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Notes -
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.
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.
Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?
From my perspective, gerrymandered districts are an insult to the idea of representative democracy. I hope CA fails in its shenanigans. I hope we Texans find a spine. Failing that, it would be nice if our leadership could pander to anyone other than Trump.
But I know how much those hopes are worth.
What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand? The norm goes into the shredder when the first side defects, not when the patsy notices and finally decides to fight back.
To be fair, mid decade redistricting is, while definitely signaled well in advance, not very precedented.
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The part where it's not true. TX in particular is not gerrymander as aggressively as it could be (though it is still gerrymandered). The same is not true of, e.g., WI, NC, or OH.
Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered. The biggest limitation here is not "room" for gerrymandering, but legal constraints for doing so.
Uh, without some blatantly illegal actions, none of those three could be really any more gerrymandered than they already are. NY was a 57-43 D-R split last election, and yet splits seats 19-7 (76-24%), CA was a 60-40 split and yet seats are split 43-9 (82-18%), and WA was 57-43 splitting seats 8-2.
Conversely Texas was 58-40 with independents, and split seats 25-13 (66-34%).
The problem (and dirty secret) of the DNC in this whole dust up is they have no juice left to squeeze. Their biggest safe states are already gerrymandered as hell, and even friendly courts only bend so far. Gavin Newsome won't do shit because if he pushes harder he might get his already incredibly advantageous map thrown out for one that might more proportionately represent the voters.
To his credit though- he's not as cringe as the Connecticut democratic party and governor who are taking the high road on social media about how they are "avoiding partisan warfare". This conveniently glossed over the fact thst they have already achieved what is proportionally the most gerrymandered state in Amwrican history- the 42% of GOP voters gets exactly zero congress critters, a flawless victory.
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Characterizing Texas' current actions as "a patsy finally noticing and fighting back" is a-historical nonsense im afraid. Republicans have had their share of innovation in the gerrymandering space. See operation REDMAP.
Yes yes, and Phil Burton and Willie Brown were gerrymandering California - home of Reagan and Nixon - blue in the 1980s:
After the 1980 census California became entitled to 45 congressional districts, a growth of two.[4] Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature and the governorship but were feeling vulnerable after former Governor Reagan had won California by a landslide in the 1980 presidential election. Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton and new State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown devised a redistricting plan that would result in five new safe Democratic seats.[5] Congressman Burton would boast that the bizarrely shaped map, which included a 385-sided district, was "My contribution to modern art".[6] Reacting to what was called "one of the most notorious gerrymanders" of the decade,[7] Republicans successfully placed a veto referendum on the primary ballot and California voters overwhelmingly rejected the legislature's redistricting plans in the June 1982 election, the same election that enacted the California Constitution's Victim's Bill of Rights.[8]
A majority of the California Supreme Court justices, however, had been appointed by Governor Jerry Brown and a sharply fractured court ordered the rejected districts to be used in the November election because only it was "practicable".[9] Democrats won 60% of the congressional seats despite only taking 49.9% of the statewide vote.[10] Democrats still lost the statewide elections, losing the governorship and incumbent Governor Jerry Brown losing his U.S. Senate bid to San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Governor Brown responded by calling an extraordinary legislative session, amending a previously passed bill with the redistricting plan that had just been rejected by the electorate, and signing the redistricting plan into law hours before being replaced by Republican George Deukmejian.
That's arguably significantly worse than what the GOP is trying to pull now in Texas.
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You say that the Dems clearly started it. Others says the Reps clearly started it.
Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.
I read something on TheMotte that appears to be well-argued, some guy replies with what appears to be an equally compelling argument, and some other website has information that contradicts them both. My brain feels like it's going to explode. There is no hope.
The "he started it", "no HE started it" is almost always pointless if it goes back further than like 1 or 2 decades max. There will usually be some hidden counterexample that can always be trotted out by either side. If that's lacking, they can just pull out an example that's only tenuously related. E.g. say we lived in a world where we could all 100% agree that gerrymandering was initiated by Republicans in 1990; in this case R's could simply say they were responding to the "dirty tricks" the Dems were using in general, such as when they sank Bork's SCOTUS nomination in 1987.
