Republicans threaten to remove Democrats from their office or even have it arrested. Democrats have stated: “We are at war” and have promised to go “nuclear”.
All this about cards.
How can something so apparently fundamental winding such an intense rhetoric spark? That is because, thanks to a process that is known as gerremwandering, political fights to be able to become cards with high-stakes competitions about power, how it is exercised and how far the parties are willing to go to protect it.
The current impasse at GerryMandering centers around Texas, where the Republican majority of the state hopes to approve new maps that again sign the congress districts to secure their party to five extra seats in the congress if the cards are present against next year's interim elections. Dozens of Democratic legislators have fled the state to prevent the legislator from considering the maps. The tactic has worked so far, but it is unclear how long they can sustain or which authority Republicans should overcome their holdout.
What is GerryMeering?
Every 10 years the census determines how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the States. That decision is made at the federal level, but it is the States themselves who choose how to detect their territory in their assigned number of districts.
In most cases, district cards are approved by the state legislator, which creates a clear stimulus for the power of power to manipulate the cards to their advantage. That is what GerryMeering is: the process of drawing cards in a way that concentrates the power of a party while the power of the opposition is dilated.
Grymningening is nothing new. It has even been around for longer than one of the most important political parties of today. The term was completely conceived in 1812 after Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry Gerry Congress Cards had approved with a winding district that critics said critics looked like a mythical salamander. Gerry Plus Salamander became Gerrymander, although Gerry himself found the card 'very unpleasant'.
Click on the arrows to go through different gerremring scenarios to see how it works in practice.
How does GerryMeering work?
Voters for the two parties are not evenly spread over the states. They tend to cluster together with others who have similar political views. Democratic voters are concentrated in large cities, while Republicans usually dominate rural areas. This creates the possibility for legislators to draw lines that distribute their voter base tactically over districts, so that they can win as many seats as possible.
There are two primary techniques that are used in GerryMeering: cracking and packaging. Cracking splits a dense area of the voters of a party into small pieces that spread over different districts where they are in the minority because of their political opposition. In Utah, for example, the lines are drawn, so the only democratic stronghold of the state of Salt Lake City is cracked in four pieces that make each part of larger, mostly national districts.
The other GerryMeering -Strategy is called Packaging, that is when cards stuff as many voters from one batch as possible into a small number of districts, so that the seats are safe elsewhere in the state.
The term “Gymander” stems from this Gilbert Stuart cartoon of a Massachusetts Electoral district that has been played above all reason. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
Is Gerryanging legal?
Yes, but with some important reservations. The Supreme Court has ruled that there is nothing in the Constitution that hardens the legislators to design the districts of their state to give themselves a part -time benefit. Gerrymanders based on race – maps that are designed to weaken the voting power of a specific minority group – are unconstitutional. The distinction between the two types of gerrymeering can be blurry because minorities, especially black voters, tend to vote for Democrats. In those cases, the court has established that a Gerrymander can still be constitutional, as long as he has been created with a clear intention to dilute minority voices.
Apart from the rules against racial gerrymage, which can change as soon as the next term of the Supreme Court, the only other national mandate for congress card drawing that districts must have approximately the same population. Many states also set additional guidelines for their maps, including the principle that districts must be as geographically compact as possible and that all parts of a district must be connected.
How did GerryMeering become such a big problem?
There have been for centuries of complaints about gerremwandering, but nothing in the past can be compared with the intensity of the fight on district lines in the past one and a half decade.
Things started to escalate after the census of 2010, when Republicans set up a coordinated effort throughout the country to use Herdistrict to increase the GOP control over both national and federal legislators. The campaign used advanced mapping technology that was not available during earlier redistribution cycles. The new maps were credited to help the Republicans to maintain a strong majority in the House of Representatives in 2012, despite receiving 1.4 million fewer votes than national Democrats in Huisraces.
Republicans kept control of the house during the next two election cycles, partly because of partisely cards that helped them to protect more than a dozen seats than they would otherwise have won, according to analysis of the Brennan Center for Justice. Although Democrats were largely overwhelmed in 2012, Blue States passed their own Gerrymanders after the 2020 census. As a result, the distribution benefit of the Gop was largely deleted by the Mid -Terms of 2022, according to the Associated Press.
Even in the context of recent Gerrymeering, analysts say that the scope and timing of the redistribution effort of Texas Republicans stands out. States usually sign their districts every 10 years, after the new census determines where house districts will be distributed. The Texas Gop has chosen to make new cards, only five years after the last redistribution round of the state, with the aim of having them in place for the midterms.
Republicans currently check 25 of the 38 Congress districts of Texas. The new card would put them in position to retain 30 house seats after next year, which would give them 80% of the representation of the State in the congress in a state where President Trump Voting in last year's presidential race, according to the official count of Texas State Secretary. However, that plan is issued until the impasse with Democrats that the state fled has been resolved.
Democratic governors in California, New York and Illinois have promised to GerryManding their own states if the new Texas card comes into force, but experts say they would experience serious obstacles if they try to go with the GOP about redistribution.
The outcome of the current redistribution fight can have a huge impact on the last two years by President Trump in the White House. Democrats only have to turn a handful of seats to get a majority in the house, which would give them Veto power about any legislation that Trump wanted to accept and the authority to start speeching investigations into his actions. If Republicans keep control, Trump would enjoy a congress for two years that has been steadily tailored to his vision of the land.
