Virginia

We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

May 13, 2026

Two weeks ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act provided that no state or local government could impose any conditions or procedures on voting that would result “in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

In the past, the Supreme Court has recognized that the right to vote alone does not necessarily fulfill the aims of the law. It’s possible—even easy—to dilute the votes of Black Americans to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate they support. Sometimes, then, in order to guarantee Black representation in government, states have had to create districts that are made up primarily of Black Americans. The court has condoned this practice, upholding the idea that in such a case, the state has a compelling reason to draw districts according to race. In the past, the court saw the creation of majority-minority districts as a way to comply with the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing that Black voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer.

But in 2024, a “non-Black” voter in Louisiana challenged a new majority-minority district drawn so that the state’s congressional delegation might include two Black legislators out of the six allocated to the state. Those districts were designed to remedy the fact that although one third of the people who live in Louisiana are Black, the state has never had a Black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. The state hasn’t had a Black governor since Reconstruction.

On April 29, by a vote of 6–3, with the right-wing justices in the majority, the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s construction of a majority-minority district unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. It was, they said, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. And, as the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the federal courts have no business addressing partisan gerrymandering.

Immediately, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency to stop the state’s congressional primary election, which was already underway. His declaration has thrown the election into chaos as 45,000 ballots already cast won’t be counted, and the ballots already sent out will still include the race that Landry has now postponed.

Since then, other Republican-dominated states have rushed to pass mid-decade gerrymanders that will shut Democrats out of power.

Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a Republican, immediately called the Tennessee legislature into emergency special session to get rid of the state’s only Democratic member of Congress, the one representing Memphis. Sixty percent of the people who live in Memphis are Black. Once back in session, the Tennessee lawmakers repealed their own law that prohibited mid-decade redistricting. Then, on May 7, they cracked Memphis into three districts, diluting Black votes by swamping them with voters in white suburbs. The state had similarly cracked Nashville in 2022, flipping that seat, as well, from Democratic to Republican.

“Tennessee is a conservative state, and this map ensures that our congressional delegation reflects that,” Republican state senator John Stevens said. “This is about allowing Tennessee to maximize its partisan advantage.”

On May 8 the Virginia state supreme court voted along partisan lines to strike down a plan Virginia voters had approved to redraw the state’s congressional districts temporarily to favor Democrats as a way to counteract the Republicans’ partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Florida, Ohio, and other states.

The court majority argued that the redistricting measure was invalid because, as Amna Nawaz and Ali Schmitz of PBS explained, the Virginia constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a constitutional amendment twice: once before a legislative election and once after. This should guarantee two different sets of eyes on any such amendment by letting the people elect new lawmakers between the votes. But when the General Assembly passed the measure the first time, early voting was already underway. Thus, the court said, it was not “before” a scheduled election.

On May 11, a week before elections are due to start there, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a 2023 district map that lower courts ruled unconstitutional because it diluted Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, thus violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In an unsigned one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts to reevaluate in light of the Callais decision.

On May 12, Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes” as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee’s only majority-Black, Democratic district. As Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed “every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on” and stripped “nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve” in the Tennessee state legislature.

On May 13—today—Georgia governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the Georgia General Assembly for June 17 to redraw Georgia’s congressional maps before the 2028 election. He said it was too late to change Georgia’s maps for 2026, but that the Callais decision requires Georgia to change its electoral maps.

Also today, Louisiana legislators advanced a congressional map eliminating one of the state’s two Black-majority districts. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster is expected to call for a special session to eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district and only Democratic seat, and Mississippi governor Tate Reeves said Mississippi lawmakers would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district before 2028.

Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket assesses that redistricting could net Republicans between 16 and 18 seats in Congress in 2026, while the Democrats will likely pick up six, at least so far: five in California and one in Utah where a court demanded a redrawing of districts. Many of these redistricting plans are being challenged in the courts, and it remains possible that not all of them will flip, but G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers assesses that the Democrats will have to win congressional elections by 3–4 points in order to win a majority.

We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South.

We have been here before.

The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is “AN ACT To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by recognizing that right in the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and unscrupulous employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could only be paid for with tax levies. Black voters, they said, were ushering in socialism.

