“If the United States is to deter a nuclear attack,” then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in a 1967 speech in San Francisco, “it must possess an actual and a credible assured-destruction capability.”

McNamara was elucidating a long-established defense concept known as “mutually assured destruction,” meaning that if one side has the ability to destroy its enemy but knows that it cannot do so without being destroyed itself, and that its enemy can and will act to do precisely that, stability is the result.

Something like that argument is being applied to gerrymandering, which is applying nuclear-level destruction to American democracy at both state and federal levels. And it is proliferating.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom used the phrase “fight fire with fire” when he said he planned to work with the California legislature and congressional representatives on a plan that would temporarily set aside California’s independent redistricting commission. The aim is to draw a map that would offset any gains the GOP makes in Texas, where President Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott are trying to force a gerrymandered, mid-decade congressional map through the Texas legislature with the aim of maintaining Republican control of the U.S. House.

That action in Texas, of course, explains why Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker was holding a news conference this week with Texas Democrats who had fled the Lone Star State to try to prevent, well, their own mutually assured destruction. After other Texans in exile made their way to New York City for a separate news conference, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said that “if Republicans are willing to rewrite these rules to give themselves an advantage, then they’re leaving us no choice, we must do the same.”

Closer to home, Pritzker assailed what was happening in Texas as a “corrupt” act, likely to “silence millions of voters,” with nary a sense of irony, as if his own party was squeaky clean on the matter in Illinois, which is hardly the case.

Illinois Republicans, or what is left of them, roared at the hypocrisy, given that the Illinois version of gerrymandering, as egregiously implemented in 2021, has effectively disempowered Republicans, and thus Republican voters, to the point that very few of them even see a point in running for office in Illinois districts anymore, beyond the safe Republican islands. That’s despite 44% of Illinoisans voting for Trump in 2024.

The problem with applying the language of assured mutual destruction is that democracy does not die in a nuclear flash, to be avoided at all costs. It dies progressively, eaten away by incremental loss of trust.

The Illinois State Fair, which began Thursday in Springfield, is typically the kickoff of the new political season. But this year serious Republican candidates in districts now held by Democrats are outnumbered not just by cows but maybe even the one made of butter. Party representatives tell us that donors can read maps with impossible odds like anyone else and thus no longer see much point in supporting Republican efforts in Illinois. They feel their money is better spent on races outside the state, the competitiveness of which are now being undermined by Trump and his cronies in Texas and elsewhere.

Indiana appears to be next. Vice President JD Vance already has met with the Indiana governor and Republican legislative leaders, reportedly to “discuss ways to strengthen the GOP’s House majority ahead of the 2026 midterms.” The vice president would have been better advised to stand for fair and impartial maps in the Hoosier State and beyond. He should be shouting out for democracy, loud and clear.

We’ve railed against gerrymandering on both state and federal levels before, of course, and not just to lament the cowardice on gerrymandering displayed by the Illinois Supreme Court, as well the U.S. Supreme Court’s lamentable 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause that removed federal courts as a crucial check on partisan gerrymandering. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts clearly recognized the threat gerrymandering posed to democracy, but the 5-4 court majority he led ruled that the only lawful remedies were political, as distinct from federal judicial intervention.

Already that decision has not aged well. We’re with Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote in her dissent: “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations.”

If not that, then what else is the court for?

We’re back on the topic today to say that the events of the last few days only have deepened our conviction that gerrymandering is a real and present threat to American democracy that must be stopped before yet more damage is done. We also are here to say that phrases like “fire with fire” and “all’s fair in love and war” are nothing more than lazy, partisan thinking, tempting as they may be to utter.

So we were glad to hear Rep. Mark Lawler of New York say on CNN Tuesday that he thought what his fellow Republicans were doing in Texas was “wrong.” A voice in the wilderness perhaps, but a voice nonetheless.

“We have to actually have neutral districts across this country,” Lawler told the news outlet. “It would serve the country better.”

Ya think?

In a separate interview with PBS, wherein he strikingly echoed the arguments in Kagan’s dissent from 2019, Lawler allowed that “both sides have been guilty” of gerrymandering. “We should have competitive districts based on communities of interest, and ultimately the voters, not the politicians, should decide who is in the majority,” he said.

Such a novel concept.

Lawson has said he plans to introduce legislation that would “outright ban gerrymandering.” Good for him. We hope to be able to support that. We think all Americans with a sense of fairness should do the same.

Erudite cynics like Karl Rove have written that gerrymandering has been around as long as there have been politicians and districts and that public officials invariably become inured to their own hypocrisy. Plus ça change.

Perhaps. But such is the frighteningly rapid deterioration of structural fairness within the American political system these last few months, thanks mostly to a craven administration that sees everything as a zero-sum game and its singular ability to bring out the worst in its opponents, that surely some who have failed to see the clear and present dangers might wake up. Even if that means acting against their own short-term interests.

This isn’t about one side laying down its arms, or refusing to do so. It’s about building a structure with bipartisan buy-in so both are able to do so at once. We like to believe that could still be done in America.

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