Mike Johnson. the Home Speaker, will quickly have the problem of main a three-seat Republican majority. He has an attention-grabbing idea about why the Republican edge will likely be so slender. Final week, on Fox Information, he blamed Democratic gerrymandering.
Whereas it’s at all times a pleasant shock to listen to a Republican chief categorical concern in regards to the evils of gerrymandering, Johnson has the information and the mathematics fully backwards.
The reality is the alternative: Republicans drew the district traces of practically 3 times as many US Home seats as did Democrats – 191 to 71. Republicans gerrymandered greater than 3 times as many seats than Democrats. They began from a place of energy after drawing historic gerrymanders in 2011 that lasted a decade in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina. And the Republicans’ gerrymandered benefit was preserved and guarded by the Republican supermajority on the US supreme court docket.
Johnson is true about one factor: he holds the speakership due to gerrymandering – however due to the election rigging carried out by his personal facet.
The Republican social gathering’s three-seat majority wouldn’t exist in any respect with out a new, mid-decade gerrymander in North Carolina that gift-wrapped the Republicans the three further seats that made the distinction. Earlier than the Republican-controlled state supreme court docket upended North Carolina’s congressional map, the purple state elected seven Democrats and 7 Republicans. (When Democrats managed the court docket, they mandated a good map, not a Democratic one; when Republicans took over, the gerrymander returned.)
And what occurred after the newly-seated Republican court docket destroyed the balanced map and returned it to the Republican legislature to be tilted in its route? The brand new map produced 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. Many consultants imagine it might but elect 11 Republicans and three Democrats. The gerrymander handed Johnson the three seats that made him speaker. With out it, Democrats would possibly even management the Home.
Johnson, fairly merely, couldn’t be any extra unsuitable. Each events definitely gerrymandered the place they may. However Republicans had the facility to gerrymander much more districts in much more locations.
General, in line with the nonpartisan Brennan Middle for Justice at New York College regulation faculty, all of it provides as much as a 16-seat edge for Republicans nationwide. “The bias on this cycle’s maps strongly favors Republicans due primarily to aggressive gerrymandering in GOP strongholds within the South and Midwest,” a Brennan report concludes.
There are not any redistricting angels. The US supreme court docket made certain of that with their 2019 determination in Rucho v Frequent Trigger, which closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering instances at precisely the time when lower-court judges appointed by each events had discovered the instruments they wanted to find out when partisan gerrymanders went too far.
However when the Republican court docket ended the potential of a nationwide resolution, it launched a sport of mutual assured destruction: the Republican social gathering constructed its benefits in state legislature and Congress all through the 2010s by way of redistricting. With no hope of assist from impartial courts in leveling tilted taking part in fields in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and elsewhere, Democrats have been left with little selection however to maximise gerrymanders of their very own. That is horrible for voters. It’s unhealthy for democracy. Typically it’s even hypocritical. But doing nothing whereas Republican gerrymanders run wild isn’t a greater technique and presents no ethical victory.
So in 2021, Democrats turned a 13-5 map in Illinois right into a 14-3 edge, gaining one seat and wiping away two from the Republicans. (Illinois misplaced a member in reapportionment.) Democrats additionally helped themselves to an extra seat in Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico, and retained their gerrymander of Maryland. This yr, a court-ordered redistricting in New York resulted in a single further Democratic seat, and mildly strengthened a handful of others, every by not more than a proportion level. (Just one flip in New York this cycle could be attributed to redistricting.)
These are the one gerrymanders Johnson desires you to find out about. The reality is that they’re dwarfed by what Republicans did themselves.
Begin in Florida, the place Ron DeSantis, the governor, oversaw an aggressive and sure unconstitutional gerrymander that netted the Republican social gathering 4 further seats, wiped away two traditionally Black districts and created a wildly disproportional 20-8 Republican delegation.