Former Confederates declared it their duty to “redeem” the South from “Black rule,” by which they meant the Republicans and third parties in which white men and Black men worked together for policies that benefited workingmen, policies like education and workers’ protections. White Democrats argued that because such parties, even if overwhelmingly white, could win only with Black votes, they represented “Black rule.”

By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until the mid-1960s as white southern Democrats worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in the South to cement their own control over the region. In 1890, fourteen southern congressmen wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats had to control the South. Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and Its Results insisted that Black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had perverted the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars.

Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted.

Eight years later, there was still enough Black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of Black Republicans and white Populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2,000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to “reform” the city government. They issued a “White Declaration of Independence” and said they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by” Black men.

As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic mayor claimed “there was no intimidation used,” but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup. In the years to come, white Americans would continue to maintain control of politics through violence. They considered it a public duty to purge society of Black Americans, taking photographs of themselves at lynchings.

The region white Democrats ruled at the beginning of the twentieth century enforced white supremacy with extralegal violence. That racial domination helped white Americans swallow the South’s dramatic inequality. A few wealthy men dominated the region, while most people were poor: southerners had about half the average per capita income of the rest of the nation.

It was this world Congress addressed when, after more than 80 years in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the Fifteenth Amendment, it passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, finally taking seriously the amendment’s charge to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted that democracies depend on members of each party recognizing the legitimacy of their partisan rivals. Even if they disagree with each other, each recognizes the others’ members as loyal to the nation and accepts their legitimacy as lawmakers if voters elect them. Democracy also depends on parties refusing to use the tools of government to destroy the ability of their partisan opponents to win elections.

A day after a Pennsylvania man was arrested for making a “hit list” of twenty Democratic legislators he called “communist infiltrators” and threatened to shoot, as President Trump calls Democrats “traitors” and as southern states destroy the ability of Black Democrats to elect representatives, the echoes of the past are deafening.

Although the parties have switched sides, the story is the same. Now, as then, a minority is disfranchising voters because it knows its ideas are unpopular and it cannot win on the merits of its policies. What it can do, though, is to deliver white supremacy to its followers in hopes that it will be enough to make them ignore the economic system that is leading them to ruin.

As Joyce White Vance noted tonight in Civil Discourse, Georgia Senate minority leader Harold Jones II reacted to the news of Georgia’s special session for redistricting by saying: “If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.

“June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.

“Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Trump says Iran’s economy is crashing. Americans expected to pay higher prices for gas, groceries and appliances

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

May 7, 2026

Today Tennessee state representative Justin Jones burned a Confederate battle flag in the rotunda of the Tennessee State Capitol in protest of the legislature’s redrawing of the state’s congressional district maps to erase the majority-Black 9th Congressional District. By cracking the city of Memphis into three pieces and joining them to white suburbs, the legislature turned all the state’s districts into Republican seats.

The actions of the Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are a direct response to the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which found that in creating a second congressional district to enable Black voters to elect a representative of their choice, as mandated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Louisiana legislature unconstitutionally took race into account when drawing the district lines. Although the Supreme Court’s clerk normally waits 32 days to finalize an opinion, the Supreme Court made the decision effective immediately to allow Louisiana, where the primary election was already underway, to redraw its maps.

Immediately, Republican-dominated state governments rushed to redistrict their states to eliminate majority-Black districts, thus slashing through Democratic representation in their states. As Khaya Himmelman of Talking Points Memo explained today, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, immediately suspended a congressional primary election that was already underway in order to give Republican legislators a chance to change the maps to give at least one of the state’s two Democratic seats to Republicans.

Although a federal court injunction forbids Alabama from redrawing its maps before the 2030 census, Republican governor Kay Ivey called for the state to do so, and Republican attorney general Steve Marshall has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to let the state revert to a map struck down in 2023 because it was racially gerrymandered.

Trump began this gerrymandering arms race last year, pressuring Republican Texas legislators to redistrict the state to help Republicans win the midterms and protect him from investigations and possible impeachment. As of today, Patrick Marley of the Washington Post noted, Republican-dominated legislatures in Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida have redistricted to pick up Republican seats, while Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama are engaged in that process. In retaliation, Democrats have temporarily redistricted the states of California and Virginia.

