Mike Johnson exhibiting some chutzpah.
Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Photos
Republicans need to demonize Gavin Newsom’s effort to provide his occasion some additional U.S. Home seats within the 2026 midterms. However they’ve a little bit of a messaging drawback. In any case, Newsom may be very explicitly responding to the energy seize Donald Trump demanded in Texas (as indicated by the formal identify for the laws the California governor is pushing to authorize a poll initiative in November: the Election Rigging Response Act).
Past the truth that Trump did it first, Republicans can’t actually get too pious about what Newsom is doing as a result of it displays the truth that blue states, by and enormous, have been more likely than purple states to let impartial commissions somewhat than partisan politicians draw their congressional and state legislative districts. Many Democrat-led states have embedded these practices of their legal guidelines and constitutions. Certainly, that’s why California has to carry a particular election: to allow its legislature to do what Texas’s (and doubtless Florida’s, Missouri’s, and Indiana’s) can do as an train in pure partisan energy.
So in combating Newsom, Republicans may need to keep out of the highlight and let good authorities sorts (or maybe former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a non-MAGA RINO if ever there was one) defend the Residents Redistricting Fee that Democrats need to put aside till 2030.
And that’s why Home Speaker Mike Johnson’s social media assault on Newsom is such a profile in chutzpah:
So Newsom is trying to “disenfranchise thousands and thousands of California voters” by letting them vote on a congressional map? Will voters in Texas have an opportunity to vote on the map Trump is pushing via that state’s legislature? How about in Johnson’s Louisiana, the place the U.S. Home map drafted by that state’s Republican-controlled legislature has been deemed in violation of the Voting Rights Act in each district and circuit courts? If Governor Ron DeSantis follows via on his risk to conduct a mid-decade re-redistricting in Florida to provide the GOP much more of a cushion for the midterms, will Sunshine State voters get to vote on that? In fact not.
Johnson, who has a rare private stake in rigging the midterms to spice up his very restricted possibilities of hanging on to his Speaker’s gavel, actually must provide you with a greater argument than to assert Californians are being disenfranchised. They’re truly going to exhibit extra energy over congressional maps than another voters within the nation — and much more than the theoretical involvement that they had through a fee. In the event that they don’t like Newsom’s map, they will vote it down. Except Republicans are prepared to increase the identical courtesy to red-state voters, they need to in all probability simply put a sock in it.
