Flickers of the bygone days of Indiana’s political pragmatism have rekindled in the past week. Political pressure is already threatening that fledgling spark.
It was lit by the Trump administration. The White House is trying to strongarm Republican-majority states into redrawing their congressional boundaries, years ahead of the constitutionally based post-census cycle.
Now, President Donald Trump has invited all 110 Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly to an Aug. 26 meeting in the White House, the Indianapolis Star reported Friday.
They should decline, politely if that softens the consequences for those lawmakers.
The coercion from the White House is a purely political ploy to win more Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Not through better candidates, policies or campaigning, but by simply erasing the existing lines and redrawing them to ensure a GOP victory.
Trump’s Republican Party holds a narrow 219-212 majority in the House, with four vacant seats. The party in control of the White House historically loses seats in midterm elections. If that holds true in the 2026 election, Democrats could regain the House majority, complicating Trump’s plans.
So, the White House has unleashed a pressure campaign on governors and state lawmakers in Republican-leaning states to redraw congressional districts to win more House seats. It started with Texas, where Republicans hold 25 of the Lone Star State’s 38 seats in the U.S. House, and has spread to others.
The U.S. Constitution provides for states to redistrict after the decennial census, which happens next in 2030. This is 2025.
The president’s rationale for disrupting that cycle, specifically in Texas?
“We are entitled to five more seats,” Trump told CNBC on Aug. 5.
Soon, compliant Texas Republicans began working to conjure up new boundaries to deliver those five seats in 2026, setting off a wild clash with minority Democrats who left that state in a procedural move to stall the scheme. Then, Vice President J.D. Vance was sent to Indiana to twist the arms of Gov. Mike Braun, Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston (R-Fishers) and state Senate Pro Tem Rodric Bray (R-Martinsville) to follow Texas’s lead. The Hoosier leaders were basically noncommittal.
Numbers illustrate the reason why Indiana officials should not join the power grab. Republicans already hold seven of the state’s nine seats in the U.S. House. That calculates to 78% of the seats. That is far more than the actual Republican-Democratic split in Indiana. Braun won the 2024 governor’s race with 54% of the vote, while Democratic challenger Jennifer McCormick got 41%.
Trump wants 100% of Indiana’s seats, and wants new lines drawn to guarantee that outcome.
Admirably, a surprising number of Republican Indiana state legislators have pushed back against the scheme.
Zionsville Rep. Becky Cash told WTHR in Indianapolis, “I do not support redistricting and do not know of any reason why Indiana should redistrict.” Even staunch conservative Rep. Jim Lucas of Seymour gave the “highly unusual and politically optically horrible” scheme a “hard no” on social media, adding, “If there are seats that need targeted, we should do it the old-fashioned way and campaign harder in those districts.”
Spencer Deery, the Republican state senator from Lafayette summoned a slice of the late Richard Lugar’s statesmanship, saying, “We are being asked to create a new culture in which it would be normal for a political party to select new voters, not once a decade, but any time it fears the consequences of an approaching election. That would clearly violate the concept of popular sovereignty by making it harder for the people to hold their elected officials accountable, and the country would be an uglier place for it.”
Deery is right; it would be. There is no need for state legislators to travel to the White House to face intimidation. Indiana should study its legislative boundaries after the 2030 census, and no sooner.
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