Editorial: California can’t afford to allow Texas to rig 2026
President Donald Trump believes he is “entitled to five more seats” – his words – in the U.S. House of Representatives. And he’s acting like it.
Reportedly pushed by his aides to prevent losing his House majority to Democrats in November 2026, Texas’s Republican leaders are working hard to deliver the president more congressional seats to ensure Republicans retain control of the House.
Considering that chamber has the most power over the U.S. Treasury’s $7 trillion purse and more than a third of the California state government’s budget is funded by federal spending, what happens in Texas will have tremendous repercussions for California taxpayers who already send more to D.C. than they get back.
Today, Lone Star state legislators are thumbing their noses at the longstanding political norm, followed by every other state, of waiting until the next census before redrawing their congressional districts. Instead, half way through this decade, they’re changing the rules of the game. Poll after poll this summer shows congressional Republicans losing in the midterms; fearing a wipeout, they’re trying to cheat the old-fashioned way, gerrymandering.
The draft congressional map Texas GOP leaders unveiled late last month would freeze, at least, five Democrats out of Congress and help Republicans maintain their majority.
Will their ploy work? Too early to say.
Texas Democrats had left the state, denying temporarily the state Legislature a quorum needed to pass the plan. In fact, they’ve been on the run, hiding from state (and apparently federal) authorities, who threatened to drag them back to Austin and ram through Trump’s plan.
Paying more for less
Amid the uncertainty, California can’t be caught unprepared if the Texas scheme works.
After all, no state has more to lose than California if Trump gets away with manufacturing a House majority. That’s a mathematical reality.
Consider that California taxpayers gave $83.1 billion more to the federal treasury than they took from it in 2022, the most recent year available. By contrast, that year, Texans took $71.1 billion more than they gave.
No state pays more and gets less than California.
The imbalance of payments is bad enough when Democrats control all three branches of the federal government, like they did in 2022. But Trump and his Republican Congress are doing everything in their power to make that ledger even less friendly to the Golden State, against which they have a clear vendetta.
It’s the House where federal spending bills originate, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which just emerged from the Republican-controlled chamber, reveals in stark terms why California needs Democrats to reclaim the House in 2026.
California can expect to lose more than $200 billion in federal funds over the next decade as a result of House Republicans’ new tax-and-spending plan, according to projections by the California Budget and Policy Center. (The state’s Legislative Analyst Office has not yet released its official projection.)
And the loss of federal dollars set in motion by that bill is already wreaking havoc across the state, jeopardizing nearly every sector of California — spanning transportation, education, scientific research and energy infrastructure, just for starters. In fact, the state projects that up to 3.4 million Californians will lose their health insurance as a result of that one bill alone, not to say anything about all the other legislation in House Republicans’ pipeline.
Across the Bay Area, county governments are scrambling to protect what’s left of their safety nets. Federal funding here helps support delivery of food assistance, child welfare services, housing, public safety, medical and behavioral health care. That’s all being dramatically cut.
Santa Clara and Alameda counties, which receive a majority of their health care budgets from the federal government, are bracing for impact. Santa Clara, which operates the second largest public health system in California, projects to lose more than $4 billion over the next five years. That’s the largest revenue loss the county has experienced since Prop. 13 passed in the 1970s and that now threatens its entire system’s viability as a reliable safety net.
To avert disaster, Santa Clara County—one of the wealthiest anywhere in the country—is now counting on passing a sales tax in November to raise about a third in local revenues of what it’s losing in federal benefits. In other words, Santa Clara has to tax itself locally to pay for services its federal taxes were paying for until House Republicans took it away.
Responding in kind
California leaders need to be prepared to meet force with force.
That means pausing California’s high-minded independent commission that has, admirably, drawn congressional boundaries in a non-partisan way since 2010.
While we would normally oppose gerrymandering of any kind, we believe California must act to protect its financial interests.
Will there be a chain reaction? Probably. By all accounts, it’s already starting.
Following Texas earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker both said they’re considering redrawing their state’s congressional districts. On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he wants to redraw his state’s. Ohio Republicans might be next and on and on.
In addition to these tit-for-tat threats, Trump is now deploying Vice President JD Vance to make the case for a new federal census that would, undoubtedly, reduce the number of safe Democratic congressional seats long before the 2030 census.
Simply put, there are no good options, including inaction.
Critics of California reacting to Texas’s provocation have focused on what this does or doesn’t mean for Governor Gavin Newsom’s potential run for president. Those are red herrings.
Gov. Newsom is rightly building support for a plan that will need voter buy-in; and he’s making clear that whatever plan the Legislature approves has to have an end date.
When the California Legislature returns from summer recess on Monday, they’ll have four days (though possibly more depending on the legal interpretation) to pass an official plan that will get on the Nov. 4 special-election ballot.
We can expect legal fights, well-funded opposition campaigns and a long, messy process to re-write our rules. The campaigning will be nonstop.
But while the details of the plan are still being worked out, this much must be clear:
Californians can’t sit idly by and take the moral high ground while Trump and his allies in Texas create Machiavellian schemes to manufacture a House majority hellbent on using the federal government to extract more wealth from California taxpayers while delivering their communities less.