When 87 Percent Isn't Enough

On Wednesday, a judge in Annapolis handed Maryland Democrats a rare loss in a year when they usually get whatever they draw up. Democrats already hold seven of the state's eight congressional seats, 87.5 percent of the delegation, and Gov. Wes Moore called a special session in August hoping to grab the last one too. The judge said not so fast, at least for the November ballot. The state filed its appeal within hours. This fight is not over. But the ruling is worth sitting with, because it says something true about how power actually behaves. It never volunteers to share.

I've spent 30-plus years advising people on their fiduciary duty, the legal obligation to act in someone else's interest even when it costs you something. Legislatures drawing their own district lines carry no such duty. They answer to nobody but the next election, and the next election is exactly what they're trying to rig.

Maryland's actual problem isn't underrepresentation. Trump pulled roughly 34 percent of the presidential vote there in 2024, and Larry Hogan, a popular former governor, took nearly 43 percent of the Senate vote the same year. That's not a fringe. That's a third of the state that gets exactly one voice in the U.S. House, Andy Harris in the 1st District, because his seat sits far enough from Baltimore and Annapolis that Democrats haven't yet figured out how to crack it. The blocked amendment would have let Maryland draw a new map that jumps the Chesapeake Bay to swallow Harris's district whole. The judge called the ballot language “intentionally misleading” and ruled the amendment violated the state constitution's single-issue requirement. Translation: nice try.

Maryland isn't unique. Republicans hold zero House seats in Massachusetts, where they still pull about a third of the statewide vote and can't crack a single one of nine districts because Republican voters are spread too thin to win anywhere. The same math plays out in Connecticut, Hawaii, Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, and New Mexico. Some of that is honest geography. Brookings found that in states with only one U.S. House seat, an average of 37 percent of voters back the losing party every time, because there's only one line to draw. I'll give Democrats that much. But Maryland has eight seats to work with. There was plenty of room for one competitive district. They went to court to erase it anyway.

Here's the part I actually respect, in a keep-your-enemies-closer kind of way. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering claims are political questions federal courts can't touch, a case that, fittingly, was consolidated with a Maryland challenge brought by Republicans who said their own map had been rigged against them. That decision gets blamed for a lot of the current mess. Texas redrew five seats toward Republicans last year; a federal panel in El Paso called it a racial gerrymander. But the Supreme Court put that ruling on ice so the Republican map could run in 2026 anyway. California countered with five extra Democratic seats of its own. Missouri and North Carolina piled on for the GOP. But Rucho also means the only venue left for a real check is exactly the one that fired on Maryland this week: a state court applying its own state constitution. That's federalism doing its job, even when the result makes one side furious.

I ran the high hurdles in high school and college. Nobody ever let me move the hurdles closer together in the other guy's lane because I got tired of losing. That's the entire pitch behind Maryland's amendment. My lane is too competitive, so let me redraw the track. House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk says lawmakers remain confident and that Maryland voters should have the final say. Fine. Let them vote on a ballot question that doesn't lie about what it actually does, which is precisely what the judge just required.

To be sure, Republicans aren't running a charity operation either. Texas built its map for the same reason Maryland wrote its amendment, to keep power by drawing the other side out of existence, and a federal court found real evidence that race, not just politics, drove the lines before the Supreme Court let the map proceed on a stay anyway. Nobody's hands are clean here. The difference this week is that a Maryland judge, not the U.S. Supreme Court, drew a hard line and made it stick, at least until Maryland's own high court weighs in.

So, what actually fixes this? Not a federal law banning gerrymandering. Congress writing the rules for how Congress gets elected is asking the fox to reroof the henhouse. The real fix is what just happened in Annapolis: state constitutions with real teeth, state courts willing to enforce them, and voters who show up to referenda instead of letting legislatures rewrite the rules in an August special session nobody's watching. More than a dozen states are mid-fight on new maps right now, some pushed by Republicans and some by Democrats, and every one of them is a live test of whether the guardrails hold.

Maryland Democrats already have 87 percent of the map, and the Oversight Project called Wednesday's ruling “complete and total vindication.” If 87 percent isn't enough for the party that already owns it, no percentage ever will be. The rest of us, in every state where one party owns the whole board, should be paying closer attention than we currently are.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.

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