Democrats are changing maps of congressional districts in order to wipe out Republicans in Congress. While it’s atrocious, they are getting away with it since the Founding Fathers did not anticipate this level of cheating, so failed to place checks against it in the Constitution.
The Supreme Court cannot step in and end the practice because they determined in 2019 that it is a nonjusticiable political question prohibiting judicial intervention; the Founding Fathers assigned redistricting to state legislatures with oversight by Congress under the Elections Clause.
How did we get to this situation? California just rigged its congressional seats to massively favor Democrats. Democrats currently hold 43 of 52 congressional seats in California, but the move gives them four or five more. They did this by taking away power from the independent redistricting commission and giving it to the Democratic-controlled California State Legislature instead. It was accomplished through the Orwellianly named “Election Rigging Response Act,” a proposition passed by voters who likely thought they were voting for the opposite.
Election integrity investigator Shiloh Marx, who has been getting inactive voters removed from voter rolls, noted that Prop. 50 won by 3.1 million votes, about the same number of voters he got removed.
Three other states are also heavily pushing to get more Democratic representation. In Virginia, Democrats are proposing a map that would flip two to four seats their way. In Maryland, Democrats are in discussions to eliminate the only Republican-leaning seat. In Utah, a court-imposed map shifted a seat to Democrats.
Utah Sen. Daniel McCay slammed Third District Court Judge Dianna Gibson for the decision on X. “Judge Gibson took 76 single spaced pages to justify ignoring plain language of the Utah Constitution,” he posted. “Could Judge Gibson be the first judicial removal for ignoring the Utah Constitution that she took an oath to uphold?” He included a screenshot of the Utah Constitution, which gives the power to the Utah Legislature to draw congressional maps.
Gibson rejected the Republican-controlled legislature’s map, accepting instead an alternative map submitted by two left-wing plaintiffs who had sued over the map, the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government. Citing Utah’s newly passed Proposition 4, which requires fair redistricting, Gibson said the legislature’s map was an "extreme partisan outlier" and "unduly favoring Republicans.” However, Utah’s four congressional seats are already held by Republicans! The Democrats’ map gives Democrats a strong chance to flip one of those four seats in the 2026 midterms.
Democratic legislators in Virginia are pursuing a constitutional amendment to take away authority to redraw maps from the bipartisan Virginia Redistricting Commission and put it under the Democratic-controlled legislature. Their proposed map targets four Republican-held seats, likely leaving only one seat in Virginia Republican leaning. The measure is scheduled to be on the ballot on April 21, after the Virginia Supreme Court rejected a challenge to disqualify it.
A proposed map in Maryland would eliminate the only seat out of eight that favors Republicans, giving Democrats all eight congressional seats. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore relaunched the Governor's Redistricting Advisory Commission, which recommended the partisan map. It was adopted by the Democratic-controlled Maryland House of Delegates. Previous attempts to change the map to eliminate the last Republican seat have been struck down by courts, which is why the bill hasn’t advanced through the Maryland Senate yet.
Republicans are combating the sleazy maneuvers by conducting redistricting of their own. In July, President Donald Trump urged Republican states to take the unusual step of redrawing the maps mid-decade. Texas generated a map that could flip up to five seats to Republicans. A rogue court struck it down, falsely calling the map racial gerrymandering, but the Supreme Court granted the map a temporary stay, citing reasons such as the lower court’s decision being issued too close to elections. The appeal is ongoing in the lower courts.
Common sense dictates that representatives should be chosen by voters fairly. Redistricting congressional maps so only Democrats win races destroys our constitutional republic. The Founding Fathers must be rolling over in their graves, wishing in hindsight they had anticipated this problem and accounted for it in the Constitution. The word gerrymandering didn’t emerge until 1812, when a Boston newspaper combined Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry's name, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Constitutional Convention delegate, and later Vice President under James Madison, with "salamander" to describe a bizarrely shaped state senate district drawn to favor his Democratic-Republican Party.
The Founding Fathers could have been aware of some of the problem, but did not anticipate how bad it would become. Scholars differ over whether there was minor gerrymandering immediately after the Constitution was adopted, when Patrick Henry helped draw Virginia's districts to place James Madison with his political rival James Monroe in the same district, as an attempt to keep Madison out of Congress. Madison won anyway and went on to push for the Bill of Rights.
Historian Thomas Rogers Hunter argued that it wasn’t gerrymandering, since the district was compact, consisting of contiguous whole counties in the Piedmont region, bounded by natural geographic features.
It’s unfortunate that the Right has been forced to adopt the Left’s tactics in order to fight back. We all condemned Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for years, but now we’re using many of them ourselves. We ridicule and pick targets — gone are the days of civil discourse under the late William F. Buckley Jr. Using these aggressive tactics is our last gasp hope to save the Republic.
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