“We are no longer on our way to an authoritarian country. We are no longer approaching authoritarianism. We are there. We have fallen off the cliff.”
—Texas Rep. Gina Hinojosa
Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist. In addition to raping columnist E. Jean Carroll, at least two dozen women have accused him of sexual abuse, including Jessica Leeds, who said he was “like an octopus” and his “hands were everywhere” as he reached his hand up her skirt and grabbed her breasts on a flight to New York.
Right now, Trump’s in the midst of raping America, with his hands everywhere, like an octopus, violating the Constitution left and right, prosecuting political enemies, terrorizing whole communities, and occupying the national capital with military vehicles and masked armed troops — a signature dictatorial move. He’s threatening to put federal troops in other blue cities as well, a blatantly unconstitutional form of mass intimidation. So if Texas redistricts to help him maintain power — as they’re trying to do — then redistricting California is absolutely necessary to stop him. It might seem like an extreme response, but if you’re trying to stop a rape, you’re trying to stop a rape. You don’t really worry about anything else. And no one can blame you a bit.
“It’s not complicated. We’re doing this in reaction to a president of the United States who called a sitting governor of the state of Texas and said, ‘Find me five seats.’ We’re doing it in reaction to that act,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Aug. 14, as he announced his redistricting plan. “We cannot unilaterally disarm. We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear.”
“The extreme response makes sense if we view gerrymandering and attacks on democracy as part of this longer fight going on since around 2010 when the Tea Party won primaries, then generals and started the modern gerrymander trend,” historian Rachel Gunter told Random Lengths News. “I don’t think we can divorce it from Trump’s attempts to subvert elections and challenge the 2020 results or the Supreme Court’s increasingly undemocratic rulings.”
In Texas, Trump’s power-grab comes on top of a long history of racial as well as political gerrymandering in the state. As the Texas Tribune reported on July 31:
Any new map will inevitably be challenged in court. Courts have found that at least one of Texas’ maps violated the Voting Rights Act every decade since it went into effect in the mid-60s. The current map is still being challenged in federal court in El Paso, with no verdict yet reached.
The initial attempt to gerrymander Texas in a special session has failed, as Texas Democrats fled the state to break quorum, but Gov. Greg Abbot has vowed to repeat the process until he succeeds, and a second special session has already begun. “They may still pass these maps, but we’re going to do everything we can to awaken America,” Texas state Rep. Jon Rosenthal told the Associated Press. “Wake up, America!” Newsom echoed in announcing his plan, which would only go into effect if the Texas power-grab succeeds.
“It all started when he hit me back,” Republicans are crying in response, claiming that it’s Newsom who’s trying to usurp power… by putting a proposal on the ballot this November. They want us to ignore everything going on in America today. They don’t want us to see the whole forest on fire. They claim they just want to save a single tree.
“Democrats in Washington and California are united in our resolve: we will not stand by and let Donald Trump rig our democracy to tighten his grip on power,” Rep. Nanette Barragán told Random Lengths ahead of Newsom’s announcement.
“In Washington, Democrats have consistently fought to protect the right to vote by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and pushing for legislation that would force every state to use independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions,” Barragán noted, leaving unsaid that Republicans have blocked them. “But these are not normal times. Trump and his rubber-stamp Republicans are dismantling the guardrails of our democracy piece by piece. We cannot let them. We must act decisively to stop our democracy from sliding into authoritarianism,” she said.
“We’re here because Donald Trump on Jan. 6 tried to light democracy on fire. Tried to wreck this country. Tried to steal an election,” Newsom explained. “And here he is once again trying to rig the system. He doesn’t play by a different set of rules. He doesn’t believe in the rules,” Newsom said. “We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt. And we have got to meet fire with fire.”
Newsom’s redistricting proposal would go on the ballot this November and would only go into effect if Republicans redistrict first. It would not replace the independent redistricting commission, which will still draw new maps after the 2030 census.
In response, California’s nine GOP representatives vainly tried to position themselves as defenders of democracy, gaslighting the public by ignoring Trump’s role as the driving threat to democracy, the Texas GOP’s role in supporting him, and the limited, conditional nature of the Democrats’ redistricting proposal.
In a statement, they falsely accused Newsom of “trying to grab power away from the citizens on the [Independent Citizens Redistricting] commission and give it to Sacramento politicians to gerrymander their own districts.” In reality, state legislators would only draw lines for Congressional districts, not for their own. And voters would have the final say.
What’s more, a member of the commission, political science professor Sara Sadhwani, kicked off the Aug. 14 announcement event by endorsing the proposal, and explaining why it was consistent to do so, why it was “a one-time occurrence that this does not subvert the will of the people of California.”
Sadhwani praised the commission for working “collaboratively across the aisle” in a “community driven approach” that “received almost 40,000 pieces of community testimony” and produced “some of the most competitive seats in the nation” with maps that passed unanimously. To serve on the commission “was one of the proudest moments of my life,” she said. (This process stands in stark contrast to Texas, where state legislators drew a racist map, adding two majority-white districts when minorities accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth since the previous redistricting.)
“But these are extraordinary times, and extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” she said, going on to elaborate:
We have witnessed masked gunmen kidnapping our neighbors off the streets and my understanding is they’re outside waiting to do it again. [They were.] We have seen not just the toleration of political violence, but the encouragement of it on Jan. 6, against nonpartisan election officials, and the deployment of the National Guard in our cities, turning our cities into police states. And if that wasn’t enough, we are watching executive overreach that no doubt is making our founding fathers turn in their graves and we have to take action. These are the hallmarks of a democracy in peril.
Sadhwani then went on to explain her reasoning:
My political science colleagues Steven Levitzky and Daniel Zeblat, who authored a very famous book at this point, How Democracies Die, wrote, “Protecting democracy requires more than fright and outrage. We must be humble and we must be bold.”
I’m here today to be humble, to set aside the good work of California, but I do so with the expectation that this is a one-time occurrence that does not subvert the will of the people of California. And I call upon these many leaders who have joined here today to be bold, to fight for American democracy, to not just pass maps for 2026, but to fight for independent redistricting in all 50 states so that we can level the playing field of a representative democracy.
The proposal for independent redistricting in all 50 states is nothing new. Rep. Zoe Lofgren has introduced such a proposal repeatedly since 2007. In 2021, it was a part of a broad package of Democratic reforms passed by the House as its first piece of legislation, HR-1, which died in the Senate because of a GOP filibuster. So the idea that elected Republicans are champions of fair districts is patently absurd.
What’s more, an even stronger proposal has recently been introduced by Reps. Jamie Raskin (a former professor of constitutional law) and Don Beyer. Known as the Fair Representation Act, it would not only require independent citizens commissions to draw congressional maps, it would also require multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting, which would enable a larger percentage of people to elect representatives of their choice. A similar system used in the Illinois lower house for almost a century allowed rural downstate Democrats to elect representatives along with urban Chicago Republicans. Thus, it’s the kind of reform that could significantly reduce the number of people who feel ignored in politics and increase the diversity of views represented.
The act “brings democracy up to date in the 21st century instead of turning the clock back to the white primaries, grandfather clauses, literacy tests and poll taxes of the 20th century,” Raskin said. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for California voters to make it into law. But they can counter Texas’s gerrymander, giving Democrats a better chance of being able to pass it through the House in 2027, and make it an issue in the 2028 campaign. That should be the ultimate goal voters have in mind as they head to the ballot box this November. Or they can allow Trump to continue his rape of America.