The Texas Tripwire

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” While not nearly as famous as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” with these words, Jefferson established what would later become the United States of America as a country based on the rule of the people. This is precisely what gerrymandering subverts. It is a violation of the democratic principles this country was founded upon and purports to uphold, allowing politicians to tailor their constituents rather than for the people to elect their representatives. While both Democrats and Republicans have manipulated the boundaries of congressional districts in the past to gain a political advantage over the other, this “bipartisanship” by no means frees Texas from condemnation for their most recent gerrymandering efforts. This attempt is unprecedented and serves as a dire warning sign for the future of American democracy. 

This predicament began with a comment made by President Trump suggesting that Republicans are “entitled to five more seats” in Texas, as he won the state in the 2024 election. Soon after, Governor Greg Abbott convened a special legislative session to approve gerrymandered maps designed to give Republicans these additional seats. As a result, Democratic lawmakers in Texas left the state to break quorum, preventing the legislature from approving the redistricting. Despite this strategy having a long history in American political tradition, they face a wide range of penalties, including a five-hundred-dollar fine for each day of absence, and threats from Texas Republican leadership such as removal from office, bribery charges if they accept money to pay off their fines, and using the FBI to drag them back to Austin. 

Now some argue that gerrymandering is simply an accepted, albeit corrupting, practice in American politics that both sides implement to gain an advantage over the other, and furthermore, that there is a great deal of hypocrisy for these Democratic lawmakers to take refuge in Illinois, an incredibly gerrymandered state. And while gerrymandering in all contexts should be condemned, this situation is incomparable and unprecedented. Not only is Texas already one of the worst offenders of politically biased districts, even before the new map goes into effect, but it is also exceptionally rare for redistricting to occur outside of an updated census. The only other time this has happened (not accounting for maps declared unconstitutional by SCOTUS and thus updated to resolve this issue) was in Texas in 2003. But aside from compounding the already present Republican advantage, what makes this instance especially egregious is that the pressure came directly from the President of the United States, rather than being a product of state-level politics. In other words, this is yet another example of the Republican Party acquiescing to the demands of President Trump.

The Constitution explicitly outlined a system of separation of powers to avoid situations like these, both through the creation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches with their respective powers and through federalism, giving states a certain amount of independence over their internal affairs. Now the Trump administration has breached both. The legislative branch has shown time and time again, whether by approving abhorrently unqualified cabinet nominees such as Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. or through the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” that they can no longer serve as an effective check on the executive’s power. Never before had pressure from the President of the United States resulted in partisan gerrymandering, but because of the grip the administration holds over the entirety of the Republican party, the unthinkable is now a broken quorum away from passage. 

Both the lack of resistance to the Trump administration and the actual act of gerrymandering pose significant concerns for the state of the American republic, as both are signs of democratic backsliding, defined as “the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy” in Nancy Bermeo’s paper “On Democratic Backsliding.” The Texas redistricting effort is a stark example of executive aggrandizement and the strategic manipulation of elections, two of the hallmarks of modern democratic backsliding. Bermeo writes that “backsliding occurs when elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences.” And if the President of the United States and the Governor of Texas pushing redistricting efforts designed to keep their party in power don’t fit this definition to a T, then what does? Gerrymandering severely undermines the representativeness of our supposed representative government, and Democrats in Texas will now have their voice stripped from the political sphere. 

Perhaps even more concerning is the redistricting arms race Texas has the potential to set off, as there is an overall inability to stop this measure, aside from counter-gerrymandering. In 2019, the Supreme Court declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable issue in Rucho v. Common Cause, stating, “We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts. Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.” As such, there is no longer an avenue in the judicial branch to challenge Texas’ redistricting effort. Regardless of one’s thoughts of Rucho, the effect is that partisan gerrymandering must be dealt with only in the political sphere. And California has already vowed retribution if Texas goes through with this plan, promising to make up for the lost Democratic seats through their own partisan gerrymandering. 

While this appears to be the Democratic Party’s only option to combat this blatant injustice, it perpetuates, rather than ends, the fraught practice of gerrymandering. Nothing is stopping other Republican states from then redistricting to combat California’s plans, followed by more Democratic states responding in kind, creating a gerrymandering “arms race.” This presents a national problem of minority political parties in their respective states having their representation erased. In her dissent in Rucho, Kagan wrote that partisan gerrymandering "deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights” and that “the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.” In a vacuum, such statements should ring true regardless of which party is committing the offense. But it would be unfair to hold one party to a higher moral standard than the other, especially when both the Supreme Court and the Republican party have now legitimized this practice. When counter-redistricting is the only viable option to combat a perverse power grab, refusing to match Republican gerrymandering is sanctimonious. And Democrats are not the ones who have opened the floodgates. They must work within the system they have been confined to, before trying to reform it. As Texas State Representative James Talarico stated, “The goal is not for every state to be gerrymandered. The goal is ultimately to take politics out of this process because it is the rot at the core of our broken political system, but Democrats can’t unilaterally disarm. We have to stand up to bullies.”

This is especially true given that partisan redistricting has the potential to spread even further, depending on the outcome of Louisiana v. Callais, which will determine whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. If the conservative supermajority determines it is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, there is nothing stopping conservative Southern states from razing all of their majority-minority districts, eliminating nearly all Democratic representation in the South. 

Gerrymandering, especially this current instance, should not be waved away as simply an unpleasant part of American politics. It is a subversion of democratic principles and robs people of their voices in government. The Texas redistricting effort is particularly troubling due to its largely unprecedented nature and the Pandora’s box of further gerrymandering this has opened. And while counter-redistricting efforts further undermine the representativeness of districts across the country, past and upcoming Supreme Court decisions have ensured that the Democratic Party’s hands are tied. Only a bipartisan consensus abolishing this practice, formally declaring it outside the range of accepted political practices, can put this threat to American democratic institutions to rest.

DomesticAmelia CantwellComment