Hey guys, it's Lauren Egan here at the bulwark. Last week, I wrote a newsletter piece titled,

Meet the Most Hated Democrat in America. And the piece was about the president of the state

Senate in Maryland, a man named Bill Ferguson, who is opposed to redistricting and is holding up

the process in Maryland. And it's really pissed off a lot of national Democrats, some other

local officials in a state who think that blue states have this moral imperative to gerrymander their congressional districts in response to Donald Trump's redistricting push, which of course kicked off over the summer in the state of Texas.

And after I published that piece, Bill Ferguson reached out. He asked to come on the bulwark to

talk about his position. So I have Bill here with me today. Bill, thanks for joining. I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you, Lauren. Thanks for having me. And, you know, thanks for the most infamous title now

known available. So yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad. Thanks for no hard feelings. Really appreciate it. I've got a 13-year-old. So I get called much, much, much worse on a daily basis. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Okay, so it would be great to start off with sort of walking me through. Give me a summary of why you are opposed to redistricting. Is it a good governance thing? Is this like a deeply held

anti-Gerrymandering principle that you have? Where are you coming from? Yeah, look, and look,

this question did not come as a surprise to us. Once we heard that Texas was going to be in the queue

and potentially moving forward with a mid-cycle redistricting, we knew that Maryland was potentially

on the agenda. This also isn't the first time that we've tried to make the first district, our Republican

district in Maryland, more competitive. In fact, we did this exact thing in 2021 in Maryland. And so

there is a broader national debate happening, which I totally understand. I think I am as

angry as anyone about what's happening with the Trump administration,

especially what's happening here in Maryland with our federal employees who have been treated

unbelievably horribly and the impact and fear that's happening in every community with ice

and sort of a paramilitary lawlessness. all of this has created what I understandably believe

to be a fear of fight everywhere. And I absolutely understand that. But what we have to do and what

the Maryland Senate caucus ended up where we landed was picking places where we can actually

have an impact and where we can win. When you look at Maryland's laws and the context of Maryland

...