The Week Where Republicans May Have Stolen the Midterms

In five days last week, Republicans gained maybe 10 seats in Congress. And not a single citizen voted.

Republican state legislators, governors, state supreme court justices, and U.S. Supreme Court justices have combined over the last week to effectively hand up to 10 U.S. House seats to the GOP. That’s not just bad for the Democrats, although it most definitely is that. It’s bad for democracy. This can’t be accepted as normal.

Early last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a gerrymander so that Republicans could win as many as four additional seats. Three days later, Tennessee Republicans later seized on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling to eliminate the lone majority-Black congressional district in the state. On Friday, four Virginia state Supreme Court justices, three appointed by the state’s legislature when both houses were controlled by Republicans, invalidated a ballot measure that could have resulted in four additional seats for Democrats through redistricting. Later that day, Louisiana Republicans, also taking advantage of Callais, presented new maps that will almost certainly result in the defeat of one Democratic member of Congress there. Five days; ten seats; zero votes from members of the public.

Adding immediate context only makes it worse. Florida voters approved a ballot measure in 2010 that explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. The all-Republican Florida Supreme Court is almost certainly going to let the redistricting stand anyway. In contrast, a clear majority of voters in Virginia, more than 1.6 million people in total, backed the redistricting that four judges wiped away. Voting had already started in Louisiana, but has now been suspended. The South, a region with a long history of discriminating against Black Americans, is now rushing to eject from Congress Black members elected by Black citizens.

Then broaden the picture further. We have an authoritarian president who ignores laws and core democratic values. He knows that the party in the White House often loses a ton of House seats. He knows that trend is particularly likely to continue if the president is unpopular,........

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