Let’s stipulate that partisan map-drawing is a nasty, grubby business that subordinates ethical representative democracy to various power interests. Ideally, it should be avoided or forbidden. But ideal, clean, simple “solutions” in politics are often a mirage. Consider the following three points — which don’t even touch on serious constitutional concerns about the federal government dictating or usurping state administration of elections — that should give anyone pause before signing on to a proposal that purports to bar gerrymandering.

1. Democrats have already shown they will abandon gerrymandering bans when those bans become inconvenient.

If what happened in the Old Dominion is so terrible, why don’t Republicans follow Democrats’ lead and agree to ban gerrymandering? That challenge has been tossed around frequently in the aftermath of the Virginia power grab. One obvious rejoinder is that Virginia and California did ban gerrymandering, decisively, with the support of large majorities of their voters. Then Democrats took extraordinary steps to unravel those bans, many of which they had publicly supported, the moment their perceived political interests shifted.

Two-thirds of Virginians supported a constitutional change earlier this decade, during a regularly scheduled, high-turnout presidential election. They took this power out of the hands of politicians. The resulting map was superb and undeniably representative of the electorate. In 2024, 51% of Virginians supported House Democratic candidates, and 48% cast ballots for Republicans. The commonwealth’s congressional delegation now features six Democrats and five Republicans. The maps are sensible, and the electoral results match the will of voters.

In short: fairness.

The new map is intentionally manipulated to jolt this into a 10-to-1 split, in which the 48% of voters who backed GOP House candidates would be represented by just 9% of the seats, one of the worst mismatches anywhere in America. This is the direct result of undoing an existing, consensus-backed gerrymandering ban that was succeeding as designed.

Democrats pretended their support for those reforms was about high-minded good governance. Then they jettisoned them, employing ruthless and even legally dubious methods, as soon as their supposed “principles” were tested. They’ll argue that it’s not fair if only some states do things the right way, justifying their flip-flop as an effort to “level the playing field,” or whatever euphemism they prefer. We’ll deal with that below. But demanding gerrymandering bans while throwing existing gerrymandering bans in the trash does not exactly convey good faith. In fact, bad faith is a recurring theme in these considerations, which brings us to the second point.

2. Democrats’ supposed national gerrymandering ban was buried inside a partisan wish list.

Another popular claim on the Left these days is that Democrats offered Republicans a straightforward opportunity to ban gerrymandering nationwide in 2021, and every single House Republican voted against it. The implication is that those chickens have now come home to roost in Virginia.

This is a bad-faith argument. The legislation referenced in this context, H.R. 1, was branded the “For the People Act,” and it went far, far beyond simply rejecting gerrymandering. Indeed, the bill served up an appalling dog’s breakfast of intolerable poison pills for even the most centrist or gerrymandering-opposed Republican. It presented a veritable Christmas tree of left-wing pet projects and priorities designed to impose hyperpartisan and deeply ideological federal control over elections nationwide.

It was packed with outrageous nonstarters, from brazenly gutting voter integrity measures to endorsing D.C. statehood to implementing the partisan DISCLOSE Act. The roster of poison pills is long, even by Washington standards. To pretend that Democrats offered Republicans anything remotely resembling a workable path forward on gerrymandering in H.R. 1 is, frankly, a lie. So, of course, Democrat-aligned “fact-checker” PolitiFact rated their party’s lie “mostly true.”

Once again, bad faith rears its head. And with that, we arrive at the final point.

3. Even “independent” commissions can be gamed.

What if all the toxic components were stripped out of H.R. 1, leaving only what Ballotpedia described as a requirement for states “to establish independent redistricting commissions to carry out congressional redistricting”? Sounds reasonable, no? If it were to pass constitutional muster and work as established in pre-power-grab Virginia, wouldn’t this be an elegant and fair-minded resolution that would satisfy many people across party lines?

Enter the problem of California.

A supermajority of Golden State voters embraced the independent redistricting commission model in 2010, in what seems to have been an earnest effort to wrest control of congressional map-drawing from politicians’ talons. California Democrats then set about undermining that purpose as aggressively as possible while maintaining a false veneer of an “independent” process. Even the left-wing publication ProPublica exposed some of the manipulations Democrats immediately began performing to achieve their desired redistricting outcomes through the ostensibly nonpartisan board voters had demanded.

Fast forward to 2024, which was a broadly solid GOP election cycle. The state’s “independent” commission had assembled a map of California districts that split 43-9 in favor of Democrats. Roughly 40% of Californians — nearly 6 million people — voted for Republican congressional candidates that year. Those votes translated into just nine seats won out of 52 statewide, or 17%. An approximately proportional map would have yielded closer to 20 GOP-leaning seats.

For reference, California’s “independent” commission has established maps that are less representative than Texas’s new ones — yes, even after Lone Star State Republicans completed their controversial partisan gerrymandering project. Also for reference, Texas’s new gerrymandered map is still twice as representative as Virginia’s new gerrymandered map, with approximately double the percentage of seats drawn for the minority party.

California voters asked for independence and fairness. They now have an 83%-17% map, based on a 60%-40% vote split, despite the state having checked the box of establishing an “independent redistricting commission to carry out congressional redistricting,” as mandated in the bill Democrats have pointed to as their anti-gerrymandering plan. Perversely, California would presumably have already complied with anti-gerrymandering edicts in a hypothetical national ban.

See the problem?

JAMES CARVILLE GOES FULL RADICAL

The stench of bad faith is overwhelming. For conservatives to be open to a national gerrymandering ban, the bar of skepticism must be set high, given the three integrity-related obstacles listed above. Democrats have demonstrated their willingness, if not eagerness, to dispose of existing anti-gerrymandering fairness for partisan reasons, to blatantly misrepresent their poison-pill-laden legislation as a simple gerrymandering reform, and to technically comply with “independent” commission requirements while stacking the resulting panels and outcomes for maximal partisan benefit.

If these concerns can be allayed and addressed in airtight, best-practices legislative language in a stand-alone bill, shorn of the nonsense, that’s a conversation worth having. If the pre-power-grab Virginia model can be replicated, there’s a strong argument to do so. But deep-seated reasons for mistrust abound. Many Republicans, rightly fuming over what’s happened in Virginia, may determine that, in spite of that loss, they are better off retaliating in places such as Florida, redrawing maps if the Supreme Court alters representation-related elements of the Voting Rights Act, as expected, and bringing down the redistricting hammer after the 2030 census reflects a dramatic shift of people and power to red states.