Ari Berman has a dog-bites-man story about where the country is projected to stand after the 2022 elections. Yes, many longtime red states are experiencing a blue shift from demographic change and increasing diversity. Lucy McBath’s 2018 win in Newt Gingrich’s former U.S. House district and Senate wins by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof in Georgia are emblematic of that change. But are they durable? Not if the projected Republican minority has anything to say about it.
Berman writes:
Republicans could pick up anywhere from six to 13 seats in the House of Representatives—enough to retake the House in 2022—through its control of the redistricting process in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas alone, according to a new analysis by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart that was shared exclusively with Mother Jones. Republicans need to gain just five seats to regain control of the House.
The Republican redistricting advantage goes far beyond those four states: They’ll be able to draw 187 congressional districts, compared to 75 for Democrats. (The rest will be drawn by independent commissions or divided state governments.) But those states are at the highest risk of extreme gerrymandering, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and they have 94 seats, roughly a fifth of the House. Republicans could draw as many as five new GOP congressional districts in Florida alone, giving them control of the House by redrawing maps in just one state. They’re also likely to gain two to three seats through new maps in Texas, one to three in Georgia, and one to two in North Carolina, according to TargetSmart.
Having failed to win control of one legislative chamber over the last couple of elections, North Carolina Democrats can expect another decade Trump-style litigation over district lines. Republicans will draw legally objectionable maps and dare Democrats to challenge them. They will. In court. Republicans will push back, delay, delay, delay, and finally tweak maps just enough to tell the courts they did. Those new maps will still be unaccaptable to the court and judges will order them redrawn again. More delay. Until Republicans run out the clock on the decade and it’s time to redistrict again from scratch. Just like the last ten years.
Thus, did I vote in NC-10 in the 2016 primary and in NC-11 by the time November rolled around. In that time, the district line flipped over my house from the ridgetop to the west to the ridgetop to the east. It moved again by the 2020 election.
Republicans have admitted that gerrymandering is part of their plan to retake Congress, combined with the raft of new state legislation meant to deprive Americans of their freedom to vote and have their voices heard in state and federal legislatures.
Imagine Mensa-reject Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House in 2023 and tremble. Joe Biden can kiss goodbye the last two years of his presidency.
Democrats’ “best hope,” Berman continues, is passage of the sweeping For the People Act passed by the House and collecting dust in the 50-50 U.S. Senate. It would also ban many of the state-level voting restrictions in progress and on the books as well as end partisan gerrymandering.
A stripped-down version of the For the People Act proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) eliminated some of the voting protections from the original version of the bill but included the ban on partisan gerrymandering. This revised measure, which is expected to be formally introduced in the coming days, may have a better shot at passing the Senate, especially if moderate Democrats like Manchin are willing to create an exemption to the filibuster for this bill and allow passage with a simple majority. (So far, Manchin has said he opposes this exemption.) “At some point we’re going to get to a binary choice between protecting our democracy and protecting an arcane Senate procedure,” [former Obama AG Eric] Holder says of the filibuster. “At the end of the day, you’re not going to get 10 Republicans [to support the For the People Act]. This is something Democrats will have to pass.”
But that legislation will only make a difference on redistricting if enacted before the new maps take effect—giving Democrats a matter of weeks to act.
The Biden White House has said it believes Democrats can “out-organize voter suppression.” But out-organizing rigged districts is something else. “You can’t out-organize the dismantling of a multiracial district in the Atlanta suburbs. Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” says Michael Li of the Brennan Center.
Republican gerrymandering is likely to blunt the impact of demographic changes that should benefit Democrats. Nearly 75 percent of the growth in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas comes from communities of color, but virtually all the new seats drawn by the GOP are likely to be held by white Republicans. As many as six Democratic representatives of color could lose their seats in these four states, according to TargetSmart. “The future of America is multiracial coalitions, and Republicans will have an opportunity to kneecap that,” says Li.
Bottom line?
“A House controlled by one political party solely because of partisan gerrymandering,” Ohio State University law professor Ned Foley wrote recently on the Election Law Blog, “could make all the difference between the survival or death of American democracy.”
So while Republicans have joined a death cult vis-à-vis Covid and vaccines, Senate Democrats more committed to Senate traditions than to democratic ones risk presiding over the death of the republic if they sit on their hands much longer. They wanted a senator’s power. Will they use it to save the republic they swore to defend against enemies foreign and domestic?
And not just Democrats in the Senate. I wrote last week:
A frustrated President Abraham Lincoln once snidely commented on Gen. George B. McClellan’s reluctance to engage Confederate forces massed near Washington: “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time.”
One hundred fifty-nine years later, President Joe Biden declared the G.O.P.’s passage of laws restricting access to voting the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” The question is, Is Biden up to engaging in that fight? Or does he wish to be remembered like McClellan?
Biden will leave the Beltway to stump for his near-and-dear Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF). But will he rally public pressure to save the republic so he has one to lead beyond 2022? You’ve got weeks to act, Joe.
Watch this space until Republicans ban it.