When Gerrymandering Comes For MAGA~~Because Those Are The Laws of Physics
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| Representative Kevin KileyDamon Winter/The New York Times |
Ms. Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion.
Published first on
The New York Times
President Trump is responsible for the noxious redistricting war currently festering in multiple states. For weeks this summer, he hectored Republican lawmakers in Texas to find him five more House seats before next year’s midterms, and they scurried to do just that.
But that doesn’t mean Democrats are the only ones upset about the situation. Which is why I reached out to the handful of California Republicans most likely to lose their House seats if their Democratic-controlled state chases Texas down the redistricting tracks. How are they feeling about the rush to redraw?
“Gerrymandering is a big problem wherever it occurs. It’s a plague on democracy,” Kevin Kiley, who represents California’s Third Congressional District, told me. “It’s especially bad happening in the middle of the decade,” he said, when “partisanship is literally the only purpose.”
“What we have right now — this domino effect or this redistricting war of mutually assured destruction — that’s just total chaos,” he added.
”Where,” Mr. Kiley asked, “does this end?” Does it?
This is a politically existential question for Mr. Kiley and some of his Republican colleagues. Looking to clap back at Texas, Gov. Gavin Newsom is spearheading a plan for his state’s Democratic-led Legislature to engage in some retaliatory gerrymandering. In a Nov. 4 special election, voters will decide on Proposition 50, a measure that would sideline the state’s independent redistricting commission and make way for a new map proposed by the Legislature to add Democratic seats. The shift would be temporary.
The commission’s authority would be restored after the 2030 census. But that is cold comfort for the Republicans whose constituencies are poised to be sliced and diced.
“My district will be torn into six different pieces!” Mr. Kiley said, speaking of the proposed map. “People think that’s crazy.”
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| Kevin Kiley standing with others in an office with leather chairs and an American flag on a pole beside a drapery-covered window. |
Kevin Kiley with staff.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
Challenge coins in Representative Kiley’s Washington office.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
Eager to short-circuit the madness, he has introduced a bill in the U.S. House to outlaw middecade redistricting nationwide. “It definitely has a lot of support on both sides of the aisle,” he asserted.
“Maybe the one thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on these days is that having this kind of unscheduled upheaval to our representative government is a really bad thing,” he added. He said he’s “ready to use every possible tool” to get the House speaker, Mike Johnson, to bring the bill up for a vote. “I’m going to put as much pressure as I can, in a positive way, to see that that happens.”
What happens is quite likely to be nothing. Nada. Bupkis. The odds that this speaker will move to thwart the electoral desires of this president are roughly the same as those of Pam Bondi posting all of the Epstein files on Bluesky. Also, while many of Mr. Kiley’s colleagues may dislike the upheaval, that doesn’t mean they agree on what to do about it.
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His bill “is not going to go anywhere, because you’re not going to get consensus,” Representative Doug LaMalfa, another California Republican whose seat is in danger, told me. Mr. LaMalfa thinks the federal government should keep its nose out of states’ electoral business. “It’s not up to us here to prescribe all that,” he said.
Mr. Kiley and Mr. LaMalfa both stress that this is a lousy use of political time and energy. If he were talking to the White House, Mr. LaMalfa said, he’d urge steering clear of redistricting altogether. “I’d be saying, ‘Look, man, this is just touching off a whole wave of unreliable elections, unreliable districts. Let’s just stand by the product that we have here.’” By which he means Republicans should focus on promoting the “big, beautiful” law and other achievements. “Nobody should be doing this middecade stuff,” he said. “It’s a bad deal.”
Of course, as Mr. Trump sees it, any deal that gives him what he wants is a good one. So if, in his quest to gerrymander a few more House seats in red states, some of his members in blue states wind up collateral damage, so be it. And as the president presses for more red states to join the fray, it becomes all the more vivid just how expendable he considers the other members of his political team, no matter how loyal or useful they have been. California’s vulnerable House Republicans are a diverse gaggle that includes new blood and old-timers, a Trump antagonist and a Trump lickspittle. But when the president starts rigging the system for his own benefit, no one is safe.
First elected in 2022, Mr. Kiley is the freshest face of the vulnerable Republicans. Ken Calvert, by contrast, is California’s longest-serving House Republican. For three-plus decades, he has presided over a stretch of the state’s Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. He has weathered the decline of the California Republican Party as well as multiple redistrictings.
Representative David Valadao has been through some things in the Trump era. In 2021, he was among the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach the president over the Jan. 6 horror. Today, Mr. Valadao is one of only two of that 10 still hanging on in the House.
Representing the 48th district, Darrell Issa is one of the president’s most smitten kittens. His recent cheerleading includes nominating Mr. Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
As for Mr. LaMalfa, since 2013, the fourth-generation rice farmer has represented California’s First District, a large, rural section of the state’s northeastern corner. Under the proposed map, this reliably red territory would be chopped into multiple Democratic-friendly segments.
As California Republicans lobby to save their seats, they are in a tricky spot. For starters, they can’t afford to look too self-interested. They need to keep their message focused on high-minded matters of democracy. “The consequence for particular representatives really shouldn’t be the main concern,” said Mr. Kiley. “We need a fair redistricting process for every state across the country in a way that really assures that voters are empowered rather than politicians.”
“In my home state, voters have affirmed on three different occasions that they don’t want redistricting in the grubby hands of legislators,” said Mr. LaMalfa. “We should support the constitutional mandate the people put in place.” His bottom line, he said: “I don’t want the actions of government to continue to erode people’s confidence or participation. The more disgusted they get, the more they just shut it off and say: ‘Those guys are all the same. They’re all a bunch of dirtbags.’”
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| A bearded man in a suit and tie stands in a House hearing room, with tables and chairs and an American flag. |
Representative Doug LaMalfaCredit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
“It fails the test of kindergarten logic that two wrongs don’t make a right,” said Mr. Kiley. “Just because we don’t like what’s happening in some other state, why should our own citizens pay the price for that?”
That all sounds reasonable, except … it feels more than a little rich for Republicans to be grumbling about a partisan power grab, seeing as how California Democrats are responding to what Texas Republicans did at Mr. Trump’s behest.
Here is where the political tap dancing starts to get fancy. “Whether it’s in direct response is somewhat debatable, in the sense that other states have gerrymandered as well, Democrat and Republican,” said Mr. Kiley. “You can say, ‘Well, New York actually did it last cycle, and Illinois is already crazily gerrymandered.’”
The House speaker has been more combative, pointing the finger straight at Eric Holder, President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, who now heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “They’ve been doing this for longer than a decade, OK?” Mr. Johnson recently told Punchbowl News. “And blue states have gerrymandered Republican representation entirely out — entirely. So both sides have some fault in this thing.”
Let us stipulate that neither party is blameless when it comes to gerrymandering. But what has supercharged this fresh round is the heavy-handed meddling by Mr. Trump. He has been shameless in prodding Republican state lawmakers to do his bidding, fallout be damned.
I asked Mr. Kiley if the fact that the White House had taken the redistricting fight national made it awkward for him to oppose it. Nope. As he sees it, the ongoing circus just drives home the need for a federal solution — which is precisely what he’s proposing.
“It could get to the point where we have rolling redistricting every cycle,” he warned. “We need to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”
Amen. Alas, for someone as hungry for control as Mr. Trump, enough is never enough.
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