On Thursday, December 11, 2025, the Indiana Senate rejected by a vote of 31-19 the mid-decade redistricting plan demanded by President Donald Trump and his cohorts. It was the right thing to do. The federal government has no say in how states draw their congressional map, and the Indiana constitution authorizes only one redraw per decade. Plus, it was unashamedly promoted as a way for the Republican majority to disenfranchise Indiana Democrats entirely in the U. S. House of Representatives. It was a call to cheat.
Now we wait to see what happens next. A very strong school bully said, in essence, "If you don't cheat for me on this test, I'm going to take all your lunch money for the next three years!!" And enough Indiana lawmakers said, "We don't cheat in Indiana" to carry the day. The bully is now enraged. There have been multiple threats against the personal safety of Republican state senators who voted against the plan, along with their families.
Ordinarily, we could go to the school administration and ask that something be done to protect us from this school bully and his thugs. However, our school analogy breaks down at this point. Somehow, our bully has been made school superintendent and the entire administration is scared to cross him. In fact, the teachers themselves urged us to cheat for him and were infuriated when we refused to do so. He has persuaded many parents and school board members he is working in their best interests by keeping riff-raff out of the school. All while enriching himself on the lunch money he is collecting from students too weak to resist him.
What can we do now? Do we wait a year for a new school board election and hope the bully loses power? A year without lunch is a long time.
It was the right thing to do. And doing the right thing always beats doing the wrong thing. It remains to be seen what price there is to pay. What I have heard so far, beyond the immediate threats to lawmakers' safety, are promises to "primary" the holdouts by endorsing Trump loyalists to defeat them in the next election cycle. There is also the question of federal funds that come into Indiana. We have crossed a powerful bully. But that bully is neither all-powerful nor immortal. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote during the American Civil War, "The wrong shall fail, the right prevail." It was good to see a majority of Indiana Senators come down on the side of fairness, even after 58% of Indiana Representatives (82% of Republican Representatives) voted to redistrict.
