If the Founding Fathers were alive today and happened to glance at Texas’s latest congressional redistricting map, they wouldn’t just raise their powdered eyebrows. They’d likely declare it a grotesque betrayal of everything they risked their lives to build.
The map, unveiled by Texas Republicans and engineered under the invisible hand of Donald Trump, is not about representation. It is not about fairness. It is certainly not about democracy. It is, rather baldly, about rigging the game. Specifically, it’s designed to create five new districts where Trump won by double digits, on the assumption that loyalty to a man matters more than the will of the people.
Let’s call this what it is: a gerrymandered grift.
James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, warned against the dangers of faction. Political power consolidated by narrow interest groups who govern not for the common good, but for themselves. If he saw today’s Texas, he’d see the exact kind of factional control he feared. The goal is not to win arguments. It is to redraw the battlefield until only one side can win.
Under the new plan, heavily Latino districts that have traditionally leaned Democratic are surgically sliced to dilute their political power. Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez find themselves cast into Trump-won territory. Three Democratic-held urban seats in Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas are essentially erased, while Republican-leaning districts sprout like weeds in their place.
This isn’t representation. It’s manipulation.
The Founders were flawed men. Many owned slaves. Women and Indigenous people were largely excluded from their vision of liberty. But they were also architects of a radical experiment: that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. That idea, however imperfectly applied, has been our North Star.
Gerrymandering, especially on this scale, shatters that principle. It hollows out consent and replaces it with control. It says: we choose our voters, not the other way around.
And here’s the bitter irony. The very party that rails against “election interference” is carrying it out in broad daylight. Texas Republicans are using map lines like scalpel blades, cutting the electorate until it bleeds predictably red. It is, at its core, anti-democratic.
What would George Washington say? Likely the same thing he said in his farewell address: “The alternate domination of one faction over another is itself a frightful despotism.” This map isn’t governance. It’s domination. And it’s a frightful preview of what happens when partisanship supersedes principle.
There is still time. Legal challenges are mounting. Organizing is already underway. But democracy doesn’t defend itself. The Founders left us the tools, but they also left us the responsibility.
In Texas, and everywhere this playbook is being copied, we must decide: are we citizens in a republic, or pawns in a game of power? One thing is certain: the Founding Fathers didn’t fight a revolution so politicians could rig the scoreboard and call it freedom.