Texas GOP Hopes to Redraw Congressional Map And Keep Control Of U.S. House

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Speaker 3 It's a fact of life everywhere, isn't it? Even in the Midwest. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.
I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.

Speaker 4 I'm Hansi LeWong. I cover redistricting.

Speaker 5 And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

Speaker 3 Today on the show, several states could get new congressional districts before next year's midterm elections, and that could end up determining which party controls the U.S. House going forward.

Speaker 3 Hansi, we're going to start with Texas, where state lawmakers are meeting for a special session there. The agenda includes redistricting.

Speaker 3 Why does the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, want lawmakers to redraw their state's congressional map?

Speaker 4 The short answer is: Republicans in Texas are playing pure hard politics. They control the governor's office, they control the state legislature, so they control map drawing.

Speaker 4 And that is usually a once-a-decade process. It happens right after census results come out.

Speaker 4 But this month, you have the Republican Party of Texas putting out a statement that says doing another round of redistricting now, five years before the next census, is, quote, an essential step to preserving GOP control in Congress.

Speaker 4 And going back to your question, the longer answer here is that Governor Abbott says he received a letter this month from a Trump appointee at the Justice Department making claims about four of Texas's 38 districts that Republican lawmakers drew back in 2021.

Speaker 3 So wait, he's openly saying that there's a partisan objective here?

Speaker 4 You have the Republican Party of Texas saying that.

Speaker 3 So Abbott says there are these four districts where there's an issue. I mean, what is the concern here, Hansi?

Speaker 4 You know, this is from, again, again, concerns raised by this letter that a lot of legal experts are skeptical of.

Speaker 4 They claim that these four districts violate the Constitution because they are allegedly racially gerrymandered.

Speaker 4 Really, this letter is echoing arguments that Republicans in other states have been trying to make at the Supreme Court to get key remaining parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down.

Speaker 4 I'm talking about protections against racial discrimination and redistricting, protections against maps drawn in ways that would weaken the collective power of minority voters in areas where voting is racially polarized and would prevent minority voters from electing their preferred candidate.

Speaker 4 But putting all that aside, the bottom line here is that Texas Republicans do not need a legal justification to re-redistrict for Congress right now in the middle of the decade.

Speaker 4 They've done it before after the 2000 census, and now you have President Trump also saying he wants a new map for Texas, that he thinks he can get Republicans five more House seats.

Speaker 5 You know, the Constitution gives state legislatures the right to be able to redraw districts throughout the country, and the Supreme Court has said that partisan gerrymandering done exclusively based on,

Speaker 5 you know, whether or not a district's too Democratic or too Republican or not enough one way or the other, that is perfectly legal. What is not legal is racial gerrymandering.

Speaker 5 When you say, I'm going to put African Americans in this one district and I'm going to take this other ethnic group and put them here, That is not the way they're supposed to look at it.

Speaker 5 Of course, it's a very fine line when you start digging deeply into the fact that some racial groups, like black voters, overwhelmingly lean Democratic.

Speaker 5 So you can certainly racially gerrymander in practice while saying that it's something that you're doing for partisan purposes.

Speaker 3 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And it could be hard to determine where is that line. Is this a racial gerrymander? Is this a partisan gerrymander or some combination of the two?

Speaker 3 I mean, Hansi, we've said Texas isn't the only state that could get new districts in the coming months. There are lawsuits in a handful of other states that could lead to new maps as well.

Speaker 3 You mentioned that this is something that happens after every census, redistricting, but why are we seeing all these efforts now?

Speaker 4 You know, it's not unusual for some congressional maps to get caught up in lawsuits that drag on for years. And this decade, there are different types of legal issues involved in the various lawsuits.

Speaker 4 I'm tracking five cases over congressional maps in the South, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North and South Carolina. And there are cases in Utah and Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 And depending on what courts decide in their timing, those states may or may not have to draw new maps before the midterm election next year.

Speaker 4 I should note also, Ohio has to draw a new map because of a state law. But what is notable this decade is that this is the first redistricting cycle since the Supreme Court struck down.

Speaker 4 key protections under the Voting Rights Act back in 2013 that would have required certain states with a history of racial discrimination to get their maps approved by the Justice Department or federal court.

Speaker 4 That's a pre-clearance program that has effectively been dismantled by the Supreme Court's conservative majority.

Speaker 4 And that has unleashed some state lawmakers to try to draw and redraw maps in ways that courts in the past may not have allowed.

Speaker 5 And let's be real here. I mean, this is about trying to get control of the House.

Speaker 5 I mean, there is such a narrow margin right now that one seat here or there can really make a big difference, which is why this is so important and why we're starting to see Democrats say that they need to be doing this in their states.

Speaker 3 How are Democrats fighting back?

Speaker 5 What happened was back in 2006, Republicans wound up getting crushed in those midterm elections because of the Iraq War, because of some ethics issues.

Speaker 5 And they were able to win a ton of state legislative seats and then win over unified control of a lot of legislatures.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, on the other side, you had this movement among a lot of Democrats to come up with independent commissions to try to draw states more evenly.

Speaker 5 But given that that had happened, Republicans were able to win over a whole lot more seats than Democrats were able to do.

