‘These are not normal times’: Why Alex Padilla changed his tune on nonpartisan redistricting

As a United States senator, Alex Padilla does not have much personally at stake in the congressional redistricting skirmish now sweeping through Texas, California and potentially other parts of the union. He represents a whole state, the nation’s most populous, so district boundaries do not affect his electorate.

But Padilla, a quietly influential member of his party and of the Senate, is invested in the struggle for power and advantage underway in Washington. He is a committed critic of President Donald Trump. Padilla’s attempts to stand up for the immigrants who undergird the life and culture of California crested in a memorable confrontation earlier this year when he showed up at a news conference hosted by Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, only to be wrestled to the ground by federal officers.

The incident was captured on video and stands as one of the hallmark moments of the Trump regime’s dubious resort to force as it stampedes through American cities, rounding up people who look Latino and shipping them off to faraway lands. 

Padilla has supported independent redistricting commissions in the past and backed the current structure in California, which was built to minimize partisanship in the business of drawing lines for members of Congress and others. But now, as Trump and his allies work to game the nation’s politics, Padilla is a supporter of California’s proposed response.

He is backing Proposition 50, which will appear on a special election ballot in November and would redraw California’s congressional maps to give Democrats the advantage in five more races. That’s a direct response to Texas, which, under instructions from Trump, has approved new maps that draw five seats in that state with Republican majorities.

This is politics, not math, so none of these schemes are foolproof. Even if the new maps go into effect, actual candidates need to run and win, and voters have a way of foiling the best-laid plans. But tilting majorities is intended to shape the field for the party doing the drawing.

In “normal times,” Padilla told me this week when we met in his Capitol Hill hideaway off the Senate floor, he would support nonpartisan commissions and that redistricting take place once every 10 years, in conjunction with the census. “But these are not normal times. There’s too much at stake.”

For Padilla, this is about more than voting systems or niceties. It’s about climate change, immigration, access to health care — the full panoply of assaults that the Trump administration has waged and that it intends to sustain by holding the House of Representatives in the midterms. It’s a goal so important that the administration has made clear it’s willing to cheat to achieve it.

Notably, Padilla said, the administration is not attempting to do that by trumpeting its record since taking office in January. Trump and his allies enjoy a rare moment of dominance in the nation’s life, holding the presidency, both houses of Congress and, in effect, the Supreme Court, which has regularly avoided direct confrontations with the president by giving him what he wants — even when it stretches logic and constitutional norms, as it did on abortion and presidential immunities.

The administration could run on its record, Padilla said, but that record is, by every measure, deeply unpopular. Most voters object to the substance of Trump’s signature legislative achievement, his so-called Big Beautiful Bill, with its cuts to medical and health services in order to pay for tax cuts for the very wealthy.

And voters also have registered their discomfort with Trump’s militarized sweeps through American cities, starting with Los Angeles, in order to deport gardeners and nannies and other working men and women under the guise of targeting dangerous criminals. As of this week, 39% of voters say they approve of Trump’s job performance, compared to 57% who disapprove, the lowest point of his presidency. And Trump’s support from Latinos, which surprised many analysts during the election, is falling. 

That leaves Trump and his allies in a quandary, Padilla argued.

“The only hope they have to stay in power after the midterms is to rig them,” he said.

That has touched off the rush to redistrict, first by Texas and then by others. Padilla said he’s convinced that the push would not have stopped with Texas, and that necessitated California’s response. In any case, he said, it’s required if liberal states have any hope of holding their own against conservative line-drawing.

Underscoring that point, the senator is today introducing a new bill, the Redistricting Reform Act of 2025. It would bar states from redistricting mid-decade unless ordered by a court, and it would require states to create an independent redistricting commission to supervise the drawing of congressional lines. That would end the arms race now underway, but it will surely draw opposition — let alone go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress — since it would strip redistricting away from legislatures and governors eager to use it to gerrymander lines.

It was the immigration roundups that prompted Padilla to show up unannounced at Noem’s June press conference in Los Angeles. When he tried to ask a question, FBI agents tackled him to the ground. She claimed to have felt threatened by him, but video recordings of the incident make clear he never got close. He is a United States senator after all, asking a question of a cabinet officer, for which he was manhandled and detained.

Dismissing the incident a few days later, Vice President J.D. Vance referred to the senator as “Jose” Padilla, a remark that could only be heard as a racial slur. I’ve known Padilla a long time, since his days as a Los Angeles City Council member. It’s clear how much the confrontation with Noem and the disrespect by Vance affected him.

And so the partisanship, the invective, the smuggery that Trump has brought to the White House continues to erode efforts at moderation. Now it forces Democrats, including Padilla, into an uncomfortable position: Do they stand by nonpartisan districting commissions and let Trump rig the system in Texas and elsewhere, or do they stoop to his level and jimmy districts in the states that they control?

I suggested to Padilla that the old maxim “two wrongs don’t make a right” might be appropriate here. He politely disagreed.

“Two wrongs don’t necessarily make a right,” he acknowledged, “but in this case, one wrong could be disastrous.”