California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Thursday that he is calling a special election November 4 to tear up the state’s congressional map in favor of a gerrymandered map to eliminate Republican seats.
Newsom claims that by doing so, he is saving democracy.
The so-called “Election Rigging Response Act” aims to disenfranchise the state’s Republican minority by reducing its U.S. House seats from nine, perhaps to zero.
California’s existing map was created by a nominally “independent” redistricting commission, established by the voters in a constitutional amendment. (Democrats have gamed that system anyway, using groups that purport to represent local communities in the redistricting process, but are actually proxies for the party.) Despite having nearly 40% of the vote, Republicans have only nine of the 52 House seats — about 17%.
Newsom says he is acting because Texas plans to redraw its maps, possibly removing five Democrat seats, after a flawed Census and a U.S. Justice Department finding that the existing map was unconstitutional.
It is unclear whether Newsom has the legal and constitutional authority to tear up the map; Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office had found a “legal pathway,” suggesting he is gabling on a legally dubious loophole.
Newsom is hoping other Democrat-run states will follow. But many, like Illinois, have already gerrymandered their congressional maps to hurt Republicans, and so there are not many Republican seats left to seize.
Republican states, however, have generally been fairer in their district maps, and therefore have many more Democratic seats available to them, should they wish to retaliate, which they almost certainly will do.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol conducted an enforcement action against illegal aliens outside the venue where Newsom and other Democrats had been speaking.
The governor and mayor angrily denounced the enforcement action, saying that it had been a deliberate provocation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
