Donald Trump has spent the last six months relentlessly attacking our democracy — and this week proved that the cracks are starting to show. His personal lawyer and Department of Justice hatchet man, Emil Bove, is now a federal judge. Republicans moved to further weaken the Voting Rights Act. Members of Congress laid the groundwork to permit more aggressive voter purges — even as Democracy Docket broke the news that the DOJ is seeking confidential voter data from all fifty states.

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August 1, 2025

Donald Trump has spent the last six months relentlessly attacking our democracy — and this week proved that the cracks are starting to show. His personal lawyer and Department of Justice hatchet man, Emil Bove, is now a federal judge. Republicans moved to further weaken the Voting Rights Act. Members of Congress laid the groundwork to permit more aggressive voter purges — even as Democracy Docket broke the news that the DOJ is seeking confidential voter data from all fifty states.

The most immediate threat to democracy this week, however, came from Texas, where Trump convinced Republican officials to undertake an unprecedented round of gerrymandering. If successful, the effort would yield five more Republican seats in Congress.

With control of the House on the line, anxiety among Democrats is high, and simple solutions are elusive. The threat of a new wave of extreme GOP partisan gerrymandering — from Missouri to Florida to Ohio — hangs in the humid summer air. State by state, in red and blue alike, Democratic politicians, senior strategists and teams of lawyers are working on potential reactions and solutions.

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My own thinking about how to combat the scourge of Republican gerrymandering has evolved. I’ve always been a fierce defender of democracy who is not afraid of a partisan brawl. I understand the power of litigation as a tool to combat anti-democratic schemes. That has not changed.

However, times have changed. Democracy is hanging by a thread. Simply mitigating partisan gerrymandering by fighting state by state and district by district isn’t enough.

Democrats should make the problem of partisan gerrymandering an even bigger one for Republicans. Put simply: If Republicans threaten five Democratic seats in Texas, Democrats should threaten fifteen, twenty or even thirty Republican seats in states they control.

It’s not enough to say Democrats shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight — if Republicans bring pistols, Democrats should bring machine guns.

My inspiration for this approach comes from an unlikely source: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who once observed that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to enlarge it rather than shrink it:

“Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

For years, Democrats have tried to limit the effects of partisan gerrymandering by trying to make it smaller. They’ve enacted laws and state constitutional restrictions to prevent drawing maps based on partisan intent. They’ve sued to stop the use of partisanship in redistricting. Yet, if the last week is anything to go by, the problem has only worsened.

While many Democratic-controlled states have banned or limited partisan gerrymandering, Republican-controlled states have celebrated it. Democrats in states with restrictions adhere to those laws, while Republicans openly flout them. When a Democratic state loses a lawsuit, it redraws a compliant map. When Republicans are defeated in court, they remain stubbornly defiant.

This week, it seems clearer than ever that the solution is to, as Eisenhower suggested, “make it bigger.” Democrats must aggressively redraw maps at the expense of Republicans. The more aggressive, the better. The goal is to make the problem so large that Republican House members pressure their leadership to call it off.

Right now, Republicans are bratty toddlers who have never experienced consequences for their actions. They’ve been told no, but they’ve never been punished. It’s past time that we punish them.

We’ve already seen governors like J.B. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul signal that they are exploring ways to counter GOP gerrymandering. Other Democratic governors with legislative majorities should do the same.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder issued an important statement that should help pave the way for more leading Democrats to adopt a more aggressive approach to an existential problem.

“Let me be clear,” Holder’s statement read. “Our enduring commitment to fairness does not blind us to reality. In this moment steps must be taken to respond to the authoritarian measures being considered in certain states and now so brazenly taken in Texas.”

There is no guarantee this will succeed. Republicans may escalate their own gerrymandering. They may simply ignore the law.

But if we refuse to fight we are simply admitting defeat — and the consequences for democracy will be devastating. Now is the time to go big in our fight for free and fair elections.

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The Weekly Top Line

The redistricting battles, like the fight for voting rights, will ultimately be fought out — at least in part — in court. For this reason, the fight over judges is central to the fight for democracy. This week’s confirmation of Emil Bove tells us something important: Trump wants to stack the bench with people personally loyal to him. Just as important? Senate Republicans will not stand in his way.

Right now, Senate Democrats and Republicans are in a standoff over the confirmation of judges and tempers are running hot. Sen. John Thune cannot let his majority go home because Trump won’t let him. The president is so frustrated, he even attacked the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley.

Thankfully, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer did a masterful job of filling nearly every significant vacancy on the federal bench that Senate rules would permit. While this gives the pro-democracy movement a chance, it is one that Trump and Thune will try to undo. How this plays out will be critical in the legal fights ahead.

Fools and Cowards of the Week

There is no doubt that the 2020 election was a humiliating defeat for Donald Trump. Not only did he lose the election, but his legal team challenging the results beclowned themselves — losing scores of lawsuits nationwide. Since then, the lawyers who took up Trump’s lies have gone on to be ridiculed, indicted and, in a number of instances, disbarred.

Yet, even with the news that a D.C. Bar panel had recommended Jeffrey Clark – a former Justice Department official — be disbarred, the far-right members of the Georgia Elections Board voted to ask the Trump administration to investigate the 2020 election results in Fulton County.

At this point, you would think Republicans would distance themselves from this nonsense. But to the contrary, many are all in. The GOP are fools for thinking this will help them and cowards for going along with the unstable ride.

The Week’s Siren 🚨

As noted above, on Tuesday, Democracy Docket broke the news that the Department of Justice is reaching out to every single state to obtain the sensitive voter data of nearly every American voter. There is no reason the DOJ should want or need this information. Anecdotal reports suggest that many states — both red and blue — are telling federal officials making these requests to pound sand. Maine’s Secretary of State even told them to “go jump in the Gulf of Maine.” Let’s hope this resistance holds.

In the meantime, we must all be vigilant as the DOJ makes more attempts to put its thumb on the scale next November. .

Overlooked This Week 👀

Amid a sea of nonsense coming from the administration this week, we shouldn’t ignore the ethics complaint filed by Pam Bondi against Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg. Boasberg is overseeing several high-profile lawsuits against the Trump administration and Bondi has been a vocal critic of some of the judge’s decisions. None of that, of course, supports this kind of spurious intimidation. While this complaint won’t go anywhere and Judge Boasberg is certain to ignore it, we cannot overlook this escalation and we should worry about what it portends for the future.

Watching Next Week

Next week is the sixtieth anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Civil rights and voting rights advocates are sure to celebrate its passage and continued importance in our legal system. Until recently, such celebrations were bipartisan affairs. With Trump back in the White House and Republicans attacking voting on all fronts, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, the GOP has to say about what was, in 1965, a bipartisan legislative achievement.

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