Perhaps even more troubling than court battles is the growing normalcy of political persecution. Democrats surely believe their efforts to pursue impeachment and, later, legal action against Trump were sound and morally right. But in an era whose political ethos seems to be defined by “their side did it first,” Republicans inevitably saw these and other actionsas little more than retribution against a president whose politics Democrats did not like. They have thus become very supportive of Trump’s second-term efforts to go after people whom they don’t like.
Gerrymandering is just the latest front in this war. And while it’s true that Republicans fired the first shot with their 2010 project REDMAP and did so again by pursuing mid-decade redistricting, Democrats’ hands certainly aren’t clean here, either. But what is most worrisome is that this latest escalation is undoubtedly setting a new precedent for future redistricting. The parties will now see it as imperative to not only draw as favorable maps as possible in states that they control but to do it whenever they feel like it. Failing to do so, the thinking will go, could consign them to minority status in the House for years. An easy fix would be a federal ban on political gerrymandering, which House Democrats proposed in 2019 but did not see through.