Indiana GOP to Trump: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on

[Scooter]

Some chinks showing in the armor. Lame duck status emerging early in this second term.

Indiana Lawmakers Reject Trump’s New Political Map

Republican members of the Indiana Senate bucked President Trump on Thursday and joined Democrats in voting down a new congressional map that would have positioned Republicans to sweep the state’s U.S. House seats.

The 19 to 31 vote was a highly public defeat for Mr. Trump, who has spent significant political capital pushing for redrawn maps in Republican-led states and who repeatedly threatened political consequences for Indiana Republicans who did not fall in line. The defiance of Mr. Trump comes as he faces other signs of rifts within his own party.

The rejection of the map in the State Senate, where Republicans hold 40 of the 50 seats, followed months of presidential lobbying that turned increasingly pointed in recent weeks as it became clear that some holdouts were not budging. Mr. Trump called some of them out by name on social media, openly questioned their loyalty to the party and pledged to back primary challengers against them.

As the debate turned more tense, several Republicans, both for and against the new map, reported threats or swatting. Long-simmering ideological and stylistic divides among Republicans in Indiana spilled into the open, with many long-serving or institutionalist figures who opposed the map clashing with Trump-aligned conservatives who favored the plan. Republicans would have been expected to flip the only two Democratic-held congressional seats among the state’s nine districts if the new map had passed.

That Indiana lawmakers voted at all showed the enduring power that Mr. Trump holds over his party. Many in the State Senate did not want to debate the map, which was proposed outside the usual once-a-decade redistricting cycle, and the chamber’s leadership relented and brought the bill to the floor only after the president and his allies stepped up their pressure campaign. The map’s defeat, though, showed the limits of Mr. Trump’s power to bend Republican officials to his will.

“I believe the bill on its face is unconstitutional,” said State Senator Greg Walker, a Republican who opposes redistricting and who recently reported a swatting incident at his home, a form of harassment in which law enforcement was called to respond to a nonexistent emergency.

Another Republican opposed to the new map, State Senator Spencer Deery, said that “I see no justification that outweighs the harms it would inflict upon the people’s faith in the integrity of our elections and our system of government.” He added that “it’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C.,” and that “it’s time to say no to outsiders who are trying to run our state.”

Republican supporters of the plan framed the new map as a way to offset gerrymandering by Democrats in other states and boost the odds of a Republican majority in Congress. Some of them spoke in dire terms about what it might mean for the country if Democrats take control of the U.S. House.

“I don’t want to wake up the morning after the election in November and find out we lost the House of Representatives by one vote,” said State Senator R. Michael Young, a Republican who supports redistricting.

State Senator Mike Gaskill, another Republican redistricting supporter, said, “President Trump is not forcing this on us. He’s encouraging us to do the right thing. To stand up and fight.”

The redistricting arms race that started this summer with Texas Republicans and that quickly spilled across state and party lines has shown signs of cooling in recent weeks. Kansas Republicans rejected a Trump-backed plan to consider a new map in a special session, and Maryland Democrats have been publicly divided over remapping. The Democratic governor of Illinois did not immediately pursue a new map, but told local reporters that his state might redraw its map if Indiana went ahead with redistricting.

Indiana senators debated the map on Thursday as anti-redistricting protesters gathered outside the chamber, chanting phrases like, “Fair Maps Now.” Democrats blasted the proposed map as cynical and unfair, arguing that it spliced like-minded areas apart in order to maximize Republican political influence.

Indianapolis, the state’s Democratic stronghold, would have been carved into four districts under the proposed map. Those districts would have matched urban neighborhoods with conservative, rural counties. Some Democrats questioned whether splitting up the city, which has significant Black and Hispanic populations, would have amounted to an illegal racial gerrymander.

“By any standard of good governance, this is an unprecedented and profoundly cynical exercise of political power,” State Senator J.D. Ford, a Democrat who opposes redistricting, said during a committee hearing earlier in the week. “And it’s the old phrase: Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.”