It's more productive to focus on questions like 1) who's benefiting more, right now or in the recent past, and 2) which side is trying to escalate, right now or in the recent past.
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I'm really struggling not to read this comment as "without expending energy to assess the evidence, how can I find truth?" Or, alternatively "figuring things out is uncomfortably hard, therefore it can't possibly be done." Except that feels really uncharitable and I really hope that's not what you meant.
Yes, motivated argument and even honest disagreements exist. It's true of most things, not just politically/culturally controversial ones. That doesn't absolve you - or any of us! - of the burden of assessing things for yourself as best you can. What hope is there for democracy, the idea that common people can be trusted to manage their own affairs and be entrusted with political power, if the default attitude when confronted with dispute and contention is "welp, no way to determine who's right here, fuck it!" That's not the attitude of a citizen; it's the resigned fatalism of a slave.
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Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting. Sweep away the decades of bullshit. Make everyone fight for their seats.
Divorcing redistricting from the census is going in the wrong direction. It is strictly worse to have the winners of each election clamoring to entrench their lead. But Trump and Newsom think they can score some points by mashing the big Defect button, so that’s what we get. It’s like calling a snap election. It’s chicanery.
Several states have "independent" committees to draw district lines, but still manage to have drastic swings between party votes (let's use "votes for presidential candidate from each party" as a good, but imperfect proxy) and congressional representation. California comes to mind, but certainly isn't alone. I've even seen this defended with "but reds choose to live in dense blue areas, so we can't draw lines to create majority-red districts". Note that the Civil Rights Act requires, and we manage to generally, draw districts that are majority-minority (Q: if neighborhoods broadly ever become effectively non-segregated, can we throw up our hands and say this isn't possible?). The Louisiana SCOTUS case recently included peripheral questions about whether two disconnected historically-Black areas (one urban, one rural) could reasonably be drawn into the same district for this purpose.
Honestly, I've come to the opinion that in this day and age, good geographic district boundaries just aren't a solvable problem, and that we should probably move to proportional slates of candidates by state like some parliamentary systems do. This has its own problems, but I think if limited to one house of Congress would balance reasonably well. Pity that existing law disallows such schemes, I believe.
Good geographic district boundaries wouldn't matter if we expanded the House properly. The entire need to mess around with district borders is downstream of them being so huge that the decision has to be made, but fundamentally there's no good reason why the House shouldn't have a membership in the thousands, and it's the most straightforward solution we could have to a number of issues; it wouldn't require overturning SCOTUS precedents, it wouldn't require overturning CRA district rules (the smaller districts would be easy to make compliant), we wouldn't have to spend years in a domestic political fight about whether Americans would go for multi-member districts, and so on.
I mean other than that congress would get even less done with thousands of members? I think the size limit is needed simply because there’s no way that a 3000 member house is going to get any useful work done. 500 members is already pretty big, and the current congress hasn’t passed a proper budget in over a decade. Adding more people to the body isn’t going to fix the inertia.
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One of my more unhinged pet ideas for the house is that the the main problem with Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard's theorem are the requirements for a deterministic process.
In my fantasy each voter would be able to nominate one person to serve in the House for a two year term. You would then select 2,500 ballots to establish the house for the next two years, continuing to select random ballots one at a time in the case of duplicates. No one would be guaranteed incumbency, so you couldn't trade as much on future electoral success. Very popular politicians would still be more likely but not guaranteed a spot, so they would also have to maintain a real job or do a good enough job to maintain influence even when not in power. With a 2,500 strong body crazies should be a small enough minority, on an given issue, to be safely ignored. And if the sample is random you would have enough statistical representation to match the populace to within 1% on any given topic, even tighter if things are not 50/50. The idea would be that the majority go back to their regular life after serving.
Leave the institutional knowledge building and statesmanship to the Senate.
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Article going into detail on this topic
I enjoyed the charming quaintness of the argument that expanding the House to 11,000 people would require fewer, not more, staffers to keep up with the magnitudes more institutional relationships such a reorganization would imply.
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I'll admit that that was exactly the article I was thinking of; I rounded off the 11,000 member proposal just for convenience's sake, even though it probably shouldn't scare anyone here.
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