Tennessee is now expected to send only Republicans to Congress. Just minutes after the Republicans cut Memphis into thirds to get rid of the voices of Black Democrats, Republican state senator Brent Taylor announced he was running for the new seat “to stand with President Trump and cement Tennessee’s conservative legacy for generations to come.”

In Tennessee, Representative Steve Cohen, who currently represents Memphis and who is the only Democrat in the Tennessee congressional delegation, posted: “And just like that, the TN GOP voted to enforce a racial gerrymander of Memphis and strip our city of effective representation for decades. Trump knows he HAS TO rig the game to keep his majority in November. And the TN GOP was willing to go along with it. It’s shameful. Next stop is the courts.”

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has already sued to block the redistricting.

Cohen is right that the Republicans recognize the only way for them to win going forward is to skew the maps so that Democrats can’t win, because right now, at least, the administration is a dumpster fire.

This morning, Warren P. Strobel, John Hudson, and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reported that the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a confidential analysis of conditions in Iran that suggests the administration has been badly off the mark in its public statements about the war.

Although Trump insists that the war had been an overwhelming military victory and that Iran is suffering so badly from the U.S. military blockade it will have to cave to U.S. demands quickly, the CIA report assesses that, in fact, Iran can survive for at least three or four more months before having to deal with more severe economic hardship. The report also assesses that Iran still has about 75% of the mobile missile launchers it had before the war and about 70% of its missiles.

Trump has told reporters that Iran’s economy is “crashing” and that Iran was down to 18% or 19% of its former missile stocks.

The content of the analysis is important, and so is the fact that CIA analysts are sharing it with reporters, suggesting they are disturbed by the administration’s current trajectory.

The administration insists the war has “terminated,” meaning that it does not have to honor the 1973 War Powers Act that requires the president to either withdraw troops or get congressional approval for continuing military actions. Today the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire in the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran firing on three U.S. destroyers and the U.S. firing on two ships entering the strait.

While the Iranian military called the strikes a violation of the ceasefire, a U.S. official told Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios that the exchange did not mean the war had resumed. This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

As the national average for a gallon of gas hit $4.56 today, the British energy giant Shell announced its profits were up 24% in the first three months of 2026. This amounted to almost $7 billion, more than twice what Shell made in the previous quarter.

In the Wall Street Journal, John Keilman reported today that Whirlpool, which makes refrigerators and washing machines, said the Iran war has caused a “recession-level industry decline” and that Americans should expect to pay higher prices for appliances going forward.

While experts say there were about 14 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2025, Trump border advisor Tom Homan told the Fox News Channel today that there are “well over 20 million” undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and “we’re going to do everything we can to arrest as many people as we can.”

But a new Pew poll shows that 52% of Americans already think Trump is cracking down too hard on undocumented immigrants. Politico adds that that number includes about a quarter of the people who voted for him in 2024. It also includes 67% of Latino voters, who had swung toward the Republicans in 2024.

Those poll numbers came before today’s story by Lisa Song, Maya Miller, Melissa Sanchez, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica identifying 79 children injured by tear gas or pepper spray during immigration encounters. While the reporters documented federal agents throwing tear gas and shooting pepper spray into crowds, the Department of Homeland Security said the fault for the children’s injuries lies with “agitators” and parents who put their children in harm’s way. “DHS does NOT target children,” it said.

The journalists assess that their count of 79 injured children is “likely still a vast undercount.”

Americans are paying dearly for the administration’s detention of immigrants. Just today, Patricia Mazzei and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that the administration of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is talking with the Trump administration about closing the Everglades detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz. The center has been called unsanitary and inhumane since it opened about ten months ago, yet the cost of housing its 1,400 detainees is more than $1 million a day. DeSantis has asked for $608 million to run the camp for a year.

And then there are Trump’s increasingly high profile attacks on the pope. Pope Leo XIV is the first pope from the United States, and Trump seems determined to challenge him. The pope has spoken out against inhumane treatment of migrants and has called for peace through diplomacy, an observation Trump has taken as criticism of his war on Iran. Last week, Pope Leo appointed Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala to become the new bishop of West Virginia. Menjivar-Ayala was once an undocumented immigrant himself.

