Letters from an American - August 2, 2025

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today, and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place. August 2nd, 2025 Republicans in the state legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislators normally redraw district lines every 10 years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts

that tend to vote Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, despite their growing unpopularity. Trump is urging other Republican-dominated state legislatures, those in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for example, to do the same thing.

We're going to get another three or four or five in addition, Trump said to reporters about House seats. Texas would be the biggest one, and that'll be five. Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasiniti of the New York Times note that voters are reduced almost to bystanders, as Republicans essentially admit to trying to determine the outcome of Texas races long before the elections are held. A person close to the President told Goldmacher and Corasiniti that the White House strategy is maximum warfare everywhere

all the time. Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to rig the system if they thought they could win a majority of voters. Carving districts to either crack political opponents into different districts or pack them into a single district is it's called gerrymandering after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme, even though he didn't like it. Parties have always engaged in gerrymandering,

but computers make it possible to carve up districts with surgical precision. The extreme gerrymander Texas Republicans are attempting is coming on top of partisan gerrymanders already in place. As journalist David Daly explained in his book, Rat Sh**, the true story behind the secret plan to steal America's democracy.

After Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Republican operatives worked to make sure he had a hostile Congress that would keep him from passing legislation. To push a plan they dubbed Operation Red Map, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, they raised $30 million, mostly from corporations, to buy ads and circulate literature that would convince

voters to elect Republican state legislators in 2010. The legislators elected in 2010 would get to redistrict their states with maps that would last for a decade. The plan worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. But Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering doesn't just weigh the scales of an election toward one political party. It also depresses turnout for the opposing party. If you know your candidate is going to lose, why bother to vote? In one heavily gerrymandered North Carolina district in 2024, democratic candidate Kate Barr worked to call attention to gerrymandering by using the campaign slogan, Kate Barr can't win.

Sometimes the opposing party doesn't even bother to run a candidate. Meanwhile, the party with a lock on the district gets more radical, as candidates have to worry about being primaried by someone more extreme than they are, rather than about attracting centrist voters that in a fair district they might lose to an opposing party's candidate. Trump is also confronting his unpopularity by trying to cement his power in the federal courts. Republicans began working to cement their power by stacking the courts during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan's Attorney General, Edwin Meese, deliberately politicized the Department of Justice in an

attempt, as he said, to institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can't be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections. On July 20, Trump demanded the Senate abandon its long-standing tradition of so-called blue slips. the Senate abandoned its long-standing tradition of so-called blue slips, an informal process by which a senator from the minority party can effectively block a judicial nominee proposed for their state. While this system can be abused by senators holding seats open for a president of their party, as Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican of Missouri, did during the Biden administration, it is designed to prevent a president from stashing unqualified or bad appointees in their states.

Benjamin S. Weiss of Courthouse News noted that Democratic New Jersey Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used the system to prevent Trump's lawyer and advisor, Alina Haba, from consideration to be the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. After posting on social media that the practice means the President of the United States will never be permitted to appoint the person of his choice, Trump demanded that Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican of Iowa, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, end the system immediately and not let the Democrats laugh at him and the Republican Party for being weak and

ineffective. Trump then reposted other posts calling Grassley a rhino or Republican in name only and sneaky and suggesting he hates America. Ending the practice would effectively cut senators and the minority from any influence at all on judicial appointments and Grassley, who has gotten Trump's many controversial appointees through Senate confirmation, has refused to agree. He said, I was offended what the president said, and I'm disappointed it would result in personal insults. In July, Trump demanded the Senate cancel

its scheduled August break and long weekends to confirm his incredible nominees. Democrats have deployed the same techniques Republicans used to slow the confirmation of Democratic president's nominations. According to Manu Raju and Victoria Stracke-Wallercy of CNN, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York,

said he would agree to let some nominees go through quickly in batches So the senators could go home, but only if the administration unfroze the federal funds Congress appropriated for agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Programs like foreign aid and only if Trump agreed he would not push for another rescissions package, clawing back appropriations Congress passed. Tonight, Trump posted, Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the radical left lunatics, to go to hell.

Do not accept the offer. Go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are and what a great job the Republicans are doing and have done for our country. Have a great recess and make America great again." Schumer reposted Trump's rant and commented, "...the art of the deal. Meanwhile, Democrats say they will fight back against Republican gerrymandering. They will challenge any Republican redistricting in court, but after standing firm on Democratic

institutionalism in the past, they now say they are willing to fight fire with fire and redistrict their own states to create Democratic districts. What the Republicans are doing is so un-American and it's a constant threat to our democracy, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said. So I'm really pissed frankly and we are going to do whatever we can do to stop this from happening. Governors Kathy Hochul of New York and JB Pritzker of Illinois are weighing options for redrawing maps in their own states.

This will be more difficult for them than for Republican states, because Democratic states tend to use independent citizen led redistricting commissions rather than partisan systems. California governor Gavin Newsom posted on social media, Trump is so scared of the American people holding him accountable for his catastrophic actions,

he wants Republicans to rig the 2026 elections for him. Newsom pointed out that it would be easy for California to eliminate its Republican-leaning districts altogether, getting rid of nine Republican seats. He posted on social media, game on. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions,

dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.