Everyone gets what President Donald Trump is trying to do in Texas.
He’s pushed the state’s Republicans to redraw the boundaries of its congressional districts now instead of at the end of the decade so the GOP can pick up five more U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterms.
Trump understandably wants his MAGA Revolution to have four full years to make America great again.
Another five seats in the very red state of Texas could expand the GOP’s narrow majority in the House and thwart Democrats’ pipe dreams of legislatively sabotaging the last two years of Trump’s reign.
It’s encouraging to see Trump getting his party to play major league hardball for a change, but he’d better be careful.
Remember the old saying “What goes around comes around”? It’s bipartisan.
In 2013 Democrats running the U.S. Senate thought they were smart to change the rules for confirming federal judges from a two-thirds vote to a simple majority.
But when Republicans regained control of the Senate, they used the so-called “nuclear option” to confirm enough conservative Supreme Court justices to build a 6-3 conservative majority. Democrats have been crying ever since.
Trump’s push to get five more House seats for Republicans may work in the short run, but it also might backfire.
His scheme has riled up the governors of already well-gerrymandered blue states like California, New York and Illinois who are threatening to retaliate by doing some more gerrymandering of their own.
So far, the turmoil in Texas been a political win for Republicans, thanks to about 50 Democrat lawmakers. They made fools of themselves by flying like a flock of chickens to Illinois instead of voting against a bill they knew they couldn’t stop.
They should have played the game of democracy by the rules.
They should have stayed home and voted, accepted defeat and then gone to the courts to see if they could win their case there. Running away so there wouldn’t be a quorum for a vote was a media stunt that only delayed their inevitable loss.
The Texas Democrats should have taken a cue from the Republicans in California’s Assembly. They have been hopelessly outnumbered by Democrats in Sacramento since the birth of Christ.
They can’t stop Democrats from passing their crazy and destructive bills or pass a sensible bill of their own. But they don’t pull stunts like running out of the state.
Meanwhile, though you rarely if ever hear it from the biased national liberal media, Donald Trump and Republicans didn’t invent gerrymandering last week.
Since America was born, major political parties have practiced the dark arts of drawing crazy amoeba- and snake-shaped lines on the maps of their states to create safe voting districts for themselves.
Gerrymandering is part of the reason there are 11 blue states with zero Republicans in the U.S. House today.
In 2024 Trump got between about 32% and 48% of the vote in those 11 smallish states, which include Delaware, Vermont, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Mexico and Connecticut.
Other lopsided states with millions of unrepresented Republicans living outside big cities include Maryland (one Republican and seven Democrat House members), Illinois (three Republicans and 14 Democrats) and California (43 Democrats and nine Republicans).
The worst case is deep blue Massachusetts, where Trump managed to get about 32% of the vote. It’s fitting, I guess. Massachusetts is the birthplace of the term “gerry-mandering,” thanks to one of its slickest early governors, Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 infamously drew a voting district in Boston that looked like a salamander.
Perhaps it’s a tribute to Gerry’s pioneering political skills that today Massachusetts has nine U.S. House members and not a single one is a Republican.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
