What started as a call from President Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has become an arms race that will reshape congressional districts and determine control of the House of Representatives. But the most troubling aspect isn’t the gerrymandering itself, but how willingly our leaders are abandoning the institutions they claim to defend.

Texas Republicans, at Trump’s urging, redrew their congressional maps to eliminate five Democratic seats. California Democrats in turn have planned to effectively eliminate five Republican seats of their own. Now Illinois, Ohio, New York, and Missouri are eyeing their own retaliatory gerrymanders, each justified as a defense against the other side’s power grab.

The political logic is admittedly sound. If Texas succeeds and other states don’t respond, Republicans gain House seats that could determine control of Congress. Indeed, there are legitimate strategic reasons for Democrats, and in turn Republicans again, to consider countermeasures. This race to the bottom is a byproduct of our system, and one that needs to be addressed in its own right.

But pay attention to how our leaders are presenting this institutional destruction. “We have got to fight fire with fire,” Newsom declared. “Don’t mess with the great Golden State.” Texas Republicans, too, openly acknowledged their plan was designed to “perform better for Republican congressional candidates” and justified it as a response to “Democratic gerrymandering elsewhere.”

Don’t let the political fanfare distract you. This is the language of leaders who are celebrating playing voters against one another and taking advantage of a flawed redistricting system.

The story politicians tell themselves and us is that they didn’t want to abandon their principles — the other side forced their hand. This framing makes exploiting the process sound noble. The problem is that we’re presenting institutional destruction as moral courage.

Texas hasn’t explicitly broken any rules in this redistricting, other than political norms. Indeed, similar mid-decade redistricting occurred in the state in 2003. On the other hand, to engage in this fight, California would have to override its own independent redistricting commission.

The “fight fire with fire” mentality is now spreading to Illinois, Ohio, New York and Missouri, each claiming that redistricting is necessary retaliation. Each side insists it’s defending democracy by undermining it just a little bit, just this once, until the other side stops being so unreasonable. This is how our democratic norms collapse.

The narratives we tell matter because they dictate what is acceptable. When politicians celebrate rule-bending instead of treating it as a regrettable necessity, they tell voters that institutions are nothing but tools for partisan advantage. When abandoning principles is a triumph, not a failure, the next abandonment becomes even easier.

A principled response from California would decry Texas and acknowledge the flaws of these mechanisms. It would be out of touch with political realities to demand that a state not counter redistricting. Rather, state governments must see their participation in a flawed system as a sign that we need to fix said system.

There are politicians trying to break this cycle. Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California introduced legislation to ban mid-decade redistricting nationwide. This measure would constrain his own party’s advantage in Texas while preventing Democratic retaliation in California. Although it’s regrettable that these reforms are mostly pushed only by representatives whose seats are most at risk, they are most certainly a step in the right direction.

The choice isn’t between being naive about political realities and abandoning all principles. It’s a choice between narratives that makes bending the rules sound heroic and narratives that drive us to work on something better. Politics can require straying from the right path, but we cannot paint these responses as noble crusades.

The gerrymandering in Texas is wrong. The institutional destruction in California is wrong. We don’t need to pick which wrong we excuse based on partisan loyalty. We must instead call wrong things wrong, then figure out how to make them right. But most importantly, we cannot glorify breaking the very systems we claim to defend.

Brayden Myers is a contributor with Young Voices and a student of economics at the University of Alabama. This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire. 

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/09/04/commentary-political-parties-in-a-race-to-the-bottom/