‘Stop It!’ Joe Scarborough Warns Dems Will Return the Favor on ‘Idiotic’ Texas Gerrymandering in Tirade

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough unleashed on Texas Republicans for their “anti-democratic” and “idiotic” redistricting proposal that would carve out five new GOP-leaning districts in Texas, a state already dominated by Republicans.

Texas Democrats staged a dramatic walkout for the third time in two decades on Monday to derail the plan they say is engineered to entrench Republican power and President Donald Trump’s influence ahead of next year’s midterms.

Fifty-one Democratic lawmakers fled the state this week, most of them to Illinois, in a move designed to deny the Republican-controlled legislature the quorum needed to pass the controversial map.

A special session was called by Gov. Greg Abbott, who has threatened to remove absent lawmakers from office. House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R) announced he would sign the arrest warrants for those who’d fled the state after the vote on Monday. Those warrants are only valid inside Texas’s border.

But Scarborough took to Morning Joe on Tuesday to warn of the “short-sightedness” of the Republican bid, flagging that the move will open the door for Democrats to return the favor in blue states with partisan redistricting themselves.

[Republicans] want to rig the process. And so they’re acting so indignant about it. The short-sightedness of it is this: if Texas achieves what they want to achieve, then California will go back. And then they will draw up even more rigged lines that will help Democrats. New York state will do it. And who knows, maybe then Florida decides.

I mean, it really is – it’s an idiotic thing to do. They used to do it every 10 years. And now I don’t know if the president told them to do this or somebody else told them to do it, but it’s just stupid. And worse than that, it’s just not right. I mean, gerrymandering is just – it is so anti-democratic. And yet both sides have been doing it for a long time. And it’s time for us to stop it. This is not going to accomplish anything.

Watch above via MSNBC.