Amy Walter:
Sorry.
This is really a fascinating time for the Democratic Party, and I thought the former congressman summed it up pretty well when he said that the vision within the party right now is between those who are sort of acquiescing or doing things status quo and those who are standing up and fighting. And the question is, how much stomach do voters and Democratic leaders have for a fight?
In California, if the governor were to try to redistrict, it’s going to be very challenging. He either goes to the legislature, have the legislature, which is obviously heavily Democratic, draw those new lines, which they will be sued because right now it is in the Constitution that an independent redistricting commission draws those lines.
So take the risk of getting the courts to throw it out. Or you go to voters, which is how this got on the ballot and how it was voted in the very first place, and say, let’s just take this redistricting away from this commission that we love, that we said is going to do all of the things that legislators won’t do, which is to be nonpartisan, which is to look at communities of interest.
No, we want to bring this back to legislators and basically say, we’re going to do to you what Texas Republicans are doing to Democrats there. So it definitely muddies the water on this whole question of who’s breaking norms, right? You can say, well, we’re only breaking norms because they did, but you’re still breaking them.
