Yesterday brought an exciting new innovation in the field of unaccountable executive-branch war-waging. By law, when the president takes military action against another country, he must get Congress’s blessing within sixty days. As of today, time’s up for the war in Iran—but yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress that the administration believes it has more time. Why? Because, they’ve decided, the clock stops during a ceasefire. Happy Friday.

Give Peace a Chance

by Andrew Egger

Last August, with Texas sprinting toward a Republican partisan gerrymander and California threatening to respond with a gerrymander of its own, I lamented that “Republicans and Democrats alike are dropping all pretense of high-mindedness and rushing to crank out the most screamingly lopsided gerrymanders their population maps can sustain.” Trump and the GOP had started this fight, “but voters in both red and blue states will be worse off for it.”

We hadn’t seen anything yet. This week’s Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which all but ended the legal mechanism of majority-minority districts across the South, promises to ratchet up our ongoing partisan redistricting total war to heretofore unimaginable levels.

There’s been plenty of end-of-democracy hand-wringing on the left over the Callais decision—some reasonable, some silly. There were good reasons why Congress felt the need to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to protect black voters’ political franchise in the segregated South, where white politicians were then actively straining to dilute their power along explicitly racial, not merely partisan, lines. Still, there’s a reasonable argument to support Justice Samuel Alito’s conclusion that the way some courts had chosen to apply the VRA over the years had become preposterous—finding that if a state’s population could support a racial gerrymander creating a certain number of majority-minority districts, it was bound by law to do so.

But reasonable or unreasonable, the decision’s effect on the gerrymandering fight—if current trends continue—is going to be extreme. Freed from the legal regime that forced them to leave a number of Democratic districts in place, Southern Republicans will stroll easily into new districts that they will draw to take as many as nineteen formerly Democratic House seats.

Many Democratic groups are pledging to continue the fight-fire-with-fire approach they’ve carried out successfully over the last year. The voting-policy group Fair Fight Action is arguing this week that Team Blue could theoretically fight Republicans to a draw ahead of the 2028 elections by pushing hard for Democratic gerrymanders in seven additional blue and purple states: New York, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.

“Democrats have a clear path to neutralize this GOP power grab if they want to take it,” Fair Fight Action’s Max Flugrath told the New Republic yesterday. “This is the ‘break glass in case of emergency’ moment for American democracy.”

Color me skeptical. Fair Fight Action’s proposal relies on a lot of cheerful assumptions about the outcome of the 2026 midterms, about various state legislatures’ willingness to knife fight, and about the ability of further mid-cycle gerrymanders to survive the courts. More than that, though, it shines a megawatt spotlight on the problem that Gerrymandering Total War has presented for the anti-Trump, pro-democracy coalition. You’re just never going to convince me—and more important, you’re never going to convince a critical mass of Americans—that the only way to save democracy in this country is by gerrymandering the shit out of every state that is willing to give Democrats an ounce of political power.

Many Democrats contend their hands are forced. They’d be willing to take up federal legislation to try to stop the gerrymanderers, or at least to take weapons out of their toolkit; the problem, they say, is that Republicans won’t support such measures.

But why stop trying? The gerrymandering tit-for-tat has grown so extraordinarily stupid over the last year, so bad for voters of both parties across the country—and it threatens to get so much worse in the years to come—that it seems the very least congressional Democrats could do is to strain to find some anti-gerrymandering measures on which there’s an appetite for bipartisan agreement. Incumbents hate regular re-gerrymanders, which scramble their districts and risk their long-term political prospects: the state of perma-redistricting that Gerrymandering Total War promises is something they regard with dismay. This is true of Republican incumbents too. Democrats should go kick their tires.

Maybe no such measures exist; maybe congressional Democrats would be banging their heads against the wall looking for them. But at least they’d be banging their heads against the wall in support of actual improvements. Simply gerrymandering as hard as Republicans are to fight them to a draw is an extraordinarily grim idea of a best possible Democratic—or democratic—future. We should all demand a little more.