We need a ceasefire on gerrymandering – Latest News
Fifteen years in the past, I helped make the case for what grew to become California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission.
It was a first-of-its-kind physique of 14 abnormal Californians, neither politicians nor their appointees.
It was balanced with equal Democratic and Republican illustration, charged with drawing truthful districts after the 2010 Census.
The argument was easy, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put it: “Gerrymandering has created an absurd reality, where politicians now pick their voters instead of the voters picking their politicians.”
In this effort I typically partnered with a kind of Democrat one not often sees as of late: the reform-minded Democrat.
For over a decade, the commission labored. It wasn’t good. No democratic establishment is. But it represented one thing important, a real attempt to take away probably the most self-interested actors from a course of that shapes the equity of each election that follows.
Gov. Gavin Newsom championed Prop 50. Getty Images
Earlier this 12 months, California voters handed Proposition 50, successfully suspending the Citizens Redistricting Commission from performing till the 2030 Census, and returning its powers to the state legislature.
Gov. Gavin Newsom championed the measure as a obligatory counter to what Republicans have been doing in Texas to help protect their control of the House of Representatives.
The proposition’s language does embrace a provision to revive the commission after 2030, however I feel that promise is flimsy at best.
California is projected to lose between three and 5 congressional seats by that census, and the political strain to guard Democratic incumbents might be intense.
When the second comes, I totally count on the argument to be made, within the language of partisan curiosity, that now shouldn’t be the time to return control to residents.
This week, in Virginia, voters agreed with that view — by much less than a 2% margin.
They not solely authorised new, extraordinarily partisan electoral maps, but additionally grew to become the second state to droop what has been one of the few encouraging actions in political reform: the residents’ redistricting commission. The referendum guarantees a return to the commission after 2030.
That promise sounds acquainted.
Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York, in 2021. AP
This is the second I feared. What we’re witnessing shouldn’t be a Virginia drawback or a Texas drawback or a California drawback. It is a contagion, a tit-for-tat cycle of partisan gerrymandering that’s eating away on the fundamental premise of consultant authorities.
Texas moved aggressively in 2025 to redraw its congressional map, a transfer the Supreme Court in the end allowed to stand, doubtlessly delivering Republicans 5 further House seats. North Carolina and Missouri adopted.
And then got here the intestine punch I didn’t count on: California.
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And so right here we’re. Both events have now embraced the logic of the gerrymander. Both will declare the opposite began it. Both might be proper, and each might be mistaken, and the voters — the people all of that is supposedly designed to serve — might be overlooked of the equation.
I train at Pepperdine, an establishment that takes significantly the concept that public service is a calling, not simply a profession. We imagine what many universities are rediscovering: that larger schooling should return to its better goal. It exists to type residents succesful of sustaining a republic.
At Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy, we speak a great deal about civic advantage, that self-governance requires one thing of us past exhibiting up each two years and pulling a lever.
It calls for an engaged, knowledgeable citizenry keen to do the unglamorous work of democratic participation: serving on juries, attending native conferences, and yes, even volunteering to sit down on redistricting commissions.
Participation is the structure of a functioning republic. Christopher Sadowski
That variety of participation shouldn’t be a nice-to-have. It is the structure of a functioning republic. If universities fail in that better goal — both by means of ideological seize, or by a lack of civics-oriented coursework — we shouldn’t be shocked when residents grow cynical concerning the systems meant to symbolize them.
That is why what is going on now troubles me so deeply. When each events determine that successful issues more than the integrity of the method, they aren’t simply gaming an election, they’re educating residents that the federal government shouldn’t be, in truth, “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as Lincoln stated.
Cynicism is probably the most corrosive power in a democracy, and gerrymandering manufactures cynicism wholesale. The outcomes in Virginia and California show this, imperiling one of the one efficient bipartisan, citizen-led processes we’ve seen in a long time.
There is a path out of this. A federal framework supporting residents redistricting commissions — genuinely unbiased ones, to each extent attainable — which might be insulated from legislative override may function a variety of ceasefire on this political arms race.
It would require each events to offer up a weapon they at present take pleasure in wielding.
The path to this bipartisan answer must be led by a bipartisan coalition, which is able to require the awakening of the dormant reform-minded wings of each events.
That is exactly why it’s the proper factor to do.
Pete Peterson is dean of Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and its Braun household dean’s chair. He helped construct the case for California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission, established in 2010.
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