Twin court rulings reshape House battlefield as Democrats fight uphill redistricting battle
As they push to flip the House and capture the chamber's majority in this year's midterm elections, Democrats are facing a steeper hill to climb, thanks to two blockbuster court...
By Fox News · Fox News
As they push to flip the House and capture the chamber's majority in this year's midterm elections, Democrats are facing a steeper hill to climb, thanks to two blockbuster court rulings. The Virginia Supreme Court decision last week to strike down the state's voter-passed congressional redistricting ballot measure, coupled with the ruling a week earlier by the Supreme Court to slash a key protection in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, were major setbacks for Democrats. The twin rulings gave President Donald Trump and Republicans a major boost in their high-stakes mid-decade redistricting battle with Democrats, giving the House GOP a bit of breathing room as they defend their razor-thin majority in the midterms. At stake is which party will control the House and the Senate during the final two years of Trump's second term in the White House. SOUTH CAROLINA REPUBLICANS DEFY TRUMP, TANK REDISTRICTING, FOR NOW The Virginia decision negated four more likely left-leaning congressional districts in that state. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruling, which determined that race should not dictate the redrawing of legislative district maps, spurred a slew of Republican-controlled southern states to quickly redraw their maps and create more right-leaning seats ahead of the midterms. "We have a battlefield, a map, that favors Republicans," Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee , highlighted Monday in a Fox News Channel interview as he pointed to the possibility of the GOP having a net gain of up to a dozen more right-tilting House districts as a result of redistricting initiated by Trump a year ago. But some Republicans are raising concerns that the newly drawn GOP-controlled districts could put once safe red seats in play by diluting the percentage of Republican voters in those districts. "You could in essence take … like here in Texas, take big cities, which are typically Democrat, and split them up among several sort of…