There are rumblings in two of the nation's most reliably blue states about taking partisan politics out of the business of drawing legislative boundaries for the coming decade. And some of the Democrats in power sound ready to go along.
Discussions are in their early stages in both Oregon and Illinois, but a sustained drive to end partisan gerrymandering in either place would be one of the bigger stories of the coming year in the world of democracy reform.
Big changes in the rules of redistricting could also affect the balancing of power on Capitol Hill, in Salem and in Springfield when new maps get drawn after the next census — although a long run of election results suggest the Democratic dominance in both states will not be readily threatened.
The drive to take away line-drawing powers from politicians is much farther along in Oregon. Last week advocates filed papers starting the process of getting a referendum on next November's ballot that would turn the cartography over to a commission of a dozen ordinary citizens: four Democrats, four Republicans and four who identify with a third party or as independents.
The next step is to gather more than 150,000 signatures on petitions. The organizer of the effort is People Not Politicians, which was born to push the successful 2018 ballot initiative creating a similar independent redistricting panel in Republican-run Michigan.
The proposal has already drawn an unusual range of backers, from Common Cause and the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group on the left to the Farm Bureau and the Taxpayer Association of Oregon on the right. Also endorsing the effort are local chapters of the NAACP, the American Association of University Women and the League of Women Voters.
"Farmers do not get to choose their weather. Politicians should not choose their voters," the Oregon Farm Bureau said in a statement to the East Oregonian.
A spokeswoman for state Democrats, Molly Woon, said the party would not take a position on the ballot measure until at least next year, but may still be neutral after that.
The gerrymandering measure would become the second significant democracy reform proposal on the Oregon ballot in 2020, joining a state constitutional amendment to explicitly allow campaign finance limits.
At the Illinois capital, meanwhile, legislators in both parties have been in discussion in recent days about ways they could combat the public's perception of a culture of corruption in state government. And turning over redistricting to an outside group has secured some bipartisan interest, spurred on by the advocacy group Change Illinois, which says the state "is a leading example of the harm that gerrymandering does to our democracy."
"I think we do need to amend our constitution and relinquish the political control that lawmakers have over redistricting," GOP state Sen. Jason Barickman told the Alton Telegraph.
"I really want to see us do more work on how we change the culture here, so continue to do work in that arena," added Democratic state Sen. Melinda Bush. "How do we look at those issues? How do we make sure that the people that we're electing, that we're getting good representation? So looking at fair maps."
More than 500,000 voters signed a petition to get an independent redistricting commission proposal on the statewide ballot in 2016, but the referendum was killed through a legal challenge by Democrats. Now, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker is on record vowing "to make sure that here in Illinois we're not gerrymandering, that we're drawing maps that are fair and competitive."
Democrats have controlled Oregon's government for 11 of the past 13 years and now enjoy significant majorities in the Legislature. The party has held all levers of policymaking power in Illinois for 13 of the past 17 years and also has lopsided control of the General Assembly.
So if independent commissions take over, they will probably have their biggest impact on the power dynamic at the congressional level. Very limited population growth this decade means Illinois is nearly certain to lose one of its House seats, which now skew 13 to 5 for the Democrats, while Oregon's growth means it will gain a seat in addition to the four now held by Democrats and one by a Republican.
The fight against partisan gerrymandering has intensified in both state courts and the drive for ballot initiatives since the Supreme Court ruled in June that federal courts have no place deciding when a party in power has drawn maps that go too far to perpetuate that power. But most of the action so far has been in the majority of states where Republicans were in charge of drawing this decade's districts.
Fourteen states have now assigned the drawing of the next state legislative maps to independent commissions, while just nine will use such panels to set the congressional maps.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.