I did this Q&A with Mike Albertus on the ongoing battle over mid-decade re-redistricting. Here are some excerpts:
Texas is trying to redraw its congressional district plan, in the middle of the decade, solely in order to increase the plan’s pro-Republican tilt. There has long been a norm that district maps are redrawn only once every ten years, after each Census comes out. This norm promotes stability in representation and prevents the endless fine-tuning of maps for the sake of partisan advantage. Texas is shattering this norm, and it’s doing so for no legitimate reason. Unlike in 2003, when Texas also engaged in mid-decade re-redistricting, the plan Texas is now seeking to replace was enacted by the legislature, not imposed by a court. So Texas can’t argue that it wants to substitute a “more” democratic map for a “less” democratic one.
Additionally, the U.S. House is, at present, extremely fair in aggregate. This is true whether the chamber’s bias is measured using seat-vote metrics like the efficiency gap or by comparing enacted plans to party-blind computer-generated maps. So Texas’s mid-decade re-redistricting also can’t be defended on the ground that it would make the U.S. House, as a whole, fairer. To the contrary, a more potent Republican gerrymander in Texas would skew the U.S. House to the right and undo its current balance. . . .
If Texas opens the Pandora’s box of partisan mid-decade re-redistricting, other states will likely follow suit. Blue states will try to offset Texas’s intensified gerrymander, while red states will try to double-down on Texas’s strategy. As I’ve previously written, I think the imperative with respect to congressional redistricting is national partisan fairness: a U.S. House that’s fair, in aggregate. So I think blue states would be justified in responding to Texas’s mid-decade pro-Republican gerrymander with offsetting pro-Democratic redraws. This certainly isn’t my first-best universe. I’d much rather have fair maps in all states aggregating to a fair U.S. House. But the Supreme Court has refused to police partisan gerrymandering and the current Congress certainly isn’t going to enact sweeping redistricting reform. So in the world we’re stuck in, our options are offsetting gerrymanders in red and blue states or gerrymanders in red states and fair maps in blue states. The former option is much better than the latter, in my view, because it prevents representation and policy nationwide from being distorted by gerrymandering.
Now, it’s true that blue states like California, Colorado, New Jersey, New York, and Washington have enacted reforms (like independent commissions) that make it harder for these states to adopt offsetting gerrymanders. But the key word here is harder—not impossible. These reforms have generally been approved through state constitutional amendments. And just as states constitutions were amended to make redistricting less partisan, they can be amended again to authorize offsetting gerrymanders. Indeed, this appears to be California’s strategy: to get a constitutional amendment passed that would codify a new (more pro-Democratic) congressional plan for the rest of the decade.