Frederica Freyberg:
In terms of this kind of mid-cycle or mid-10-year census, how rare is that?

Barry Burden:
Very rare. So, in the 1960s, there were these Supreme Court decisions that were the "one person, one vote" decisions that equalized the populations of districts. Since that era, this doesn't happen. It happened once in Texas, if you remember, under Tom DeLay. There was a sort of scandal there, and they tried to redraw them, and Democrats left the state. Other than that, it doesn't happen, unless a court intervenes and there's a ruling that the districts are violation of law. In the 1800s, it happened a lot. It was a sort of the Wild West, and states, some of them were redrawing the districts every year. But we're in an era where that should not happen.

Frederica Freyberg:
What do people like you — experts in this realm think about what you're seeing now?

Barry Burden:
Well, I think it's harmful. It has a few negative effects. So, one is it's going to turn California and Texas and Indiana and Maryland into one-party states. There are going to be very few Republicans from California, maybe no Democrats in Indiana, maybe no Republicans in Virginia. So, in the aggregate, maybe the Congress will look like the country, but state to state, it's gonna be very imbalanced, and there're going to be a lot of people who are not represented adequately. Another harm is, I think, what it does to public opinion, that everyone is watching both sides doing this. So, there's a both sides-ism in this — everybody does it, everything is fair game. What's next, you know? So it's today, is drawing districts in the House. There have been a couple special elections this year. The new member who was elected in Tennessee on Tuesday was seated within a couple of days, even though those elections had not even been certified yet. So, that was a Republican — Speaker Johnson was very eager to get that person in. The Democrat who was elected in a special in Arizona wasn't seated for about 50 days. So, there's that kind of — those are just hard-ball politics that now seem totally OK because it's part of the partisan gamesmanship that's in the districts and everywhere else.

Frederica Freyberg:
Yeah, interesting. Well, even if you are a good-government type, right, and thought that this is not how this process should go, once somebody does it, you know, like California?

Barry Burden:
California, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, Democrats feel more tension in this. They want to do the right thing by good government, but they also don't want to get beat. So, Republicans don't feel any tension. They feel like this is the right and proper thing to do, and Trump is asking for it.