Sen. Jerry Moran is the voice of reason on redistricting, and the Kansas Legislature would do well to listen.
In an interview with KMUW public radio, Kansas’ senior senator said he doesn’t think state lawmakers should redraw the state’s congressional districts this year.
That puts Moran at odds with President Donald Trump, who’s trying to tilt the nation’s political playing field in an effort to hang on to a narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.
“There’s a bit of fairness that I think ought to be preserved about this issue,” Moran told KMUW. “And we have a practice that we’ve utilized for a long period of time. We reapportion at that census moment, and that makes sense to me.”
The “census moment” the senator alludes to is the once-every-10-year U.S. Census, the comprehensive count of the people living in the United States that establishes how many representative each state gets in the U.S. House.
With the number of seats fixed at 435, states that are growing get more representatives, while some states that lag in population lose them.
The “bit of fairness” Moran alludes to is the post-census redistricting process that redraws congressional boundaries to even up the population between them.
“Bit” of fairness is the right word there. Redistricting is never really fair — politicians being who they are, self-protection comes first.
But most legislatures historically have at least made some sort of effort to keep the unfairness from getting completely gross. Until Trump.
Election tampering,
Republican style
The Kansas Constitution says redistricting should happen every 10 years, on years that end in “2” — 1992, 2002, 2012, 2022, etc.
But state Senate President Ty Masterson and state House Speaker Dan Hawkins are bound and determined to ignore the Constitution and follow orders from the Trump White House instead.
They’re all-in on Kansas redrawing its districts off schedule to try to get rid of Rep. Sharice Davids, the only Democrat, the only woman and the only minority currently representing Kansas in the House.
The only reason she’s still there is because Republicans vastly underestimated her popularity when they last drew maps in 2022.
Despite GOP legislators’ efforts to corner Davids in an unwinnable district, she kicked their collective keisters in the elections of 2022 and 2024.