Trump posted last month that Pope Leo was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and he has continued his attacks, saying Monday: “The pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and I don’t think that’s very good. I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics, and a lot of people, but I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

As Sarah Ewall-Wice reported in the Daily Beast, Pope Leo responded indirectly, noting that “[t]he mission of the Church is to preach the Gospel, to preach peace. If anyone wants to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, let them do so truthfully.” He continued: “The Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, so there is no doubt about that.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was at the Vatican today to ease tensions. The visit did not go particularly well. While Rubio gave Pope Leo a crystal football with the seal of the State Department, Pope Leo gave Rubio a pen made from the symbol of peace: olive wood. The Vatican’s statement did not suggest the men found much common ground, saying the meeting included “an exchange of views regarding the regional and international situation, with particular attention to countries marked by war, political tensions, and difficult humanitarian situations, as well as to the need to work tirelessly in support of peace.”

And finally, today the president himself is in the news…or, rather, out of it. Trump, both of whose hands have been covered in makeup lately, apparently to hide bruises, was supposed to have a meeting today with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil at 11:15 that was open to the press. The reporters waited three hours, but the event never happened. At 1:22, Trump’s social media account simply posted that “[t]he meeting went very well” and that representatives from the two countries would continue to meet.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Trump:”Don’t rush me. We were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 26, 2026

Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.

The letter claimed that there was “another attempt on President Trump’s life” last night at the Washington Hilton, where Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the White House Correspondents dinner was taking place last night.

The man, whom police have identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, sprinted through a magnetometer before authorities stopped him. Shots were fired, although it remains unclear who fired them. A Secret Service agent wearing a bulletproof vest was shot but has been released from the hospital. According to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, the government is charging Cole with two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.

Shumate said last night’s incident “proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff. When the White House ballroom is complete, President Trump and his successors will no longer need to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom. The White House ballroom will ensure the safety and security of the President for decades to come.”

“Put simply,” Shumate wrote, “your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk…. Enough is enough.” He demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation “voluntarily dismiss this frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump. If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events.”

This is an odd angle to take, since, as Bluesky user Tom Shafer pointed out, the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people and Trump says his proposed ballroom will seat only 999. And to be clear, a judge has permitted the construction of the secure facility under the ballroom to continue despite the lawsuit; it’s just the ballroom itself that’s currently at issue.

Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an official requirement; this is actually the first time Trump has chosen to go as president. As Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck, and Joe Heim of the Washington Post reported today, the Trump administration could have provided a higher level of security last night as it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, but it did not designate the dinner as a “National Special Security Event.” Even so, Secret Service agents did indeed stop Cole before he could enter the ballroom.

Yesterday, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has secretly awarded the company it chose to build the ballroom a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park near the White House. In 2022 the Biden administration estimated the cost of the work to be $3.3 million. The journalists explain that the Trump administration dramatically increased the estimated cost by adding an additional 27% for inflation and then adding another inflation estimate of 24%, then increased its estimate by another 50% because it wanted to get the fountains fixed quickly, then simply gave the contract to Maryland-based Clark Construction.

While Trump claims the ballroom will be paid for by private donations, the government will pay for the fountain repairs. This means the contract should have been open for competitive bidding. To justify awarding the contract without that process, the journalists report, the administration cited an “urgency” exception to normal procedures meant for war or natural disasters.

The focus on last night’s event has obscured this upcoming week’s big story.

Trump has justified his refusal to seek congressional approval for his attack on Iran by claiming Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. While Trump’s own intelligence agencies contradicted that claim, it enabled Republicans to argue that Trump had authority to launch the strikes under the 1973 War Powers Act, which allows the president to act to counter an “imminent” threat.

But the War Powers Act says the president must notify Congress of any such action within 48 hours of its start. Then, by 60 days after that notification, the president has to stop using the military for that action unless the Congress either declares war or authorizes the use of the military for that specific action. Democrats have fought hard against Trump’s unilateral decision to go to war, but Republicans have refused to press him to get congressional approval, apparently hoping that Trump would find a way out of the Middle East crisis before hitting the 60-day mark.

