California's Governor Gavin Newsom pushed Proposition 50 to dismantle the state's independent redistricting commission — a body created by voters precisely to keep partisan hands off the map — and spent hundreds of millions of dollars the state does not have to redraw congressional lines and eliminate Republican-held seats.
The gambit spread. Democrats backed a new Virginia map that would have flipped an evenly divided 6-to-5 congressional delegation into a 10-to-1 Democratic sweep. On Friday, Virginia's Supreme Court struck it down. Republican-run states that had held back then moved: Florida swiftly passed its own new map, projected to cost Democrats four additional seats.
The Founders designed Article I to make representation a compact between the people and their legislature — not a chessboard for a single party's presidential ambitions. When one faction tears up that compact to grab the board, the republic's answer has always been the same: the other side picks up pieces too, and everyone ends up worse off than when they started.