A lot of people are calling Republican lawmakers cowards for refusing to stand up to Donald Trump, and it’s true they are. But that cowardice isn’t the root issue.

The thirst for power — guaranteed power — is.

And not just by Republicans. Democrats have been just as guilty. They’ve entered into a devil’s deal that protects their seats through gerrymandering, but they didn’t realize that they’d get the exact opposite of the protection they sought.

The “safer” their seats were, the more extreme their districts became, and the more willing the voters there became to put up with — and even demand — more extreme positions: like defending the Confederate flag, putting immigrant children in cages, and discriminating against the LGBTQ community for the sake of “religious freedom.” Positions Trump gave them permission to hold, and prompted them to express openly.

All for the sake of thumbing their noses at “political correctness” and pissing off the Democrats.

Big-city Democrats tend to go more extreme in the opposite direction as a result of gerrymandering, too. Maybe it would be better to call it gerry-pandering.

Trumpification

In the process, Trump normalized cruel and bigoted positions that the nation had spent decades marginalizing, in a quest to make American hate again, because Trump himself fed off hatred and division. It mobilized his base and distracted them from the reality that he didn’t know what he was doing and was a monumental failure in terms of governing.

And lawmakers in deep red states and districts went along because they had no choice. If they didn’t, Trump would rail against them on Twitter and call on more extremist candidates to face them in the primaries: candidates who would do his bidding without question. Now Incumbent Republicans find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They go along with Trump’s demands or stand up for decency and democracy... and risk being booted out of office by extremist constituents he’s weaponized against them.

Trump has turned their desire for “safe” seats against them, making those seats anything but safe. The seats are no longer safe for them, but for Trump. Those who go along with him can always claim they were just doing what their constituents wanted.

As Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said in announcing he was going to challenge the Electoral College vote on Trump’s behalf: “I go back to the fact that this is my opportunity, the only one that I have got in this process to stand up and speak on behalf of my constituents in the state of Missouri who are telling me night and day that they are worried, that they have — are afraid, that they feel disenfranchised.”

It’s a cop-out, and Hawley knows better. He’s a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, for God’s sake. But that also means he knows he’s in a no-win situation. Even though he’s still got four years left on his Senate term, he knows his constituents in the increasingly red state he represents are with Trump, so he’ll get on board that train, too. But it’s not out of any dedication to serving his constituents; it’s pure political survival.

Backlash

Senators who have crossed Trump, like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, left office rather than face primary challengers. Flake’s empty seat was taken by a Democrat, while Corker was replaced by Trump defender Marsha Blackburn. By and large, those seem to be the only two options for lawmakers in deep red states and districts. The states are one thing: Their boundaries are fixed. But House districts get redrawn every 10 years with the census.

At this point, lawmakers have drawn them to “protect” their political futures from the opposite party, without realizing they were making themselves vulnerable to political blackmail from Trump. Or someone like him. And make no mistake, now that Trump’s shown them how it’s done, others will follow in his footsteps... unless lawmakers act to redraw districts in a more balanced way.

That’s all that’s standing in the way of even more extreme views taking hold in the years ahead, and because it’s a census year, lawmakers have an opportunity to do just that.

Don’t hold your breath, though.

They’ve been thoroughly conditioned to believe that even the most radical member of their own party is better than the most rational person in the opposition party, and (more to the point) they don’t want to risk losing the majority — or having a chance to gain it — in either house by rocking the boat.

Bluntly, they’re paranoid. So most of them won’t even consider balancing out districts or trying other innovations such as ranked voting. (Optimally, they’d appoint a nonpartisan citizens commission, like the one used in California, to remove the blatant conflict of interest involved in having lawmakers create their own districts.)

Give up power? Have you ever found many politicians interested in doing that? They’d rather let someone like Trump blackmail them on social media and remain safely ensconced in their invisible gerrymandered cages.

We’re right there with them, unfortunately, and if Trump had won another four years, he might have used them to obliterate representative democracy as we know it. He’s still trying, and even if he fails, he’s shown would-be extremist despots the wave of the future. Unless we reform our districts and the process we use to draw them, it will happen again.

It’s only a matter of time.

Featured photo: Josh Hawley during a Senate campaign stop in Jackson, Mo., 2018, by Natureofthought, Creative Commons 4.0. Author’s note: I realize Hawley, a senator, isn’t subject to gerrymandering, but he still is emblematic of a lawmaker who’s been forced to choose between Trump and democracy… and has chosen wrong.