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In a functioning democracy, people, not politicians, choose their representatives. But as Republicans in Texas have radically redrawn their electoral maps at the command of President Trump, it is becoming painfully clear that our democracy is under siege from within.
We are accelerating toward an autocracy where, if Trump and his allies get their way, MAGA Republicans will pick their voters and radically reshape the balance of power in Congress.
That’s why California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has taken national Republicans head-on with the introduction of Proposition 50, the Election Rigging Response Act, a legislative package that would give the state “a new, temporary Congressional map, in response to the congressional redistricting in Texas, that neutralizes Trump’s power grab.”
This fight against the Republican Party isn’t new. Long before the MAGA movement, the Republican Party engaged in an aggressive and unapologetic attempt to entrench political control without majority support.
In Wisconsin in 2011, for instance, state legislators drew maps that were so skewed that by 2018, “Republicans won 46 percent of the statewide vote but 64 percent of the seats in the state assembly.”
This strategy is part of a broader anti-democratic movement, stretching back to Jim Crow and supercharged by Trump’s lies, that seeks to lock out a rapidly diversifying electorate from meaningful representation in our government. This form of authoritarianism is structured so that one party, regardless of its support among the electorate, can maintain a long-term stranglehold on power.
If successful, this latest attempt to reshape the country’s political landscape would allow a small minority the opportunity to pass laws that large majorities of Americans oppose.
This includes policies that gut checks on corporate power, strip women of their right to choose, allow polluters to pour poison into our rivers and prevent the LGBTQ community from being able to live freely and openly.
All of this could be accomplished through gerrymandering designed to further limit Black, Latino and other historically marginalized communities representation in government.
And so, Democrats face a choice. Confronted with this cynical weaponization of district lines to lock in political dominance for Trump and his allies, are Democrats morally and politically compelled to fight fire with fire, like Newsom?
The answer must be yes.
If the Republican Party is willing to rig the system so voters do not choose their representatives, then the immediate way to preserve democracy, and our Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government, is to do the same.
If Republicans force the Democrats to engage in aggressive counter-gerrymandering, the country risks becoming even more of a mosaic of uncompetitive districts.
Primaries could become the only elections that matter, with members of Congress functionally selected by a tiny, sometimes extreme, sliver of the hundreds of thousands of people they’re supposed to represent.
And more voters will feel shut out of their government, their voices silenced and their votes meaningless, all because of Trump and his allies. That includes the Roberts Supreme Court. We have arrived at this critical juncture, in large part, because the court abdicated its responsibility.
In its 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, the court had a golden opportunity to declare partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional, just as it had done with racial gerrymandering. Instead, the conservative majority declared the issue to be “nonjusticiable,” arguing that federal courts have no role in policing what they deemed an inherently political process.
That green light emboldened state legislatures to push through some of the most extreme gerrymanders in modern history, disproportionately harming Black voters.
In Louisiana in 2021, for example, where about 33 percent of the voting-age population is Black and 58 percent is white, the state Republican leadership created a map with just one Black-majority district out of six.
Given the state’s starkly polarized voting, that effectively confines Black voters’ electoral influence to roughly 17 percent of seats while white voters decide the other 83 percent.
Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in Rucho was a prescient warning. The court, she wrote, had betrayed its responsibility to defend the “foundation” of our democracy and given license to a practice that would “imperil our system of government.”
She predicted that the decision would exacerbate polarization and entrench a system where power would shift to a small faction of the population. Her prediction has proven to be devastatingly accurate.
The ideal solution is to create nonpartisan, independent commissions that draw district lines fairly, taking the power away from self-interested politicians. But that goal feels impossibly distant in our current political climate.
House Democrats have advanced three bills in recent years that would require nonpartisan redistricting, only to see them die quietly at Senate Republicans’ hands.
As Republicans aggressively gerrymander to cement their power and silence the voices of large swaths of our electorate, the only short-term strategy for preserving American democracy is for Democrats to counter-gerrymander. Launching this dangerous arms race is a morally compelled act of self-defense for democracy itself.
The MAGA attempt to cement minority rule is an existential threat to our democracy. The onus is now on our political leaders to stop this descent into autocracy now.
Our democracy is premised on the idea that voters should pick their representatives — not the other way around.
Norman Eisen is the executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund and the publisher of The Contrarian. Gabe Lezra is Democracy Defenders Fund’s policy and advocacy director, and Diamond Brown is its senior counsel.
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