Anne Smull, a retired feedstore owner in Lincoln, California — a former agricultural town that has grown into a bedroom community at the edge of Sacramento — sat down for lunch at a local cafe and learned that the man she had been sending to Washington on her behalf, Representative Kevin Kiley, would no longer be running in her district. The reason was not that Kiley had been voted out. The reason was that her district had been carved up. The wire service that reported her reaction called the move “payback” for Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere. Smull, a conservative who said she agreed with Kiley’s politics, called it something else. The redrawing, she said, “feels sneaky and underhanded.”
The California Democratic legislature sliced Kevin Kiley’s district into six fragments to destroy a competitive seat, treating the voters inside those fragments as acceptable losses in a partisan war both parties agreed to wage using ordinary Americans as ammunition. That is the accusation.
The district was not adjusted at the margins. It was sliced into six parts. The portion containing Smull’s home was grafted onto a seat based in the state’s wine country that the wire service described as “overwhelmingly Democratic” — meaning that whatever Smull’s politics are, she is now structurally a resident of someone else’s constituency. The man she voted for is still in Congress. He just no longer represents her. Kiley had already left the Republican Party to serve as an independent, a move the wire service reported was aimed at surviving the new map.
“Payback” is the word that makes the weapon sound like justice. It is the same weapon. Republicans drew districts to lock out Democratic voters in Texas. California Democrats drew districts to lock out Republican voters in California. The motive trace runs straight through both parties: the people who draw the lines are the same people who benefit from them. The cost-bearer is the woman in Lincoln who learns over lunch that her representative no longer represents her.
Republicans did gerrymander in Texas. That part of the story is real, and it is the strongest honest version of the case for “payback.” But “payback” is exactly the framing that lets each party keep deploying the weapon. Texas and California become the cover story — the other side did it first — and the cover story stops precisely at the step where continuing would implicate the party using it. The Democrats’ “payback” framing exonerates them by pointing at the Republicans. The Republicans’ Texas gerrymander exonerated them by pointing at the Democrats. Each side’s justification recycles the other side’s violation as its own license.
Who wrote this map. The Democratic leadership of the California legislature, working through whatever redistricting vehicle the state constitution provided. Who benefits. The Democratic Party, which converts a competitive seat Kiley had been holding into six fragments absorbed into safer Democratic districts. Who pays. The voters inside those six fragments. They lose representational continuity. They lose the congressman they had picked. They gain, in Smull’s case, the privilege of being told their new congressperson is somebody else. What the public framing obscures is the bipartisan structure underneath.
California Democrats did not invent this tactic. Republican redistricting reshaped congressional maps across multiple states this year, and earlier cycles, and the cycles before that, in state after state where one party holds the mapmaking pen. The two parties have spent the better part of two decades escalating a redistricting arms race, and they have both been getting away with it because the courts have refused to stop them.
The root cause sits upstream of either party’s current map. In 2019, the Supreme Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering claims present a non-justiciable political question — that federal courts have no business telling state legislatures they have drawn districts too favorably to themselves. The doctrine was dressed up as judicial restraint. The operation was judicial abdication. Once federal courts ruled themselves out, the only constraint left on partisan mapmaking was the next election, in which whichever party held the mapmaking pen could lock in its advantage for the rest of the decade. Both parties saw the door open. Both parties walked through it. Neither party has shown any interest in walking back.
This is the structural cause of Smull’s erased representation. She did not lose her congressman because the voters of her district rejected him. She lost her congressman because the bipartisan system of unchecked mapmaking allowed one party to dissolve her district before the next election could be held. The bipartisan system is the named carrier. The Democratic mapmakers are the current operators. Texas Republican mapmakers were the previous operators. They are interchangeable in role.
The cycle feeds itself: one party gerrymanders, the other party gerrymanders in response, and “payback” justifies each round. The only mechanism that breaks the cycle is independent redistricting commissions that draw lines without partisan advantage. Both parties resist that reform because the weapon is the reform they are protecting. The wickedness is not that one party uses the weapon. The wickedness is that both parties use it and both parties call it something other than what it is.
