What’s going on with the current Texas redistricting is crazy. And you can thank the Supreme Court for that. In what may be the 3rd worst modern decision behind Citizen’s United v. FEC and Trump v. United States we have the 2019 case of Rucho v. Common Cause — a case you have likely never heard of — which held that questions of extreme partisan gerrymandering are non-justiciable political questions, so the courts had to keep hands off.

Even though a previous court had already decided in Baker v. Carr that questions of redistricting were justiciable by the United States Supreme Court.

But let’s back up for a moment.

First of all, redistricting is something that is required by the Constitution after the decennial census in order to be able to draw districts that have an equal number of voters apportioned therein.

What normally happens is that the census is taken every 10 years — I  myself worked on the 1980 decennial census — and within the next year or two the state legislatures redraw the districts based on their own population. The number of the 435 congressional districts gets reapportioned between the states at that time. Texas, with its growing population, went from 36 to 38 districts for the decade from 2022 to 2031.

That’s when redistricting happens.

After the census.

This is the way it has worked since the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

And now, at Donald Trump’s urging, Texas is trying to change the rules.

Unilaterally.

Because of the Rucho case, there is nothing really out there to stop Texas from doing so.

The Texas democratic representatives who fled the state aren’t going to be able to keep their Republican colleagues from enacting this scheme, and Governor Greg Abbott — proof positive that you can be both disabled and a complete dickhead at the same time — from signing it into law.

So now California and New York are threatening to retaliate. With artificial intelligence and very detailed data on who is registered to vote where, any state can draw up districts in which they maximize the chances for one party over another, virtually disenfranchising most of us, regardless of which side we’re on.

There is an obvious fix for this, one that everyone should be able to get behind: a Constitutional amendment that requires districts be drawn as close as possible to existing municipal and country boundaries, so that the districts reflect the natural and actual composition of the people who live there.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. That would make way too much sense. And try getting that through our hyper-partisan Congress.

Oh, and fuck the Supreme Court.