Newsom’s redistricting move isn’t pretty. California GOP leaders are uglier
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King Gavin is at it again!
That’s the cry coming from Republicans across California as Newsom pushes the state Legislature to approve a November special election like none this state has ever seen. Voters would have the chance to approve a congressional map drawn by Democrats hoping to wipe out GOP-held seats and counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Trump-driven redistricting.
The president “doesn’t play by a different set of rules — he doesn’t believe in the rules,” the governor told a roaring crowd packed with Democratic heavyweights last week at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. “And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. ... We have got to meet fire with fire.”
California Republicans are responding to this the way a kid reacts if you take away their Pikachu.
See how your neighborhood shifts under California’s proposed congressional district changes.
“An absolutely ridiculous gerrymander!” whined Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who represents the state’s rural northeast corner, on social media. Under the Democratic plan, his district would swing all the way down to ultra-liberal Marin County.
The California Republican Party deemed the new maps a “MASTERCLASS IN CORRUPTION” (Trumpian caps in the original). National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Christian Martinez said “Newscum” was giving “a giant middle finger to every Californian.”
Intelligent minds can disagree on whether countering an extreme political move with an extreme political move is the right thing. The new maps would supersede the ones devised just four years ago by an independent redistricting commission established to keep politics out of the process, which typically occurs once a decade after the latest census.
Good government types, from the League of Women Voters to Charles Munger Jr. — the billionaire who bankrolled the 2010 proposition that created independent redistricting for California congressional races — have criticized Newsom’s so-called Election Rigging Response Act. So has former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fierce Trump critic who posted a photo of himself on social media working out in a T-shirt that read, “F*** the Politicians / Terminate Gerrymandering.”
I’m not fully convinced that Newsom’s plan is the MAGA killer he thinks it is. If the economy somehow rebounds next year, Republicans would most likely keep Congress anyway, and Newsom would have upended California politics for nothing.
The redistrict strategy could be a boon for Newsom’s 2028 ambitions during a moment when Democrats are hungry for leaders. But it’s also risky.
I also don’t discount the moderate streak in California voters that pops up from time to time to quash what seem like liberal gimmes, like the failed attempt via ballot measure to repeal affirmative action in 2020 and the passage last year of Proposition 36, which increased penalties for theft and drug crimes. Nearly two-thirds of California voters want to keep redistricting away from the Legislature, according to a POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll released last week.
If Californians reject Newsom’s plan, that would torpedo his presidential ambitions and leave egg on the face of state Democratic leaders for years, if not a generation.
For now, though, I’m going to enjoy all the tears that California Republicans are shedding. As they face the prospect of even fewer congressional seats than the paltry nine they now hold, they suddenly care about rescuing American democracy?
Where were they during Trump’s fusillade of lawsuits and threats against California? When he sent the National Guard and Marines to occupy parts of Los Angeles this summer after protests against his deportation deluge? When his underlings spew hate about the Golden State on Fox News and social media?
Now they care about political decency? What about when LaMalfa and fellow California GOP House members Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa — whose seats the Newsom maps would also eliminate — voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory? When the state Republican Party backed a ridiculous recall against Newsom that cost taxpayers $200 million? Or when the Republican congressional delegation unanimously voted to pass Trump’s Big Bloated Bill, even though it’s expected to gut healthcare and food programs for millions of Californians in red counties? Or even when Trump first pushed Abbott to pursue the very gerrymandering Newsom is now emulating?
We’re supposed to believe them when they proclaim Newsom is a pompadoured potentate who threatens all Californians, just because he wants to redo congressional maps?
Pot, meet black hole.
California Democrats released proposed congressional redistricting maps as their fight with Trump and Texas escalates.
If these GOPers had even an iota of decency or genuine care for the Golden State, they would back a bill by one of their own that I actually support. Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose seat is also targeted for elimination by the Newsom maps, wants to ban all mid-decade congressional redistricting. He stated via a press release that this would “stop a damaging redistricting war from breaking out across the country.”
That’s an effort that any believer in liberty can and should back. But Kiley’s bill has no co-sponsors so far. And Kevin: Why can’t you say that your man Trump created this fiasco in the first place?
We live in scary times for our democracy. If you don’t believe it, consider that a bunch of masked Border Patrol agents just happened to show up outside the Japanese American National Museum — situated on a historic site where citizens of Japanese ancestry boarded buses to incarceration camps during World War II — at the same time Newsom was delivering his redistricting remarks. Sector Chief Gregory Bovino was there, migra cameramen documenting his every smirk, including when he told a reporter that his agents were there to make “Los Angeles a safer place, since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves.”
The show of force was so obviously an authoritarian flex that Newsom filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to know who authorized what and why. Meanwhile, referring to Trump, he described the action on X as “an attempt to advance a playbook from the despots he admires in Russia and North Korea.”
Newsom is not everyone’s cup of horchata, myself included. Whether you support it or not, watching him rip up the California Constitution’s redistricting section and assuring us it’s OK, because he’s the one doing it, is discomfiting.
But you know what’s worse? Trump anything. And even worse? The California GOP leaders who have loudly cheered him on, damn the consequences to the state they supposedly love.
History will castigate their cultish devotion to Trump far worse than any of Newsom’s attempts to counter that scourge.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The author expresses skepticism about whether Newsom’s redistricting plan will effectively counter Republican political gains, noting that if the economy improves, Republicans would likely retain Congress regardless, making California’s political upheaval potentially pointless.
The piece acknowledges legitimate concerns from good government advocates who criticize the plan for superseding the independent redistricting commission established just four years ago to remove politics from the process.
The author recognizes that California voters have shown a moderate streak that sometimes rejects liberal initiatives, citing the failed 2020 affirmative action repeal and the passage of Proposition 36, and notes that nearly two-thirds of California voters want to keep redistricting away from the Legislature.
While finding Newsom’s approach discomfiting for “ripping up” the state constitution’s redistricting provisions, the author argues that California Republicans’ outrage is hypocritical given their past support for Trump’s attacks on California and their votes against certifying the 2020 election.
The author supports Rep. Kevin Kiley’s proposal to ban all mid-decade congressional redistricting as a measure that “any believer in liberty can and should back,” while criticizing Kiley for not acknowledging Trump’s role in creating the current situation.
Different views on the topic
California Democratic leaders frame the redistricting plan as a necessary defensive measure against Trump’s direction of Texas to gerrymander and create five new Republican congressional districts, with Newsom stating that California “will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy”[1].
State Senator Akilah Weber Pierson argues that rather than proving their policies work, “the Trump administration is trying to silence dissent by directing Texas to gerrymander the state,” positioning California’s response as protecting democratic processes and preserving “the will of the people”[1].
Democratic officials emphasize the plan as protecting Latino representation, with Senator Lena Gonzalez stating the Latino Caucus will “continue to work hard to further these goals, uplift Latino voices regardless of immigration status, and fight to protect hard fought gains”[1].
Supporters present the Election Rigging Response Act as maintaining California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission while temporarily adopting new districts only if other states engage in redistricting, with provisions to preserve current maps if Texas keeps its original boundaries[1].
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