Efforts to drain more politics out of legislative mapmaking for the new decade are getting pride of place as GOP-run legislatures convene in a pair of generally red Midwestern states.
Influential lawmakers from both parties in the Indiana General Assembly signed a pledge Monday to support legislation making the next round of redistricting more transparent, nondiscriminatory and politically impartial than in the past.
And in Missouri, where the General Assembly convened on Wednesday, leaders of the GOP majorities are pushing a measure they describe as a compromise for tamping down the state's past tendencies toward partisan gerrymandering. Democrats are not yet on board, however.
Legislative and congressional district lines across the country get redrawn once a decade, the year after the census details how the population has changed and relocated, to reflect the Constitution's one-person, one-vote mandate.
Under the maps that were in use for the past decade and will be used for the last time this fall, the GOP has a comfortable hold on seven of the nine U.S. House seats in Indiana and six of the eight districts in Missouri, along with supermajorities in both halves of the legislatures in both states. But in the last statewide races in both places, for Senate seats in 2018, Republicans Mike Braun of Indiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri each defeated incumbent Democrats with just 51 percent of the vote.
The redistricting reform bill on the agenda in Indianapolis with the best chance of passage would allow citizens to access the detailed census data so they could try their hand at drawing political boundaries — and would require, at least theoretically, the legislators to take such handiwork into account when setting the real lines.
"Legislators should serve in competitive districts," GOP Sen. John Ruckelshaus said in unveiling the bill and its bipartisan roster of sponsors this week. "I think we're all better for that. Competition is good."
He conceded, however, that his more ambitious measure — to turn the redistricting responsibilities over to an independent commission — was not likely to advance any farther this time than the previous two times he's offered it, which was nowhere.
In Missouri, by contrast, 62 percent of voters in 2018 approved redistricting changes as part of a sweeping constitutional amendment. It created a new position in Jefferson City for a nonpartisan state demographer, with responsibility for proposing state House and Senate maps after the 2020 census with the goals of achieving both "partisan fairness" and "competitiveness." Six finalists are still in the running.
Some Republicans are pushing for having the state vote to change the system again this fall — so that the demographer's work next year would be subject to approval by the same bipartisan (but GOP-tilted) commission that drew the lines a decade ago. Some Democrats are willing to go along but others say that would undercut the point of the referendum two years ago.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.