THEY STOPPED PRETENDING: THE YEAR BOTH PARTIES BURNED THE MAP

FACT: Gerrymandering is old. What happened in 2025 was not.

The convention, for two centuries, was that maps were redrawn once a decade after the census, and that whoever redrew them claimed to be pursuing compactness, communities of interest, or the Voting Rights Act. The rigging was real and the pretext was mandatory. Both halves of that arrangement collapsed inside twelve months.

In summer 2025, at the president’s request, the Texas legislature redrew its congressional map mid-decade — no census, no new population data, no pretext — with the explicit, stated goal of producing five additional Republican seats. The map passed on August 23. A federal district court in El Paso found it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In April 2026 the Supreme Court reversed that ruling and let the map take effect.

California’s answer was worse, and it is important that a non-partisan site says so plainly. California had an independent redistricting commission — the exact reform good-government groups had spent a generation fighting for, won at the ballot box, and held up as the model. Facing Texas, California’s leadership suspended it, passed a legislature-drawn map, and ratified it by ballot measure on November 4, 2025. The new plan is projected to yield Democrats 47 seats instead of 41.

California suspended the independent commission its own voters had spent years winning. That is not hypocrisy; it is disarmament in reverse.

Then it spread, exactly as you would expect once the norm was gone. Missouri in the autumn. Ohio’s commission in October. Florida in early 2026 by special session. Utah and North Carolina too. The Congressional Research Service notes what makes this possible: nothing in the Constitution or federal law prohibits redrawing congressional maps mid-decade. The only thing that ever stopped it was that it wasn’t done.

Understand what this means mechanically. If maps can be redrawn at any time, then any party that wins a state legislature can re-cut that state’s congressional delegation before the next election — and the party that doesn’t retaliate simply loses seats it would otherwise hold. There is no stable equilibrium in which one side unilaterally refrains. Every actor is now correctly incentivised to redraw continuously, forever.

OPINION: The seductive response to all this is that your side was provoked, and it is worth noticing how completely that framing has been engineered. Texas moved first; California burned the best reform in the country to answer it; both can point at the other; and the voter — whose district may now change between elections, whose representative may be chosen for them a year in advance — is invited to be furious at the other party rather than at the arrangement.

Here is the part that should be genuinely alarming to anyone, regardless of where they sit. A gerrymander is not a policy you disagree with. It is a device for making your disagreement irrelevant. It converts an election from a question into a formality, and it does so before a single vote is cast. The Supreme Court declined to stop it. Congress will not, because Congress is its beneficiary. That leaves the states — where independent commissions still exist in some places, where ballot initiatives are still possible in others, and where the people who suspended one commission this year are on a ballot themselves.