Of the House's 435 seats, roughly 60 are now deemed competitive. Republicans wield state-redistricting power over 187 seats; Democrats, 75. The Rs are already positioned to gain five seats in 2022 — an ominous number, given the current balance of 221 Democratic seats to Republicans' 213. To date, only a quarter of all seats have been redrawn.
Election subversion, election nullification or, most candidly, election theft by Republican state legislatures looms as the antidemocratic cauldron of 2024. Republican gerrymandering will do the earlier, dirty work in the midterms — although election subversion is sure to play its part in certain Senate elections: Georgia, specifically, we're looking at you.
Independent commissions in some states were to be the cure for partisan rigging of congressional district lines, and so far, in Colorado, for instance, it has come to pass. Elsewhere, independent commissions have fared less successfully. Last month in Virginia, to name one state, the independent panel gave up after near fisticuffs broke out. The panel turned the whole mess over to the state supreme court, which was the last thing the court wished to decide.
More common is Iowa, where Republican lawmakers threw out the initial map in favor of a second; each of the state's new districts — four in all — just happened to be carried by you-know-who in 2020. Or Ohio, where Republicans spit on the independent commission's map and proceeded to draw their own. Other commissions have been similarly abused, such as in Arizona and Michigan, where party-aligned lobbyists — organizing astroturf campaigns — have made a joke of the word "independent."
North Carolina deserves perhaps the most fiendish credit when it comes to gerrymandering. In 2011 the courts ordered the state to redraw its grotesquely designed "White" map. This month, the state reinstated it. For that, North Carolina's Republican lawmakers can thank Chief Justice John Roberts, who with his deciding vote in 2013, in the Shelby County v. Holder case, gutted the Voting Right Act's preclearance provision. Discriminatory skulduggery was a thing of the past, don't you know.
Not to be outdone by such witless indifference to American democracy, six years later the U.S Supreme Court ruled that the land's highest tribunal — the nation's alleged protector of constitutional rights — had no business, literally, interfering in states' rights to corrupt the bejesus out of U.S. congressional or any other districts. I haven't checked Ripley's latest Believe It or Not, but that is surely on page one.
Given all this rather well-known recent history, what's my point? I'll start with Wisconsin, where Republicans rule the state assembly with a 61 to 38 majority and 21 to 12 in the state Senate, even though in statewide elections, Democrats prevail. The state assembly has rejected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' People’s Maps Commission, and lawsuits are already flying in state and federal courts. As far as the latter goes, see: U.S. Supreme Court decision, 2019.
Anyway, a horde of worried citizens turned out for a public hearing on Wisconsin's freshly partisan redistricting by the Rs. An outside "protest," however, consisted only of an anti-gerrymandering group that gently offered symbolically sliced-up pizzas to the assembled crowd. It also offered speeches. Nothing more.
In Utah, where Republicans simply ignored an independent commission's proposals, one guy — one — a 36-year-old grad student, laid himself before the state capitol's doors in protest, where he was quickly handcuffed by a State Patrol officer. I repeat, since this is enormously, tellingly repeatable: just one guy showed up to inveigh, sort of, against Republicans' blunderbuss of redistricting.
Where Democrats control the process, they're doing the same, of course. The vital difference is that Democratic pols have consistently and uniformly stood for fair, nonpartisan redistricting.
Yet there's another vital difference between the parties. As Republican pols giddily hack away at whatever vestiges of fairness remained, with, obviously, the full support of their base, Democrats at large are taking it lying down — and not in the manner of that one Utah guy.
Were the national situation reversed, the Republican base would be swamping Democratic statehouses, perhaps in Jan. 6 style. Their outrage would be palpable, present and immensely pressing. Middle-class housewives would join AR-15-packing ruffians in wild and possibly violent protest, using Virginia's recent school board blowups as a guiding, though softer, template.
The opposition? It sits and reads the news or gawks at cable, shaking its head in despair. What can we do? Whatever can we do? For Christ's sake, people, the deployable template is staring you right in the face. It might not obstruct Republican gerrymandering everywhere or even anywhere. But it would exact a massive political toll and render the 2023 House, in the eyes of the larger public, illegitimate, undeserving and utterly worthless. It would, in short, be a start.
I know. Democrats. But one can dream. And who knows? Someday, the dream might materialize.