Maryland's Democratic legislative leaders have announced a special session next month to draft a constitutional amendment targeting the state's congressional map, a move that would put the seat held by Rep. Andy Harris, the state's sole Republican in Congress, squarely in the crosshairs.
The maneuver comes after a prior bill to redraw Harris's district died in the Maryland Senate earlier this year over concerns about surviving judicial review. Now, Democratic leaders want to try a different route: amending the state constitution itself, a path they hope will prove more durable in court.
Maryland already sends seven Democrats and just one Republican to the U.S. House. The new push aims to finish the job, potentially converting the delegation to 8-0. That this is happening in a state where Donald Trump won only 34.1 percent of the vote in 2024 tells you something about how safe Democrats already feel, and how determined they are to eliminate even a single dissenting seat.
House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk framed the special session as a measured, good-government response to shifting legal terrain. The Associated Press reported her statement:
"Maryland needs a durable, transparent constitutional framework for congressional redistricting that reflects the evolving legal landscape. This special session gives the General Assembly the opportunity to respond thoughtfully to recent court decisions while ensuring that Maryland voters have the final say on any proposed constitutional changes."
The language is polished. The intent is less so. Democrats already drew a 7-1 map. They previously proposed an 8-0 version. The bill to redraw Harris's district failed only because state senators worried a court would toss it. The constitutional amendment route is an attempt to insulate the gerrymander from exactly that kind of review.
Senate President Will Ferguson did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. Neither did the Maryland Democratic Party.
Harris, the former House Freedom Caucus chair, did not mince words. In a statement to the DCNF, he accused Maryland's governor and Democratic lawmakers of rigging the process because they cannot compete on ideas in his part of the state.
"What the Maryland Governor and the new Democrat Socialist Party are doing, since they know they can't win on the Eastern Shore with their far-left ideas, is trying to win by gerrymandering, with state legislators actually creating a gerrymandering double standard, one standard of compact districts for themselves, and another standard allowing extreme gerrymandering for Congress."
That double-standard charge is worth pausing on. Maryland's state legislative districts are drawn with compactness requirements. The congressional map, by contrast, has produced some of the most oddly shaped districts in the country, and Democrats have been the ones holding the pen. Harris's argument is simple: if compact districts are good enough for Annapolis, why aren't they good enough for Washington?
Gov. Wes Moore, who has struggled to shed the socialist label even as his party fractures internally, was not directly quoted in the reporting. But a linked headline from a prior DCNF piece captured the posture: "Gov. Wes Moore Says He Might Gerrymander Out Maryland's Last GOP Rep In Name Of 'Fairness.'"
Common Cause, the self-styled good-government group, offered a statement to the DCNF that tried to thread a very narrow needle. Senior director Dan Vicuña positioned the Maryland effort as a defensive response to Republican redistricting elsewhere, then acknowledged his organization would not actually endorse partisan gerrymandering, even in retaliation.
"Common Cause has a long history of opposing gerrymandering regardless of which party is doing it. However, the world has changed significantly. We will not endorse partisan gerrymandering, even when its motive is to offset more extreme gerrymandering by a different party. However, we will also not offer a blanket condemnation and demand unilateral political disarmament in the face of this authoritarian assault on fair representation and people-powered democracy."
Read that again slowly. Common Cause says it opposes gerrymandering. It also says it will not condemn gerrymandering when Democrats do it in response to what it considers Republican gerrymandering. That is not a principle. That is a permission slip.
Vicuña went further, claiming that Trump "launched an unprecedented wave of mid-decade gerrymandering" and "demanded that his allies in the states slice and dice communities of color to diminish their political power and rig more districts in favor of Republicans." Those are Vicuña's characterizations, not independently verified findings. Common Cause said it would assess Maryland's eventual new map under its own "fairness principles", the specifics of which were not detailed.
Maryland's move does not exist in a vacuum. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas's mid-decade congressional redraw in April, a decision poised to give Republicans a five-seat advantage. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed another congressional map redraw in April that would likely deliver four more Republican seats. Texas Democratic state legislators fled to New York and Illinois in an attempt to prevent passage of that state's map, a dramatic walkout that ultimately failed.
On the other side of the Potomac, Virginia's Supreme Court struck down a redistricting constitutional amendment in May. That measure would have redrawn Virginia's 6-5 Democrat-to-Republican congressional map to a lopsided 10-1 split. The Virginia court's intervention stopped that plan cold.
Maryland Democrats appear to have studied the Virginia failure and concluded that their own constitutional amendment needs to be drafted more carefully to survive legal challenge. The special session is the vehicle for that drafting process. Whether it holds up any better than Virginia's attempt remains an open question, one that courts, not legislators, will ultimately answer.
The broader pattern is clear enough. Both parties are using every available lever to redraw maps mid-decade, and both are framing their efforts as responses to the other side's overreach. The difference in Maryland is the sheer asymmetry of the existing map. Democrats already hold seven of eight seats. The effort is not to restore competitive balance. It is to eliminate the last remaining opposition seat entirely.
Concerns about election integrity have been a recurring flashpoint in American politics, and redistricting fights are among the most consequential. When one party controls the mapmaking process with a supermajority and uses a constitutional amendment to lock in its advantage, voters on the losing end have few remedies.
The special session is scheduled for next month, though no specific date has been announced. The details of the proposed constitutional amendment, its specific provisions, its redistricting criteria, its treatment of compactness and communities of interest, remain unknown. If the legislature passes the amendment, Maryland voters would have the final say at the ballot box, as Peña-Melnyk noted.
But in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by enormous margins, putting a gerrymandered map to a popular vote is not exactly a check on partisan excess. It is more like asking the majority whether it would like more power. The answer is predictable.
The Democratic Party's internal dynamics have produced plenty of turbulence in recent cycles, but on redistricting, the party's various factions tend to find common cause quickly. Eliminating a Republican seat is the kind of project that unites progressives and establishment Democrats alike.
Harris, for his part, has represented Maryland's Eastern Shore, a culturally conservative, rural stretch of the state, and has won reelection repeatedly in a district that reflects that community. The redistricting effort would likely carve up that community, diluting its voice in Congress by folding its voters into heavily Democratic urban and suburban areas.
Maryland's Democratic establishment has not been shy about exercising raw political power when it has the numbers. This special session is the latest example. Whether it succeeds depends on the legal craftsmanship of the amendment and the willingness of courts to intervene.
When a party already holds 87.5 percent of a state's congressional seats and still calls a special session to grab the last one, the word "fairness" has lost all meaning. That is not redistricting. It is erasure.
