Newsom vows Texas will be ‘neutered’ by California Will voters let him do it?

Governor Gavin Newsom threatened the Texas legislators this week who are trying to Gerrymander the voting cards in favor of the Republicans.

“Everything they do will be sterilized here in the state of California, and they will pay this award,” said Newsom. “They triggered this answer. And we are not going to roll, and we will fight the fire with the fire.”

The “we” in this sentence is you, the voters of California, who could soon be invited to repair the threat of Texas via the ballot boxes. If Newsom has its way, voters in November will be faced with a version of a question of he / then: “If Texas deceives their polling cards, then (and only) California should deceive ours?”

In these days of crawling authoritarianism, it is a fair question, but also a shore with personal interests and risks large enough to redo American democracy, or even inadvertently.

But this is the state of our union that even those determined to preserve it are ready to throw its basic principles – including, in a way – and to cause a national kerfuffle by considering removing voting cards to benefit supposedly, if not a party, democracy as a whole.

“This is something that we have never seen before, right?” Mindy Romero told me on Tuesday. She is a deputy professor and founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy on the Price School of Public Policy of the USC.

Romero is against Gerrymandering, but also should be in “unprecedented times”, a sentence that does not seem to do justice to the daily trampling of democratic guarantees by our president.

Most of you now know that the Texas Legislative Assembly, allegedly after the pressure of President Trump, plans to redraw his voting cards in the hope of collecting more seats for the Republicans at the Congress during the mid -term of 2026 – the very elections that the Democrats asked will give them control of at least one room.

With the possibility that this Texas in two stages could give Trimp an even more solid congress, Newsom has developed a plan to Gerrymander our own cards. But to make it (hopefully) legal, he needs voters to accompany him because it is not Texas, and we do not ignore the rules. We fold them.

The one who thought that redistribution could be so exciting? But stay calm, rediscovering the Nerds: it remains boring for the majority of voters, which is both the problem and the shine of the plan – you have to engage the voters, but also not so much that they think too deeply.

The difference between Texas and California is our process of voting initiative, which would ultimately make voters responsible for all Gerrymandering here. In Texas, these are back-shop stuff.

But do voters go for that? For many, this will come down to simple choices that lack the complexity of what is requested: California vs Texas, Newsom against Trump, Democracy vs authoritarianism.

Romero warns that once you break a standard, even for a virtuous reason, it is difficult to recover it. She is worried that despite Newsom’s assertion that the rigged cards disappear in 2030, the Gerrymandering could remain.

California currently has one of the country’s best systems for non -partisan redistribution, with an independent commission that traces the lines without regard to the party.

It has been set up because decades of Gerrymandering have left the voters disenchanted.

In the 1980s, the Phillip Burton political icon would have faced an infamous gerrymandre which always shows how bad things could be. He did so partly to protect the siege of his brother, John Burton (a colorful scholarship holder who served both in state legislature and the congress before becoming president of the Democratic Party of California), creating a district that injured in the bay region in an absurd way to scrape the necessary votes.

“Oh, it’s magnificent”, Phillip Burton described this dubious territory at the Washington Post at the time. “He curls like a snake.”

It was just the way in which business was done before the establishment of our redistribution committee in 2008, with a heavy push of the time. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who remains a vocal critic of Gerrymandering and who has promised to fight the Newsom plan.

But this non -partisan system was hardly won, and in reality, none of the parties really liked the idea.

“We went through this and in cooler moments,” said Romero. “Democrats and Republicans in California did not want an independent redistribution. Saddens that clearly. But many people have gathered and worked on this subject. ”

Thus, while any future voting measure will probably focus on justice to fight fire with fire, it is also true that the Democratic Party and certain Democratic politicians hope to draw the personal gain from such a vote.

As much as it could be to save democracy, politics still concerns personal gain and parties. Some California State legislators would surely wish to win a newly drawn seat in the congress. And, of course, there are political ambitions from Newsom.

“It is really difficult to disentangle people who can be sincerely frightened for our democracy” of those “who can jump on it, see him as a political opportunity. And I think we must be really honest on this subject,” said Romero.

This is the choice that voters will finally be invited to make.

But either we cannot ignore the precarious nature of the time and the reality that our checks and counterweights disintegrate. Do we save the integrity of the elections and risk risking democracy, or trying to save democracy and risk the integrity of the elections?

Two paths lead into darkness. Do voters follow Newsom or Trump?