But so far he has not, and the 60-day window closes on May 1.

Trump appears to believe the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports will hurt the country so badly that Iranian leaders will have to agree to his demands. But that pressure will take time to build. “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t,” he posted Thursday. He told reporters: “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me…. So we were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years; we were in Iraq for many, many years.… I don’t like to say World War II, because that was a biggie, but we were four and a half, almost five years in World War II. And we were in the Korean war for seven years. I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”

If Trump doesn’t find an end to the conflict, Republicans must either vote to authorize what is already a deeply unpopular war or let Trump continue his war without congressional approval, adding fuel to accusations that he is becoming a dictator. After all, Trump claimed in January, after he had attacked Venezuela without congressional approval, that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and would “take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”

The idea that the president can use the military as he wishes without authority from Congress demolishes one of the fundamental principles of our democracy: that we have a right to a say in how our lives and treasure are spent.

Rather than enabling Trump, Republicans could reassert the authority the Framers of the Constitution put in Congress’s hands and stop his deadly blundering.

“We’ve heard a lot of talk from Republicans that they’ll give this president 60 days,” the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, told Mike Lillis of The Hill. “And this is a failed effort. And it’s long past time that he come to Congress and explain what the strategy is and what the exit is. Republicans have been saying that is a crucial timeline for them. So put your vote up on the board.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists, they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 22, 2026

Virginia voters yesterday agreed to a constitutional amendment that would temporarily redistrict the state if any other state redistricted for partisan reasons: that is, in retaliation for the partisan redistricting President Donald J. Trump launched in Texas in 2025 in an effort to retain control of the House of Representatives.

As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, Trump supporters immediately insisted the voting was rigged, probably through mail-in ballots. Trump himself took to social media to attack the election, repeating charges of rigging and then adding: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

In fact, Trump himself began this mid-decade partisan gerrymander race with his pressure on Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats. That prompted California to retaliate with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas Republican-leaning seats. Other states followed suit. Republicans redistricted Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, in addition to Texas, and expect those mid-decade redistricts will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that the temporary redistricting of Virginia will give them four more seats.

State lawmakers in Florida will convene a special session next week to consider redistricting that state, as well, to benefit the Republicans.

Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that the Republicans have full control of the federal government and could pass a law to ban partisan gerrymandering any time they want to, as Democrats have called for, but they refuse. “Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists,” Cohen notes; “they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.”

The Republican National Committee, now controlled by Trump, immediately sued over the Virginia election, and a Virginia judge ruled that both the constitutional amendment and the referendum voters approved were invalid. He said that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective,” and prevented officials from certifying the results.

But, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket wrote, Virginia attorney general Jay Jones is challenging the decision, saying: “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”

Complaints about the Democratic push for a partisan gerrymander in Virginia have exposed a tendency to excuse Republican machinations to control politics while jumping on Democrats for similar behavior.

In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” “Even if Texas’s move triggers an arms race, the trend will not put American democracy on life support,” it said, dismissing the concerns of those fighting the Republicans’ attempt to game the 2026 elections.

But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” “They’re right that the [Republicans] started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward,” board members wrote.

Their argument appears to be that the Democrats stand a good chance of winning the midterms even if the Republicans have gamed the system, so the Democrats should not push back. “The news will embolden Republicans in Florida to forge ahead with their own gerrymandering…, continuing the race to the bottom,” they write, seeming to excuse the behavior of Republicans by blaming Democrats for it.

This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws.

In the 1850s, southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.

Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”

But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.

Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.

Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.

Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call, and to the new Republican Party he was helping to build, because he had shown it would stand up for their rights.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Burlingame today when a reporter asked what she thought of complaints about the Virginia vote. “Oh, wah, wah, wah,” she laughed. “Listen. Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set….

“What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight, and takes everything sitting down. And what they’re mad at right now is that we are here in a new day. And we have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they did, and now the Republican Party doesn’t like the fact that they are fighting against someone who actually will stand up for the American people.

“So if Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on…partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. And so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American