I joined Archon Fung and Stephen Richer on the Harvard Kennedy School’s “Terms of Engagement” podcast to talk about the brewing battle over mid-decade re-redistricting.

Texas GOP lawmakers recently unveiled a new draft district map, created to flip several House seats from blue to red. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced his intention to respond with a California map that favored Democrats, despite California’s existing independent redistricting commission. Maryland, Illinois, and New York could also be poised to engineer maps to produce more House seats likely to be won by Democrats.

On Tuesday, August 5, 2025, Harvard Law School’s Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, joined Archon Fung and Stephen Richer on Terms of Engagement to discuss redistricting, how these map (re)drawing efforts will impact voters, and answer the question: Can we ever put a stop to gerrymandering in the U.S.?

From the Boston Globe:

On first blush, the fund-raising solicitation sure looked like it was coming from US Senator Adam Schiff, the California Democrat well known for tangling with Donald Trump.

“Hi — this is Adam Schiff,” the email read, according to a screenshot shared with the Globe. “Josh Kraft said I could reach out with this urgent message.”

But the email came from “[email protected]‚” and it was paid for by the campaign of Josh Kraft, who is running for mayor of Boston, several thousand miles east of Schiff’s district.

And, it turns out, Schiff never said Kraft could reach out with that urgent message.

The Kraft fund-raising email sporting Schiff’s name and likeness is one of at least five the campaign has sent in recent weeks that feature prominent national Democrats who have not publicly weighed in on the Boston mayor’s race. At least two of those politicians have now asked the Kraft campaign to stop using their names and likenesses in the email fund-raising solicitations.

“Immediately after being informed that the Kraft campaign sent an email we did not approve of in Schiff’s name, we reached out to the campaign to ask them to stop,” said a spokesperson for the Schiff campaign. “While an unfortunate situation, the Kraft campaign let us know that it would not happen again.”

While some political and campaign finance experts called the Kraft campaign’s fund-raising blitz unorthodox or even potentially misleading — and rival Mayor Michelle Wu’s campaign questioned whether it violated campaign finance laws — a spokesperson for the Kraft campaign defended its legality.

The unauthorized emails were “an error on the part of our vendor,” said the spokesperson, Eileen O’Connor.

From Stanford Law:

Stanford’s Pamela Karlan and Nathaniel Persily on the redistricting push in Texas, recent signals from the Supreme Court about the Voting Rights Act, and the future of voting and redistricting in America.

The episode can be found here.

NPR:

Contrary to decades of precedent, Republican state officials in at least 15 states contend that private individuals and groups do not have the right to sue to enforce Section 2 because they are not explicitly named in the landmark law’s text. Only the head of the Justice Department, they argue, can bring this kind of lawsuit.

The issue is at the heart of a North Dakota legislative redistricting case that was brought by two tribal nations. A federal appeals court ruled against the Native American voters, and the case may be up for a full review soon at the Supreme Court. The justices may also be preparing to take up a broader question about the constitutionality of Section 2 protections, based on an order last week for legal briefs in a Louisiana congressional redistricting case originally filed by Black voters.

At a time when the Justice Department under the Trump administration has backed off from voting rights lawsuits the department had brought when former President Joe Biden was in office, the prospect of voters of color no longer being allowed to bring their own cases has supporters of the Voting Rights Act concerned about the law’s survival.

Politico:

A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a California law restricting AI-generated, deepfake content during elections — among the strictest such measures in the country — notching a win for Elon Musk and his X platform, which challenged the rules.

But Judge John Mendez also declined to give an opinion on the free speech arguments that were central to the plaintiffs’ case, instead citing federal rules for online platforms for his decision.

Mendez also said he intended to overrule a second law, which would require labels on digitally altered campaign materials and ads, for violating the First Amendment. The judge’s decisions Tuesday deal a blow to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed the laws last year in a rebuke of Musk, vowing to take action after the tech billionaire and then-Donald Trump supporter shared a doctored video of former Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the election.
The first law would have blocked online platforms from hosting deceptive, AI-generated content related to an election in the run-up to the vote. It came amid heightened concerns about the rapid advancement and accessibility of artificial intelligence, allowing everyday users to quickly create more realistic images and videos, and the potential political impacts.

But opponents of the measures, like Musk, also argued the restrictions could infringe upon freedom of expression.

Washington Post: The fight over Republicans’ push to redraw the Texas congressional map has widened into a national political war, with red and blue states moving to counteract each other and ambitious politicians around the country vowing aggressive partisan… Continue reading

Politico:Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 largely shattered the efforts to prosecute him for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.But dozens of his allies still face state-level criminal charges for their roles in the plot. The five cases against… Continue reading

According to some of the most prominent scholars in the field, the answer is yes. Earlier this year, Nick Stephanopoulos, Eric McGhee, and Chris Warshaw published an essay in the Washington Post which showed that after the 2020 round… Continue reading

The last time Texas engaged in mid-decade re-redistricting, back in 2006, I filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court for myself, Burt Neuborne, and Sam Issacharoff. Our brief urged the Court to hold that states have no power under… Continue reading

Washington Post: Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered a grand jury investigation into allegations that Obama administration officials broke federal laws while investigating Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke… Continue reading