Pressed by Trump, Republicans in the Texas legislature are planning a special session to redraw the state's Congressional lines to push the state's existing gerrymander even further, from 25-13 Republican (which already requires some heroically artificial district lines) to as lopsided as 28-8. Unfortunately, no law obstructs them from doing this kind of "mid-cycle" (between censuses) partisan gerrymander, though it could prove politically foolhardy (see below).

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is rumbling about retaliating by having California re-do its own citizen-commission-drawn map, which already accords Democrats heavy overrepresentation (43-9), so as to make it even more lopsided. But California has a voter-enacted law that forbids this kind of mid-cycle gerrymander (along with a lot of other mischief).

Oh, sure, Newsom can try putting a constitutional measure on the ballot at bunny-quick speed, but even if he managed that, he’d still have to get it past a California electorate that lopsidedly voted for citizen commission reform, and various progressives and good government groups that have already signaled that they would not support him in doing this.

State constitutions matter. California has robust limits on legislature-driven gerrymandering, Texas doesn’t. It’s pointless to pretend this asymmetry away, and it means Newsom’s talk of tit for tat retaliation doesn’t count for much.

The better hope from the Democrats' perspective is that Texas Republicans will soon overreach to the GOP's own peril. The current 25-13 Texas gerrymander generally protects Republican incumbents by giving them seats with margins of at least +7, hard to beat except in a big Democratic wave. To eliminate five more Dem seats, map drawers would have to slice likely R winning margins down to perhaps 3 points in many, many districts. And if they try that, even a modestly good Democratic year could flip a large number of seats in Texas Democratic at once -- what I call the tippy-boat phenomenon (and others call a "dummymander").

Go ahead, Texas Democrats might say, make their day.