Expect a more partisan, less governable House
WASHINGTON — Florida’s Republican-majority Legislature wasted little time last week in giving Gov. Ron DeSantis what he wanted — new boundaries for the state’s congressional districts that stand as one of the most aggressively partisan gerrymanders in the country.
The plan, approved by the Legislature on Wednesday and Thursday and signed by DeSantis on Friday, would virtually guarantee Republicans 20 out of 28 districts in a state that splits almost evenly in politics — one where former President Trump’s 51.2% victory in 2020 represented the second-widest margin in three decades.
DeSantis’ gerrymander may not survive court scrutiny — Florida voters amended their state constitution in 2010 to limit partisan line drawing. His supporters hope a Republicandominated state Supreme Court will read the limits narrowly.
The court fight in Florida is one of two that will determine the final balance of this year’s nationwide redrawing of congressional maps. The other will be in New York, where the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, will soon hear a challenge to Democrats’ aggressive gerrymander.
If Republicans were to win both court fights, they likely would emerge with a small nationwide advantage from the once-a-decade process of redistricting.
Overall, however, the main pattern of this year has been that courts, citizen commissions and changing demographics have limited the ability of Republicans to use gerrymandering to bolster their power in the House, reversing a decadeslong pattern.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Democrats used their control over state legislatures to gerrymander their way to persistent House majorities.
Starting after the 1990 census, however, Republicans
took the upper hand. For decades, the GOP has enjoyed a built-in advantage in the House, forcing Democrats to fight uphill.
This year, by contrast, redistricting has yielded a nearly balanced map, with neither party having a disproportionate advantage.
“The bias, across the country, is going to be a lot more modest,” said UC Berkeley political science professor Eric Schickler. “That’s an important change.”
A few unrelated elements collided to produce that result: Several states drew aggressively partisan lines, but the biggest Democratic and Republican gerrymanders largely canceled each other out. In other states, courts stepped in to limit partisan line drawing.
In still others, notably Texas, Republican weakness in suburban areas meant that they had to put a lot of their effort into shoring up their incumbents, rather than going after more
Democratic seats.
Some of the court fights over redistricting will extend past this year. There’s a good chance that the districts in which voters cast their ballots in November won’t be final in Florida, North Carolina, New York and Ohio.
Some districts may end up being redrawn next year or even the year after. The overall partisan balance, however, appears fairly well set.
The fact that the House results will now pretty closely match the overall vote won’t help Democrats this year — they’re on track to lose the midterm elections by a big margin.
But in 2024 and subsequent years, the lack of a strong, built-in GOP bias could help Democrats regain a majority.
Whether a more proportionate House is a fairer House is a harder question.
Although the national map is fairly evenly balanced, that doesn’t help voters whose individual states
have been gerrymandered. In Wisconsin, for example, Republican lawmakers drew lines that block Democratic voters in much of the state from an effective say in who gets elected. Democrats in New York and Illinois did much the same to Republican voters.
The Republican gerrymanders will also likely reduce the number of Black members of Congress.
DeSantis’ Florida map, alone, would eliminate two districts currently represented by Black lawmakers — one in the northern part of the state in which Black residents currently make up 47% of the population, and the other in the Orlando area, where Black and Latino residents make up a majority. The newly drawn districts would have white majorities.
The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to that kind of map drawing by narrowly interpreting the federal Voting Rights Act. In preliminary rulings in two cases so far this year — one from Alabama and one from Wisconsin — the justices signaled further narrowing to come.
Latino representation may continue to grow nationwide, but in Texas and some other states, mapmakers took advantage of the high court’s leniency and failed to create majorityLatino districts that they could have drawn.
One of the biggest effects of redistricting may be to make governing even harder.
Given the close national divide between the parties, a more proportional House will probably be a more volatile one, with fewer stable majorities and even sharper partisan differences.
Paradoxically, however, while the House majority may swing back and forth more because the two sides are close to parity, the number of swing districts — the ones that either party can win — has sharply shrunk.
In the 1990s, almost a quarter of the House came from swing seats. That’s down to about 1 in 10.
Last month, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejía of FiveThirtyEight estimated that “the 2022 congressional map could have the fewest swing seats in a generation.”
The loss of swing seats means an increase in the number of lawmakers whose only real challenge comes in their party’s primary. They have few incentives for bipartisan cooperation.
That could come back to haunt GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, assuming Republicans win the House majority and he achieves his ambition of becoming House speaker.
