having a conversation last fall with House Speaker Mike Johnson about the outcome of the 2024 House races, and he said he was very optimistic that Republicans could hold as many as 225 seats, a 15-seat majority — though he said 10 to 12 was a more likely figure. Republicans ended up with 220 and a 5-vote margin.

Johnson said that was about as much as anyone could hope for because the way the districts had been drawn, particularly in blue states, there just weren’t enough swing seats out there which could be had.

And he certainly wasn’t wrong:

Democrats rigged the maps to maximize their share of Congressional seats. It is absolutely justified for us to do it too.

California:
????40% of the statewide vote
????17% of the seats (9 out of 52)

Massachusetts:
????35% of the statewide vote
????0% of the seats (0 out of 9)…

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 30, 2025

This comes on top of what one could call “census gerrymandering,” or the fact that blue states facing massive outmigration problems have backfilled their populations with illegal aliens and managed to ward off losses from decennial congressional reapportionment because the census unexplainably counts illegals along with citizens for that purpose.

That’s something that must be fixed before the next census. This should be nonnegotiable, as it is a violation of the civil rights of American citizens.

Texas isn’t alone in fighting blue-state fire with fire. Redistricting is apparently on the table in Florida, Ohio, and Missouri, among other places.

It’s too bad it isn’t on the table in Louisiana, at least as of yet.

My home state has six congressional districts, and since losing our seventh after the 2010 census, we’ve had a 5–1 (five Republicans, one Democrat) congressional map. Or at least we did, until an Obama-appointed federal judge named Shelley Dick bullied the supermajority Republican state legislature and new GOP Gov. Jeff Landry into redrawing the districts to create a 4-2 map that looks like this:

The Sixth District, the one in pink, is now represented by Cleo Fields, a black Democrat from Baton Rouge. Fields has a checkered ethical past, and had represented Louisiana’s Eighth Congressional District — which was even more gerrymandered than the Baton Rouge-to-Shreveport monstrosity he currently occupies — in the 1990s until that district was redrawn pursuant to a successful lawsuit that found it unconstitutional.

This is very likely to happen to Fields again. There is a case in front of the Supreme Court, Callais v. Louisiana, that hinges on the argument that the map you see above is also unconstitutional. The Callais case was going to be among those decided in June, but the Supreme Court opted to punt it to the fall and hold a rehearing.

This is good news and bad news.

The scuttlebutt around the Court has it that there are six votes to throw out the 4–2 Louisiana map. But where things get interesting is that four of the nine justices are said to be for invalidating Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as well, with two of the justices still on the fence on that question.

Section 2 is the basis for these racially gerrymandered seats in the first place. Applied to Louisiana, it would say that since the state’s population is a third black, a third of the congressional districts must be majority-black districts or else the result wouldn’t give a fair shake to the minority.

Which is patent nonsense in 2025 America.

Affirmative action for black Democrat politicians like Cleo Fields carries zero justification when Tim Scott is a senator from South Carolina, when Rep. Byron Donalds is the favorite to be Florida’s next governor, and when black Republicans like John James, Wesley Hurd, and Burgess Owens represent mostly white districts (as does Ilhan Omar; her Minneapolis district is more than two-thirds white, if you can believe it). Southern states are electing black candidates to statewide offices so routinely now that it isn’t even all that remarkable.

So why isn’t Louisiana copying Texas and getting rid of Fields, who is busily conducting press avails where he likens Donald Trump to a dictator? Well, it appears that the Bayou State is being sacrificed to the Supreme Court.

The word has it that Team Trump and the GOP leadership in Congress doesn’t want to pass a new map for fear of making the Callais case moot, especially when it’s possible that Section 2 could be blown away and red states might be given the freedom to draw districts in an equally partisan fashion to the way blue states draw them. Were that to happen, the GOP majority in the House could well return to the 235–245 range.

So what the special session conservatives are calling for doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Not even to draw a contingent map that would be in place in time to use it before the party primaries commence in the spring.

That’s a shame. Redistricting for partisan advantage is fun. If it wasn’t, every single blue state wouldn’t be doing it.

And that new map in Texas is gorgeous.