Obama breaks silence on Gavin Newsom's latest plan to take on Trump
The Texas House approved a new map on Wednesday to create more GOP-leaning seats in the state after a weeks-long battle with the state's Democratic Party. After Texas unveiled its plan to add more Republican seats, Newsom vowed to respond by creating more Democratic-leaning seats in California.
Obama slammed 'political gerrymandering' in a statement shared to social media platform X on Wednesday, but commended Newsom for fighting back against Texas Republicans.
'Over the long term, we shouldn't have political gerrymandering in America, just a fair fight between Republicans and Democrats based on who's got better ideas,' Obama said in a statement.
'But since Texas is taking direction from a partisan White House and gerrymandering in the middle of a decade to try and maintain the House despite their unpopular policies, I have tremendous respect for how Governor Newsom has approached this. He's put forward a smart, measured approach in California, designed to address a very particular problem at a very particular moment in time,' he added.
The move to redraw the congressional maps in the middle of the decade is highly unusual, but Texas pushed ahead at the urging of Trump earlier in the summer. The move will give Republicans an advantage in the Lone Star state ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Obama previously weighed in on the Trump-backed redistricting plan in Texas last week.
In remarks first reported by ABC News, Obama had expressed support to the fleeing Democratic lawmakers in Texas through a video call, arguing that their exit comes at an important time to combat gerrymandering.
'We can't let a systematic assault on democracy just happen and stand by and so because of your actions, because of your courage, what you've seen is California responding, other states looking at what they can do to offset this mid-decade gerrymandering,' Obama told the legislators, who were meeting in Illinois, via Zoom.
Now, California is hoping to respond to Texas's redistricting plan approved by the House this week.
Newsom has engineered the high-risk strategy in response to President Donald Trump's own brinkmanship. Trump pushed Texas Republicans to reopen the legislative maps they passed in 2021 to squeeze out up to five new GOP seats to help the party stave off a midterm defeat.
Unlike in Texas, where passage by the Republican-controlled state Senate and signature by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott are now all that's needed to make the maps official, California faces a more uncertain route. Democrats must use their legislative supermajority to pass the map by a two-third margin. Then they must schedule a special election in November for voters to approve the map that Newsom must sign by Friday to meet ballot deadlines.
The added complexity is because California has a voter-approved independent commission that Newsom himself backed before Trump's latest redistricting maneuver. Only the state's voters can override the map that commission approved in 2021. But Newsom said extraordinary steps are required to counter Texas and other Republican-led states that Trump is pushing to revise maps.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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