Speaker 5 And now we have a sort of going back to a little bit of a ground zero where now you have Democrats saying in many states that they want to be able to more gerrymander in their districts to try to win back the House.

Speaker 5 I mean, place like California, California Governor Gavin Newsom said that he's potentially thinking about doing that, which would go around a commission that they had to do this in a nonpartisan way.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so a bit of a shift there for Democrats. I want to talk more about that in a moment, but first we're going to take a quick break.

Speaker 4 We'll be back.

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Speaker 3 And we're back.

Speaker 3 Domenico, you were talking about what feels like kind of a shift for Democrats who seem to be kind of trying to play the same game with gerrymandering that Republicans have played for a long time.

Speaker 3 Why?

Speaker 5 I think that there's a split in the Democratic Party, and it's not between progressives and moderates. It's between moderation and fighting, you know, moderation and pugilism, if you will.

Speaker 5 Because in this era of Trump, I think there's a lot of Democrats, especially younger Democrats, who feel like the older generation has gotten steamrolled by trying to operate within the quote-unquote norms.

Speaker 5 And they kind of roll their eyes at this idea that, oh, it would be hypocritical to try to do this or it'd be the wrong thing. A lot of

Speaker 5 younger operatives or even people who are just looking at the situation with Trump and all of the things that Trump's allies are willing to do, that they feel like they'd be fighting with...

Speaker 5 their hands tied behind their back and they're not interested in doing that anymore.

Speaker 5 And to be able to win, they want to be able to to utilize any and all of the levers at their disposal to be able to try to compete.

Speaker 3 So last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, somebody who of course has a lot of stake in Democrats picking up seats in the House, had this warning for Republicans about Texas's redistricting effort.

Speaker 8 Donald Trump has ordered Texas Republicans to try to produce five additional seats. In doing so, they will jeopardize their own electoral careers.

Speaker 3 He says they'll jeopardize their own careers. I mean, what's the argument there?

Speaker 4 You know, there is a risk here of Republicans in Texas overreaching because map makers in this special session may be making some out-of-date assumptions about where voters are in Texas and how they vote.

Speaker 4 This new map is going to be based on census data from five years ago. And that is a long time for a state that's changing demographically as much as Texas is.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, imagine a district that you draw to protect an incumbent, and it's like 58% conservative, 42% Democratic.

Speaker 5 And then now, in order to get another couple of seats potentially, you make it a district that's maybe 53, 47 or 52, 48.

Speaker 5 Well, in a wave year, all of those seats could potentially drop the other direction. And that would be a big problem and really backfire on Republicans if that were to happen.

Speaker 5 And as Hansi says, Texas is one of those states that continues to grow, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where you're seeing just a tremendous growth in population and, frankly, a lot more Democrats that are there in the suburbs.

Speaker 3 You know, Hansi, lawsuits seem to be a common response to new maps. Is it likely that the redrawn Texas map will also end up in litigation?

Speaker 4 Yes, it's something I'm watching for. And there are questions about whether this new map that Republicans in Texas want to pass would potentially violate the Voting Rights Act.

Speaker 4 And at the Supreme Court, you have conservative justices signaling they're open to revisiting past court rulings on the Voting Rights Act, potentially further weakening that landmark law by striking down long-standing redistricting requirements.

Speaker 4 So that is the legal environment this map making is going into.

Speaker 5 And it's really critical for the fact that we are, you know, a year and a half away from the next midterm elections.

Speaker 5 Any of those legal cases are going to make their way through the courts and are going to take some time.

Speaker 5 And we're going to see those fights probably come down to the wire in some respects in some places.

Speaker 5 And I wonder if it's going to stiffen some Democrats' spines where in states like Illinois or New York, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, Washington state, for example, if there are going to be concerted efforts to try to do this in reverse.

Speaker 3 And Hansi, you cover voting. As you're covering these redistricting fights, what are you going to be watching for?

Speaker 4 Sarah, you know, I think redistricting can get very technical and complicated very quickly and easy to tune out.

Speaker 4 And when you're talking about re-redistricting, like we have been, I mean, what a mess of a word and a concept.

Speaker 3 it's hard to even say.

Speaker 4 It is hard to even say re-redistricting.

Speaker 4 But the takeaway here, I think, for voters is that this is the process that before you even get your hands on a ballot that can determine the power of your vote. And the reality of U.S.

Speaker 4 democracy today is that some states, like Domenico said, allow voting districts to be drawn in ways that make elections less competitive and essentially ensure a win for a political party.

Speaker 4 There are efforts for more state laws that ban favoring a political party in map drawing.

Speaker 4 There's also a bill introduced this month in Congress by Democratic Representative Mark Veacee of Texas that will limit congressional redistricting to once a decade unless a court finds a map to be illegal.

Speaker 4 But right now, it's a patchwork of policies.

Speaker 4 And if you're in a state where one party is tweaking the districts multiple times in a decade, it becomes that much harder for you, the voter, to hold elected officials accountable because you may not be able to vote them out.

Speaker 3 Lots of things to watch there. We'll leave it there for today.
I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.

Speaker 4 I'm Hanzi Luong. I cover redistricting.

Speaker 5 And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

Speaker 3 And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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