Congressional maps are now the focus of both sides of the aisle.
Texas has already passed its new maps, and Gov Gavin Newsom has promised to do the same in California (several other Democrat governors have promised to do the same).
However, I have warned that all these maps will be challenged in court, and we are now seeing that with previous maps already passed, as is now the case in Utah.
This week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed newly approved maps into law.
The new district boundaries are expected to take about five seats in Congress away from Democrats, so the uproar on the left was expected.
As I have exhaustively covered, many Democrat-led states have already gerrymandered their maps, so they have no moral high ground on which to stand.
That, however, has not stopped them, and the media continues to buy into the ridiculous narrative that Texas is doing something that Democrat-run states are not.
To counter Texas’s move, Newsom signed an order to hold a special election to put new California district maps on the ballot.
California wants to further gerrymander its maps to offset the seat changes in Texas, taking the process out of the hands of an independent commission and allowing the state legislature to redraw its lines.
Newsom stated, “This is not something six weeks ago that I ever imagined that I’d be doing. This is a reaction to an assault on our democracy in Texas.”
Currently, only 12 of the congressional seats allotted to California are Republican-held, a figure that represents about half of the seats the GOP would have if the maps were fairly drawn. As I noted above, Newsom has no high ground here, as his maps are among the worst in the country in terms of Democrat gerrymandering.
The one thing I have been adamant about from the start of this little gerrymandering war is that all of these new maps will be challenged in court, and they are likely to be held up long enough that they will not be used in the upcoming 2026 cycle.
Recently redrawn maps in Utah, which were approved by a GOP-dominated legislature, must now again be reconfigured as a result of a ruling issued by Judge Dianna Gibson, who said that an independent commission should have been used to determine new boundaries.
Sen.. Mike Lee (R-UT) responded, "We the people need to halt this trend. To do so, we must first grasp what these independent commissions truly represent. In a state like Utah, they’re essentially a mechanism for the left to grab power they can’t get through democratic elections."
This ruling will likely be appealed, and it will wind up working its way through the system, possibly even reconciled before the next election. For states like Texas and California, which are just starting the process, I don’t believe the new maps will have any chance of coming into play in the near future, as the challenges will likely be strategically filed to ensure that litigation has not fully played out by the time the boundaries need to be finalized for the 2026 cycle.
