How to avoid gerrymandering

There's some more weird shit going down in American politics, and this one, surprisingly, is only indirectly related to Donald Trump.

51 of the 62 Democrat Texas representatives have decamped en masse to New York, Boston and Chicago. They're not on vacation, though they may as well be, but it's all part of a ploy to prevent the majority Republicans from passing gerrymandering legislation. See, the Texas constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote for his kind of legislation, and by absenting themselves in this way, the Democrats can prevent the chamber from achieving the necessary quorum for a vote. Et voilá!

Smoke and mirrors? Maybe. But it works, at least temporarily. (I'm not sure what the long-term plan is.) The Republicans, of course, are incensed, and governor Greg Abbot has put out civil arrest warrants for the rebels, although the legality of that move is not clear either. The absconded Democrats are now outside the jurisdictional reach of the Texas authorities. Some pretty nasty words are being exchanged by the two camps.

The Republicans' gerrymandering project is designed to re-draw the congressional lines in the state in order to create five new safe Republican seats in an attempt to save the Republican majority in the House when the mid-terms come aroundin 2026, at a time when their (and Trump's) polling is tanking. This is what the minority Democrats are.so keen to avoid by this rather desperate strategy.

Gerrymandering - a corruption of the democratic system dating back to 1812, and named after the then Governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry and a salamander-shaped voting district he created - is rife in America, and perfectly legal in some states, where state politicians (rather than an independent body) are in control of drawing congressional lines, which seems crazy to us. It should be noted that both the Republicans and the Democrats are happy to use it, given the opportunity. 

Princeton University has produced this handy-dandy interactive guide to which states are the most egregiously gerrymandered and which are relatively free from this kind of partisan redistributing. For example, Texas, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio are among the worst offenders, and there the partisan advantage is firmly Republican. However, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Illinois and South Caolina are also among the worst, but there the advantage is to the Democrats. (As you see, a partisan advantage in the redistricting rules does not always translate to a voting advantage.) However, about half the states, marked in green on the map, have their congressional boundaries drawn by independent redistricting commissions, usually every 10 years.

It seems inconceivable to me that states can change their own congressional boundaries to suit their own partisan purposes, and even more conceivabke that the rules on this vary.from state to state. Why is is not federally legislated that independent commisoms are.needed in all states to re-draw congressional maps at fixed intervals to accommodate demographic changes? Heart of democracy my arse!