There's a particular kind of audacity that only career politicians can pull off — standing at a podium with a straight face, declaring war on tactics you invented. House Democrats are now vowing to wage an aggressive, take-no-prisoners campaign over congressional redistricting after a string of court defeats. They're calling it a new era of political hardball. The question worth asking is: new compared to what, exactly?
The trigger for all this, of course, was a pair of devastating losses for the Democrats in the redistricting wars. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial gerrymanders were unconstitutional, and then the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated a voter referendum that would have handed Democrats a favorable congressional map in that state.
So now the mask is fully off. Democratic officials are openly discussing ways to aggressively gerrymander their states (which have already been aggressively gerrymandered) even more. Rep. Ted Lieu of California said "all options should be on the table" for Democratic-controlled states with redistricting commissions, urging them to prepare for talks with legislatures and voters about how to respond to developments in the South. Translation: the rules that were fine yesterday are suddenly inconvenient, and they need to go.
"We will beat the far-right extremists," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday. "We're going to win in November, and then we're going to crush their souls as it relates to the extremism that they are trying to unleash on the American people."
Strong words from the leader of a party that spent decades gerrymandering blue states into oblivion for Republican representation — and only discovered the concept of "fair maps" when the GOP started winning the map wars.
I love how Democrats want us to believe they haven't always been playing hardball with the GOP. Seriously, as long as I've been politically active, Democrats have been brutal and vicious. In every way, playing dirty is their status quo.
The filibuster is the textbook example.
Democrats used it aggressively to block George W. Bush's judicial nominees, defending it as a sacred protection for the minority. Then Republicans used the same tactic against Barack Obama's nominees, and suddenly the filibuster was a Jim Crow relic that had to be nuked.
Related: Did You See Hakeem Jeffries' Press Conference Tantrum?
Even at the state level, this is how they roll. In 2004, I was still a resident of Massachusetts. I saw firsthand how state Democrats stripped Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of the power to appoint a replacement senator if John Kerry won the presidency and left a vacancy. In 2009, with Ted Kennedy dying and Obamacare on the line in the Senate, they reversed course entirely and restored the governor's appointment power so Democrats wouldn't lose a crucial vote.
And there are other examples, like using reconciliation to pass Obamacare, or their attempt to thwart Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court in the hopes of forcing him to withdraw and postpone the process until after the midterms. And then there was that whole thing where they spied on Donald Trump’s campaign and accused him of colluding with Russia, or when they impeached him twice, and then tried to put him in prison.
And we’re supposed to believe that Democrats have been playing nice all this time?
Several House members are even using the redistricting rulings as a fresh excuse to go after the Supreme Court itself. Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-Md.), who has proposed term limits for Supreme Court justices, described the Voting Rights Act ruling as "a straw that broke the camel's back." This conveniently ignores the fact that Democrats were already scheming about court-packing long before any of these recent rulings. Joe Biden created a whole commission to explore it. The rulings didn't change their intentions; they just gave them new talking points.
Democrats want to frame all of this as a righteous response to GOP extremism, a reluctant decision to finally fight fire with fire. That framing only works if you ignore everything that they’ve done before.
