Although there are currently not enough Indiana Republicans on board with the Trump administration’s midcycle redistricting pressure campaign to move forward with the redrawn maps, those who support President Trump’s midterms scheme are now bullying their colleagues to get in line.
Indiana Senate Republicans, as of this week, have said they do not have the votes needed to approve a revised congressional district map. The White House has been attempting to force Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country to create new congressional maps that favor Republicans to help ensure Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House in the upcoming midterm elections. It is typical practice for redistricting to take place once a decade after the Census has been taken — not mid-decade as a way to predetermine a midterm election.
So far, several states, including Texas, Missouri, and, most recently, North Carolina have succumbed to pressure from the Trump administration and approved revised congressional maps that are expected to flip seats currently held by Democrats for Republicans. The new maps approved in Texas will likely flip as many as five seats.
But Trump loyalists are now taking on the redistricting pressure campaign for Trump in Indiana and bullying their Republican colleagues into approving a new map, despite the lack of support in the state Senate.
This comes as the Trump administration has been working over time to try to coerce the state’s Republicans to get in line. Earlier this month Trump himself called into a private Senate GOP caucus meeting to pressure legislative leaders into supporting the redistricting effort, Politico reported. And Vice President JD Vance has visited Indiana twice in recent months to try to convince Indiana Republicans to redraw their district lines for Trump.
“The White House has put extraordinary pressure, it seems, on state actors, on the Republican side, and we’ll see where things land,” Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Brennan Center’s Washington, D.C., office, told TPM.
It remains publicly unclear which Republican members of the Indiana state Senate are opposed to redrawing maps for, potentially, two congressional districts currently held by Democrats — Dems hold just two of Indiana’s nine seats in the U.S. House. But MAGA Republicans in the state are putting on the pressure, while casting the new maps as a supposed good faith effort to defeat some amorphous, sinister leftist regime. (North Carolina Republicans used similar messaging leading up to their vote on new maps earlier this week, attempting to spin the new maps as an attempt to offset Democrats’ gerrymandering — the opposite of what is happening.)
In a statement on Wednesday, Indiana’s GOP Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, issued a stark warning to fellow Republicans.
“Indiana should be leading the nation, not apologizing for being a strong conservative state, while radical Democrat Marxists wage war on our Constitution, our children, and the future of this Republic,” he said. “Washington is being overrun by an anti-American agenda, and instead of joining President Trump in reclaiming our voice, too many in our own Senate choose the path of weakness and political convenience.”
Read the rest at Talking Points Memo.
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