Miss a day, and lots of other people got to put in their two cents' worth. I second Davin's response, that "they did it too!" is a lame and immature response.

But maybe it's good to get the usual ping-pong match out of the way, because I have some thoughts about gerrymandering and what to do about it.

Gerrymandering is possible and valuable (to the gerrymanderer) because of the 18/19th century idea that voters have the most in common with their immediate physical neighbors. "Affinity groups" were defined by physical proximity. Pretty much everybody, at first, was landed gentry with economic and social concerns pretty much aligned, but regional differences arising out of things like trade (e.g., access to a port and issues of tariffs and the like) and particulars like the local crop, proximity to hostile Indian tribes, and so on. It made sense to base representative government upon geographical divisions.

But I would assert that the rationale is much weaker today, and that there are other bases for representation. Affinity groups today tend to be spread around the country, cutting "horizontally" across the population. We're a good example, people who value the space program and science and education, and we're literally all over the map. Even in traditional terms, the liberal majority in California has more in common with the liberal minority in Alabama than the conservative minority here. Geographical affinity is no longer a strong factor in the social organization of the United States, and I think we're seeing evidence today that it has in fact become divisive. The Texas Problem is a symptom, with arbitrary geographical areas the prize in an artificial ideological struggle.

Let's play what-if...What if we kept the Senate as it is, to account for large-scale geographical differences. But in the House, we do away with representation by tiny districts, and substitute...something else. I'm not sure what, but that something would be nation-wide and designed to allow people to vote for representatives who reflect their personal concerns. What if everybody could vote for 10 representatives, and the top 500 or 1000 vote-getters would be elected. People could allocate their 10 votes, say, for a liberal, a couple to environmental-issue candidates, a couple to organized-labor, a couple to their favorite "culture-war" icons, etc.; and conservatives, similarly, could allocate votes to, say, anti-tax fanatics, family values mullahs, anti-tax fanatics, neocon advocates of empire, anti-tax fanatics, and so on.

Also, what if the population of the House were divided by kinds of interest groups. For example, everybody's disgusted with the corrupting influence of big business on politics. Well, maybe that's because business doesn't have any direct representation in government, and tries to sneak in the back door. Suppose a quarter of the House was composed of reprsentatives elected by business instead of people? Seems like that would at least bring business influence out into the open, where we can debate it fairly and honestly. I'm envisioning something like a "Council of Guilds", a congress composed of representatives of medium-scale subsidiary interest groups.

I think that something like this would stabilize our political system. For decades we've seen how large swings in the outcome can be caused by tiny majorities in tiny districts--one party can "win" a huge majority in the House based on winning very tiny margins in the absolute vote count in a large number of districts. I propose averaging-out the votes across the entire country so that the resulting composition of the House more closely reflects the concerns of a nationwide electorate.

And gerrymandering would be dead once and for all.

Of course, we can't underestimate the cleverness of politicians. They'll look for a loophole in any replacement system. How could the system I propose be corrupted?