Texas Republicans aim to redraw House districts at Trump’s urging, but there’s a risk

AP:

Texas has 38 seats in the House. Republicans now hold 25 and Democrats 12, with one seat vacant after Democrat Sylvester Turner, a former Houston mayor, died in March….

The fear of accidentally creating unsafe seats is one reason Texas Republicans drew their lines cautiously in 2021, when the constitutionally mandated redistricting process kicked off in all 50 states. Mapmakers — in most states, it’s the party that controls the legislature — must adjust congressional and state legislative lines after every 10-year census to ensure that districts have about the same number of residents.

That is a golden opportunity for one party to rig the map against the other, a tactic known as gerrymandering. But there is a term, too, for so aggressively redrawing a map that it puts that party’s own seats at risk: a “dummymander.”

Paul Kane offeres some history and context on current developments in the Washington Post.