Never have so many people who know better tried to feign enthusiasm for their own kamikaze run.
Never have so many people who know better tried to feign enthusiasm for their own kamikaze run.
On Wednesday, with the Democratic Party’s truancy gambit broken, the Texas House GOP passed a plan to reapportion the state’s congressional districts in the middle of the decade. It’s muscular politics, but mid-decade redistricting is hardly unprecedented. And Texas Republicans are not without a valid rationale for this maneuver. The state was one of many reddish states whose populations were undercounted in the 2020 census, depriving them of proper representation.
Even if you are convinced that the Lone Star State’s GOP has no higher motive than aggressively gerrymandering Democrats out of the state’s congressional delegation, the Democratic Party would be wise to take its lumps. In a full-scale redistricting war, Democrats are outgunned, and their members know it.
Well, wisdom is namby-pamby milksops. These are times that call for futile and stupid gestures. So, spurred on by its uncompromising base for whom cathartic displays of pique are the highest political virtue, Democrats are mounting the Light Brigade’s charge into a maelstrom from which they’re unlikely to emerge unscathed. They understand what they’ve gotten themselves into, of course, but they have to pretend like they don’t.
“We don’t want this fight, and we didn’t choose this fight, but with our democracy on the line, we cannot and will not run away from this fight,” said California Democratic Assemblyman Marc Berman this week. The lawmaker’s more-in-sorrow resolve followed Sacramento’s approval of a plan to put a proposition to voters in a special election to override the state’s “independent” redistricting commission. In that way, California Democrats could net the state several new Democratic seats in Congress. “We’re neutralizing what occurred [in Texas],” California Governor Gavin Newsom insisted, “and we’re giving the American people a fair chance, because when all things are equal, we’re all playing by the same rules.”
Can you feel the excitement?
California gubernatorial candidate and former Representative Katie Porter was similarly jazzed. Californians “feel picked on,” she told CNN. “And why do they feel picked on by Donald Trump? Because he has said he is picking on us.” And it’s not just California Democrats who have caught redistricting fever. “Game on,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced following the Texas legislature’s maneuver. She couldn’t even muster an exclamation point.
If the Democratic Party’s voters are unaware of the peril in which the party’s leaders are putting themselves, the party’s leaders certainly are. They have been privy to the analyses in legacy media venues gently warning Democrats that the GOP has far more firepower in reserve that it can bring to bear in a national redistricting fight. “Republicans can get 12 or more new seats fairly easily,” Punchbowl reported last week. “Democrats can get two or three without amending a state constitution, and eight if Newsom’s California gambit works.”
The GOP has reason to believe that a Democratic map that goes for broke will run afoul of the contiguity and compactness rules with which congressional districts must comply, and their legal challenges to a power-grab like that will be successful. After all, that’s roughly what happened in New York in 2022 in a process controlled and scrutinized entirely by Democrats. Perhaps that’s why Republicans aren’t fretting too much over Hochul’s threat, either. The radical gerrymandering gun has one bullet, and she’s already fired it.
I have had many recent opportunities to write about the extent to which the Democratic Party has made itself hostage to an overwrought base of activists who are contemptuous of political strategy. To this cohort, anything short of self-immolation reveals a suspicious lack of zeal for the cause. Perhaps because it’s easier than telling this uncompromising group that they’re wrong, Democrats are resigned to their march into a meat grinder. They’re not exactly thrilled about it. But the party’s base seems to be. Democrats want “fighters” who “fight” even on indefensible terrain.
Well, as a wise man once said, you go to war with the army you have. But there is something to be said for the discretion that allows an overmatched force to live to fight another day. It’s just something Democratic voters don’t want to hear.