The Redistricting Wars Are Ugly. Republicans Didn't Start Them and They Can't Unilaterally Disarm

Texas redrew its congressional maps this cycle to add several more Republican-leaning seats. California responded with its own new maps designed to offset those gains with Democratic ones. Courts in both states are now sorting through legal challenges, and the outcome could determine which party controls the House after 2026. It is not an especially edifying spectacle, and Republicans should be honest that mid-decade redistricting for partisan advantage is not, in the abstract, good governance.
The case against what Texas did is not hard to make, and plenty of conservatives who care about durable democratic norms have made it: congressional maps are supposed to be redrawn once a decade based on new census data, not whenever a party controlling a state legislature decides it wants to lock in extra seats mid-cycle. Mid-decade redistricting purely for partisan gain, wherever it happens and whichever party does it, undermines the argument that district lines should reflect where people actually live rather than which party can most effectively pack and crack them. A Republican Party that has spent years, correctly, criticizing Democratic gerrymanders in states like Illinois and Maryland loses some credibility when it does the same thing more aggressively the moment it has the votes to do so in Texas.
The honest response is not that this critique is wrong in principle, but that it describes a world that does not currently exist. Democratic-controlled states have been drawing aggressively gerrymandered maps for decades, and California's own new map, rushed through specifically to counter Texas, is itself a maximally aggressive partisan gerrymander sold to voters as a defensive necessity. In a system where one side redraws lines for partisan advantage whenever the law allows it and the other treats unilateral restraint as a governing principle, unilateral restraint does not produce fairness; it produces a permanent structural disadvantage for whichever party keeps observing norms the other side has abandoned. Texas Republicans made a hard-nosed judgment that in an environment where blue states redistrict aggressively and courts have shown limited appetite for policing partisan gerrymandering under federal law since the Supreme Court's 2019 Rucho decision, a red state declining to use the same tools available to it is not principled, it is unilateral disarmament.
That argument has real force, and it is why most elected Republicans have backed the Texas maps despite the discomfort some feel about the precedent. But it should not be the last word, because "the other side does it too" is a justification for matching an opponent's tactics, not a template for how congressional districts should be drawn in a healthy system. The more durable conservative position is that this arms race is exactly the argument for structural reform: independent redistricting commissions, applied evenhandedly in red and blue states alike, would take the incentive for this kind of mid-decade escalation off the table entirely. Republicans who support that kind of reform in the states where they control the legislature, not just when it is politically costless, have a much stronger claim to the moral high ground than those who only discover the value of independent commissions when their own state is on the losing end of a Democratic gerrymander.
Until that broader reform exists, the practical reality is that district lines will be drawn by whoever holds the state legislature, and the party that unilaterally forgoes that leverage while the other side uses it fully will simply lose seats it could otherwise have kept competitive. Texas Republicans made a defensible, if uncomfortable, bet that the current rules of the game reward using available leverage rather than martyrdom on process grounds. The legal fights working through the courts now will determine whether that bet pays off before voters go to the polls. The deeper question of whether either party actually wants a redistricting system that isn't an arms race will still be sitting there, unaddressed, no matter how these particular maps come out.