With the federal courts out of the partisan gerrymandering policing business, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a unique and relatively simple opportunity to end this scourge of American politics.
She could pull her caucus together to support this effective anti-gerrymandering addition to the House rules:
States sending representatives to the House will be divided into one of these classes for purposes of administering House Rules against gerrymandering.
1. Representatives from states with a qualified Independent Redistricting Commission. (The rules on qualification would be spelled out separately, but the commission would have to be set up so as to avoid partisan gerrymandering.)
2. Representatives from states with Compact Districts. The perimeter of each district must be less than 150% of the perimeter of a square encompassing an area equal to the area of the district. (Since the redistricting process cannot change state lines, any segment of a district boundary that follows the state line would be measured as if it were straight.)
3. Representatives from states with only One Member of the House. No chance for gerrymandering here.
4. Representatives from states with Other Qualifying Plans. The plan will qualify if members of the minority party in the state are not packed into districts in such a way that they would have more than a 5% registration advantage in any district. (If the anti-partisan gerrymandering provisions would be in conflict with prohibitions against racial or ethnic discrimination, protecting the rights of the racial and ethinc groups would have precedence.)
5. Representatives from a state with a Gerrymandered Plan. Any state that does not qualify under points 1, 2, 3 or 4 will be considered to be gerrymandered. Representatives from the majority party of a state with a gerrymandered plan will not be seated in the House of Representatives.
It’s nice that Justice Roberts has removed the federal courts from the gerrymandering mess, so any unhappy Republicans would have no where to go to complain. A study by the Associated Press estimated that ending gerrymandering would result in a net gain of 16 seats for Democrats.
If we should ever lose control of the House, of course, we would be back in the gerrymandered mess which we are in today. But no worse off, and quite possibly most states would have independent redistricting commissions in the future.
If the chaos of setting all of this up for 2020 would be too great, it could be limited in 2020 to states where a judge has found partisan gerrymandering (regardless of any Supreme Court action to block a judicial remedy.)
The full plan could then go into effect with redistricting in 2022.