In the current Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (DSan Francisco) has succeeded beyond most expectations in keeping a very small majority in line to pass key legislation. The Democratic agenda has stalled in the Senate, but much of it passed the House.
In recent years, Republican majorities have been much harder to corral, as the past two Republican speakers, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and John A. Boehner of Ohio, found out.
“The problem Republican speakers face is really on their right,” Schickler said. “If you’re a Republican speaker, you’re going to have some pressure to govern and make deals to keep the government running so you’re not blamed for a shutdown.” But a lot of members on the right aren’t interested in compromises.
Boehner cut deals in 2011 to avoid an unprecedented default on federal debt, for example, “and it created a lot of problems on the right.” With redistricting reducing the number of members with an incentive to participate in dealmaking, “McCarthy will face that problem just as badly, if not worse.”
Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, who is not seeking reelection after 35 years in the House, talked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” recently about the problem posed by members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who have discovered that they can raise a lot of money by making outrageous statements that draw social media attention, and for whom legislation is merely a distraction.
“It will be very hard to govern for Republicans … knowing that we’ve got the MTG element that’s really not a part of a governing majority,” Upton said.
In the short term, the predictable threats of government shutdowns and crises over the debt limit will create new headaches for President Biden. In the longer run, however, a more partisan, less governable House could backfire on the GOP.
In 1995-96 and again in 2011-12, Democratic presidents faced Republican House majorities determined to fight, not deal. Ultimately, Presidents Clinton and Obama turned the resulting shutdowns and other crises to their advantage and won reelection.
Biden, mired in a dismal low point in polls, can only hope that pattern holds.
safety recommendations and going maskless at school. A few kids coughed on him on purpose, his father said.
The family relocated to the Atlanta area to attend a school where they felt better about safety protocols, easing those anxieties. But when Ami began school again, he realized that “I’m not all better.”
Here is how the teen explains it: He can sit attentively in English class on Monday and learn about independent clauses, but when he returns to the same class on Wednesday to learn about complex clauses, he has forgotten what makes up an independent clause. He can learn how to do a math problem one day, then struggle to remember it a few days afterward.
“What am I supposed to do on tests?” he asked.
Ami, who had a schedule spangled with honors classes, now expects to repeat the ninth grade. He and his parents decided to cut back on his schoolwork, paring his schedule to two classes.
The family has been seeking neuropsychological and psycho-educational assessments to help figure out what the future of his schooling might look like. The teen had resisted the idea for a while.
“I hated the idea of accommodations,” he said. It was “another way of me admitting to myself, ‘OK, I need something that I didn’t need before.’ ”
Disability advocates have called the pandemic a “mass disabling event.” The federal government has recognized long COVID as a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act if the condition limits any “major life activities” — a broad category that includes walking, thinking, sleeping and bodily functions. But advocates say much more awareness is needed to ensure access to disability accommodations and services.
“As a country, that is not something we have historically done well,” said Rebecca Cokley, U.S. disability
‘We don’t know how to prevent it. And we don’t know how to treat it.’ — DR. MICHAEL PELUSO, an assistant professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, at a recent presentation about long COVID
rights program officer with the Ford Foundation. To address the emerging need, “we need to see an unprecedented level of investment in our current social safety net across the board,” including in the education system.
Cokley added that for many patients, long COVID mirrors the symptoms people have experienced with myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Those patients, she said, historically “have been told that their symptoms are all in their heads.”
The Korns have been fortunate in many ways. Ze’ev Korn, who had been working as a psychotherapist at UCLA Health, was able to reach out to others in the health system for help. Linda was able to take a month off from work as an audiobook producer to help coordinate Ami’s care. And Ami said his doctors did not discount his symptoms, a common complaint among long haulers.
But they struggle to exCOVID-19 plain what is going on to other kids and families. “It’s not something you can see, like a broken arm or a broken foot,” Linda Korn said. “It’s very hard for people to understand.”
A doctor recently told them it would dissipate with time, Ze’ev Korn said. The Korns hope that is the case. But with so little known about the illness, Ze’ev said, they need to figure out how to best support Ami now.
In the Atlanta area, Ami has been going to Flying Change Equine Therapy to help raise his spirits and structure his time. He feeds and brushes the horses and works with Mercedes, a young horse who was sickened almost a year with pneumonia.
The teen said he is thankful to wake up each morning, mindful that other kids have not survived COVID-19. He is grateful that he can run again.
“And I’m grateful that my brain is as well as it is,” he said, “even though I want it to be better.”