The coming arms race on gerrymandering

"just want to find 11,780 votes," President Donald Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during a recorded phone call two months after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

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Trump's goal was to retroactively inflate his Georgia vote total in order win a state he'd lost and tip the Electoral College his way - to cheat his way to reelection, in other words, according to the Tribune News Service.

Raffensperger, to his eternal credit, refused that corrupt directive from a president of his own party. If only Republican state lawmakers in Texas, Missouri and other red states today had that kind principled dedication to the rules and norms of democracy.

But alas. Trump is currently engaged in a similar vote-cheating scheme but on a much larger scale: In an effort to hold onto the GOP's slim congressional majority through next year's midterm elections, Trump is pressing Republican-led states across the country to redraw congressional district lines that were just decided after the 2020 census. And unlike Raffensperger, key Republicans from Austin to Jefferson City and beyond are responding not with principled refusal but with: Yes, sir. Trump isn’t even pretending this is anything other than a calculated power grab. Because Trump easily won Texas last year, he told an interviewer this week, “We are entitled to five more (congressional) seats” from that state.