This is, in the technical sense the structural-analytical tradition uses, a wicked problem. There is no clean policy resolution. There is no shared causal account between the parties. There is no stopping rule. Each tit-for-tat escalation produces a counter-tit-for-tat escalation. The only institutional mechanism that could break the cycle — an independent redistricting commission, immune to partisan capture — exists in some states, but has been fought by both parties wherever one side has had the votes to fight it. The mechanism that would resolve the problem is the mechanism neither party wants to build.
In the 1995 Deep Space Nine episode “Past Tense,” written by Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe, the United States of the 2020s contains a population of the unemployed, the mentally ill, and the inconvenient inside walled-off Sanctuary Districts. Captain Sisko, displaced into that timeline, tells his companion that the Sanctuary Districts were not the disaster — the disaster was that they were “the start of a long, slow slide,” the moment a society decided some of its own people could be treated as acceptable losses. The bipartisan gerrymandering apparatus is not a Sanctuary District, but the analytical shape is the same. The “payback” framing makes this explicit, in a way the politicians drawing the maps will not. If the map is “payback” for what Texas did, then the map is not drawn for any principle about representation. It is drawn to send a message to the other party: you did this to us, so we did it to you. The voters inside the six fragments are not the subject of the message. They are the medium through which the message is sent. The apparatus’s preferred framing makes the voters the collateral damage of a war between parties, rather than the constituents a representative democracy is supposed to serve. The bipartisan system is at war with the voters it claims to represent. Both parties are at war with the voters they claim to represent. The voters are not at war with each other. The voters are at war with the system that has decided their representation is fungible.
To be clear about what symmetric scrutiny requires: I am not writing this column to defend either party’s mapmaking. Texas Republicans did it first this cycle, in a way that scrambled enough Democratic seats to shift the national balance. California Democrats responded in kind. They are equivalent in the structural sense. Both are doing the thing. Both are using ordinary Americans as ammunition in a war they are conducting on behalf of their donors, their activists, and their incumbent protection strategies. Neither party has a clean hand on this.
George Lucas said it plain in 2005, in a Chicago Tribune interview about the Star Wars prequels: “Because the democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.” The legislature doesn’t object to gerrymandering. The legislature authorizes it. The voters who lose their representatives have no recourse. Both parties do this to the voters they do this to. Both parties give away the democracy of the voters they call enemies.
The voters bear the cost. Anne Smull. Every voter whose district was drawn to serve a party’s interests rather than a community’s. Every voter who shows up at a lunch counter and learns she can no longer vote for the man who represents her views. The weapon is legal. The weapon is effective. The weapon erases representative accountability. Both parties deploy it.
King argued, in the late period that culminated in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) and the Riverside Church speech that April, that what had to change was the structure itself — not the actors, not the personalities, not the rotation of which party holds the mapmaking pen. The structure. The bipartisan system that has decided, since Rucho, that neither party will ever be answerable to the voters inside the lines they draw.
Independent redistricting commissions, with teeth — commissions that cannot be bypassed by separate legislative vehicles, commissions that hold across cycles, commissions whose members are not appointed by the same legislators whose maps they are supposed to police. Public financing of legislative elections, so the people drawing the lines do not owe their seats to the donors who want the lines drawn favorably. And a constitutional doctrine that does not treat partisan gerrymandering as a question federal courts must refuse to answer.
These are not impossible reforms. They exist, in some form, in states that have built them. They are not built in California or Texas because the bipartisan system has decided it does not want them. The bipartisan system is the carrier. The bipartisan system is the apparatus. The bipartisan system is what Anne Smull is up against, and what she is right to call sneaky and underhanded.
The arc bends. It bends only when specific people, in specific moments, push it. It bends because voters who can name what is being done to them begin to organize against what the bipartisan system is doing to their representation. It bends because voters like Anne Smull, who would rather be represented than managed, refuse to accept that the map they did not choose is the map they must live under.
— Malcolm Little King