The Trump administration’s open disregard for voting rights protections and its open support for voter suppression measures raise serious concerns over the fairness of next year’s elections. And fresh reporting from The New York Times further underscores the issue.
Trump administration officials have been pushing Texas Republicans to initiate steps to gerrymander the state’s districts — even more than they already are — in ways that will increase Republicans’ chances at retaining their U.S. House majority, the Times reported earlier this week.
According to the Times:
President Trump’s political team is encouraging Republican leaders in Texas to examine how House district lines in the state could be redrawn ahead of next year’s midterm elections to try to save the party’s endangered majority, according to people in Texas and Washington who are familiar with the effort.
The Times report highlights a meeting Texas congressional Republicans held in the U.S. Capitol earlier this week, in which they discussed redistricting at the administration’s behest. And Rep. Pete Sessions told the outlet that Texas Republicans committed to “bone up” on the proposal and its potential impact on the state’s congressional delegation.
Some Texas Republicans have expressed skepticism at the plan, according to the Times:
The push from Washington has unnerved some Texas Republicans, who worry that reworking the boundaries of Texas House seats to turn Democratic districts red by adding reliably Republican voters from neighboring Republican districts could backfire in an election that is already expected to favor Democrats.
Texas is already facing a lawsuit that alleges maps drawn by state Republicans in 2021 violate the Voting Rights Act. And the federal government had been part of that lawsuit against Texas until this year, when the Justice Department under Trump dropped the government’s claims. An attempt to redraw districts in the middle of a decade — rather than the beginning of a decade, as is usual — is certain to face legal challenges.
The Times was the first to report on Team Trump’s push to redistrict. Multiple outlets, including ABC News, have since confirmed the efforts. The White House did not respond to requests for comment from the Times and ABC News.
The president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, John Bisognano, said in a statement Tuesday that the details laid out in the Times report mark “yet another example of Trump trying to suppress votes in order to hold onto power.”
“Texas’s congressional map is already being sued for violating the Voting Rights Act because it diminishes the voting power of the state’s fast-growing Latino population,” he said. “To draw an even more extreme gerrymander would only assure that the barrage of legal challenges against Texas will continue.”
This desperate push to tip the scales in Republicans’ favor using illiberal machinations tracks with recent reporting — in Politico, for example — about Trump and his administration’s obsession with helping Republicans retain the House to avoid congressional scrutiny of the administration, which could very well come in the form of more impeachments if Democrats win a majority.