The North Carolina gerrymander added three extra seats. This was hardball politics to the core: nationwide Republicans deeply wired into Leonard Leo’s court-packing, billion-dollar darkish cash entity helped fund the takeover of North Carolina’s state supreme court docket. The brand new Republican majority rapidly did the nationwide social gathering’s soiled work and overturned a year-old determination that created the balanced 7-7 map and enabled the Republican state legislature to radically tilt it towards Republicans.
Florida and North Carolina alone account for extra Republican gerrymanders than Democratic ones. They don’t cease there.
Republicans gerrymandered two further seats in Texas, creating an unbalanced 25-13 Republican delegation. In Ohio, Republicans lawlessly stiff-armed the state supreme court docket not as soon as, not twice, however seven occasions to protect gerrymanders of the state’s legislature and congressional delegation. A federal court docket full of Federalist Society and Leonard Leo acolytes allowed them to get away with it.
Republican judges equally abused the authorized course of to permit Wisconsin to get away with its congressional gerrymander which awards the Republican social gathering a 6-2 edge within the final swing state. The US supreme court docket slow-walked instances on racial gerrymandering, which additionally accrued, unsurprisingly, to the Republicans’ profit.
In Tennessee, the Republican social gathering wiped a Democratic seat in Nashville off the map by cracking the blue metropolis in half and attaching small items to conservative, rural districts. They performed comparable tips with swing seats in Salt Lake Metropolis, Oklahoma Metropolis and Indianapolis, and bolstered a Republican seat in Omaha, Nebraska, swapping suburban areas for extra Republican, rural ones. It would effectively have tipped Democratic this yr in any other case.
Republican hardball with Iowa’s redistricting fee added one other seat. In Arizona, Republicans didn’t trouble taking part in video games in any respect; they merely hijacked all the course of by taking up an obscure state board that vets the commissioners and packing the sector of supposedly unbiased chairs with longtime partisans, family and friends of Republican management, and enterprise acquaintances. Arizona now constantly sends a 6-3 Republican-dominated delegation to Washington, even in years the place Democrats all however sweep statewide workplaces.
Mike Johnson doesn’t need to admit it, however Republican gerrymanders are the one cause he’ll wield the gavel for one more time period.
Whether or not Democrats ought to management the chamber is a trickier query; Republican candidates did win 4 million extra votes nationwide. But the “nationwide in style vote” for the Home is a statistic that has additionally been distorted and made meaningless by gerrymandering. Uncompetitive gerrymandered seats generate weak opposition and decrease voter turnout. Practically all of that bulge comes from states the place gerrymanders gutted aggressive elections and created Republican delegations wildly disproportionate to the presidential vote: Florida, Texas, Ohio and North Carolina.
Honest maps and aggressive contests in these Republican and blended states – moderately than districts rigged so one facet comes away with three-quarters of the seats in a 50/50 state – would make the “in style vote” look fully totally different. (It’s, after all, equally thrilling to see Republican leaders speak in regards to the in style vote as it’s to listen to them talk about gerrymandering issues.) Nobody would have a look at the ends in nations the place district traces have been so drastically warped and counsel that they mirror the need of the folks. We shouldn’t both.
Johnson’s gaslighting, nonetheless, in all probability has a deeper function. He could be laying the groundwork for a Republican bundle to vary how we vote. What if the Republican social gathering superior a bundle of redistricting “reforms” that truly reverberated to their benefit – say, ending any consideration of race, counting inhabitants primarily based on citizenship moderately than all residents, requiring congressional districts to be drawn by the legislature and never an unbiased fee, and making it harder to problem maps within the courts? Or in the event that they required prioritizing “compactness”, which might naturally pack Democratic voters in a handful of city districts and profit the social gathering that’s unfold out extra effectively?
We dwell in a gerrymandered nation twisted into extremism by one facet as wanting to warp the map as they’re to guard their ill-won positive aspects. And each time you assume it may well’t worsen, or tougher to beat, Johnson’s mistruths counsel that it very a lot nonetheless can.
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