Partisan gerrymandering is dominating the news, and as a scholar of constitutional law and a biographer of James Madison, who founded one of America’s first political parties, I think I know the reason: The whole thing has gone completely nuts.
We are now at the point where gerrymandering is making a mockery of democracy itself. It’s not inconceivable that, in the near future, every seat in Congress will be either a Democratic seat or a Republican seat, fixed by a process that manipulates electoral districts so that whichever party controls the state legislature can guarantee the election of its candidates.
How did we get here? Who’s to blame? And is there anything we can do to get out of it?
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