Former President Barack Obama on Thursday sought to flip the script on accusations that he backs gerrymandering as he defended Democrats for launching retaliatory redistrictingplans responding to Texas Republicans’ battle to redraw their state’s congressional map.
The Texas GOP attracted fierce backlash from Democrats in the state House when it recently announced an agenda seeking to boost Republicans’ majority in the U.S. House by up to five seats through redrawing district lines.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was among Republicans who accused Democrats of hypocrisy with their reaction, saying that leaders in the party, among them Obama, have spearheaded their own gerrymandering efforts to benefit the Left. DeSantis has particularly gone after former Attorney General Eric Holder, who launched the Obama-backed National Democratic Redistricting Committee in 2016, seeking to give Democrats an opportunity to create more favorable district maps across 12 states after the 2020 census.
However, Obama this week framed his stance as necessary to prevent “a systematic assault on democracy,” during a roughly 30-minute video call with Texas House Democrats and Holder, now the chairman of the NDRC. Moves by Democrats in California and elsewhere to redraw the congressional maps in favor of the party are a necessary last-ditch effort to “balance out the maps” in response to the “highly irregular” mid-decade “gerrymandering” from Texas Republicans, Obama argued during the Zoom meeting.
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Author: Marty Kaufmann
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