This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.”
By Sheila Kennedy
August 31, 2025
A number of pundits have pointed out that Donald Trump is a prime example of projection; that when he accuses someone of bad behavior, it is almost always behavior in which he, himself, has engaged. His current effort to get Red states to redistrict mid-cycle is a perfect example. Ever since he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump has insisted that he couldn’t possibly have lost “fair and square,” that the election had been rigged. So, in typical Trump fashion, he is engaging in an effort to rig the upcoming midterms.
As Jay Willis at Talking Points Memo has recently written,
Texas Republicans are in the midst of making their state even more of a mockery
of the concept of representative democracy than it already was. In an attempt to
preserve the GOP’s narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms, lawmakers are
tinkering with the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts to create
five more safe Republican seats, forcing several Democratic incumbents to seek
re-election next year in districts that are suddenly, alarmingly red. Scrambling the
map in this manner would ensure that in a state in which Trump earned 56
percent of the vote in 2024, Republicans would lock up 80 percent of the state’s
representation in Congress for the rest of the decade.
The effort to give Republican candidates unearned advantages isn’t limited to Texas–Trump is currently leaning on other Red states, notably Florida and Indiana–to engage in the same gerrymandering, which he clearly believes will forestall a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. (He really shouldn’t be so confident; in a special election just last Tuesday, a Democrat won a seat in the Iowa legislature with 55% of the vote–in a district that Trump had carried by 11 points. But recognition of nuance and complexity aren’t among Trump’s very limited intellectual skills.)
As Willis quite correctly notes, “you can draw a straight line between this frantic gerrymandering arms race and a mind-bendingly stupid decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.” That “mind-bendingly stupid decision” was a 5-4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 case in which the five Republican justices held that partisan gerrymanders are a “political question”—that is, an issue that must be left to the democratic process. “Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained thatthe Constitution yields no workable standard for determining when a given gerrymander goes too far to be legal.”
In what is, in my view, still one of the most embarrassing paragraphs to appear in
the pages of the United States Reporter, Roberts wraps in Rucho by noting that
the holding constrains only federal courts; Congress, he says, would remain free
to enact anti-gerrymandering legislation, as would lawmakers at the state level.
The argument here is that voters who are dissatisfied with corruption in the
political process don’t actually need John Roberts’s help, because they can always
seek redress of their grievances via the aforementioned corrupt political process.
This is roughly analogous to the fire department pulling up to a burning house,
attaching the hoses to fire hydrants, and then politely informing the owner that it
could rain any minute.
As Willis points out, and as I have previously written, there definitely are standards the Court might have applied. The decision was clearly partisan. Republicans control 59 of the 99 state-level legislative chambers, and both the legislature and the governorship in 24 of those states. That compares with just 15 for Democrats. Despite the fact that most Blue states have significantly larger populations than the more numerous Red states, Republicans have power over the line-drawing process in more places than the Democrats–a power that allows the GOP to win elections despite garnering fewer votes overall.
It’s hard to argue with Willis’ conclusion that what is happening in Texas and California and elsewhere right now “demonstrates just how vapid and hollow the reasoning in Rucho always was. You do not have to have a law degree to understand that a Texas map that transforms a 56-42 advantage into a 79-21 blowout is not, in any meaningful sense, fair.”
But it isn’t just Rucho. The Roberts Court will go down in history (assuming we have a history) as a disgraceful, rogue Court in which a blatantly partisan majority enabled an autocrat and undermined the democratic process in multiple decisions contrary to years of judicial precedents.
If and when the Democrats control Congress, they need to impose term limits on the justices, and expand the Court.
Sheila Suess Kennedy is Emerita Professor of Law and Public Policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. As an attorney, she practiced real estate, administrative and business law in Indianapolis before becoming corporation counsel for the City of Indianapolis in 1977. In 1980, she was the Republican candidate for Indiana’s then 1th Congressional District and in 1992, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. She joined the faculty of the School of Public and Environment al Affairs in 1998.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
