Last month, we wrote about Midwestern Republican lawmakers — in Ohio and especially Indiana — defying pressure from the Trump administration to engage in mid-decade redistricting for partisan benefit. This was an off-ramp from spiraling redistricting wars, which Democrats say the GOP instigated with a redraw in Texas. 

What they ignore in this “they started it” finger-pointing storyline is the serious injustice of the Census Bureau’s dramatic counting errors in the 2020 census, which wrongly gifted blue states at least half a dozen congressional seats and presidential electoral votes, according to experts. These faulty maps have tainted multiple election cycles, despite the agency admitting to miscounts in 14 states, which overwhelmingly benefited Democrats. Texas’s action could reasonably be defended as a corrective measure to partially mitigate this democracy-undermining problem.