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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17017 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Redistricting fight

It's been in the news that Trump is pushing for mid-decade redistricting. Yesterday, the Texas house approved a new map(https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/) which nets the GOP five seats- while not a done deal de jure, in Texas politics when something the republican party wants passes the house, it's as good as done. Texas has only in-person filibustering(that is, a filibuster in the Senate needs to talk the entire time), so democrats can't delay the map for weeks in the upper chamber.

Separately, Gavin Newsom is pushing for redistricting California to gain more seats for democrats(https://apnews.com/article/california-texas-redistricting-congressional-map-4c22e21d5d4022d33a257045693b6fd4). One problem: California law doesn't allow the legislature to unilaterally do this. They need voter approval to override their independent redistricting commission. As gerrymandering tends to be unpopular with actual voters, their odds are a lot worse than Texas'. Other solidly blue states like Colorado have the same issue that they can't actually gerrymander on short notice due to their 'independent' redistricting commissions.

Trump is going beyond Texas as he tries to ensure Republicans maintain their House majority. He’s pushed Republican leaders in states such as Indiana and Missouri to pursue redistricting. Ohio Republicans were already revising their map before Texas moved. Democrats, meanwhile, are mulling reopening Maryland’s and New York’s maps.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against. Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions and it's pretty clear that democrats will lose in an all-out war of redistricting.

Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions

Well, one formerly red state did. It turns out that "the Legislature" and "the People" in the U.S. Constitution mean the same thing (or so 5 Supreme Court justices thought).

It's worth reading Roberts' dissent if you enjoy that kind of thing. (starting at 2678 by the pagination on the left side).

Just over a century ago, Arizona became the second State in the Union to ratify the Seventeenth Amendment. That Amendment transferred power to choose United States Senators from "the Legislature" of each State, Art. I, § 3, to "the people thereof." The Amendment resulted from an arduous, decades-long campaign in which reformers across the country worked hard to garner approval from Congress and three-quarters of the States.

What chumps! Didn't they realize that all they had to do was interpret the constitutional term "the Legislature" to mean "the people"? The Court today performs just such a magic trick with the Elections Clause. Art. I, § 4. That Clause vests congressional redistricting authority in "the Legislature" of each State. An Arizona ballot initiative transferred that authority from "the Legislature" to an "Independent Redistricting Commission." The majority approves this deliberate constitutional evasion by doing what the proponents of the Seventeenth Amendment dared not: revising "the Legislature" to mean "the people."

To be clear, said legislatures are allowed to vest that power in an independent committee, right? Why was a ballot initiative even on the table?

Because the legislature refused to do it and voters pushed it through via the ballot measure.

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