A three-part series by Dan McLaughlin in National Review surveys the prospects for gerrymandering reform following a year in which Democrats, rather than Republicans as widely predicted, appear to have gained ground overall in the redistricting process. McLaughlin nicely lays out the history of partisan dynamics on this issue, offers an effective critique of Democrats’ chief bills in Congress, and has some supportive words for what I agree is the best reform path. At the same time, as I see it, he too eagerly accepts the idea that the design of districts is going to be political all the way down no matter how you arrange it, and too readily dismisses efforts to develop redistricting formats that are more independent of incumbent interests.

On the partisan dynamics, as practically everyone has noted by now, the Democrats have used this year’s redistricting cycle to their advantage, aided by baroque gerrymanders in Illinois and New York. And all of a sudden, as McLaughlin documents, the death-of-democracy wailing heard from much of the commentariat last year has given way to Zen-like equanimity. Just yesterday, a New York Times news analysis used the term “fair” five times to describe the emerging House map, which by some measures is both more gerrymandered and less competitive than the last one.

Using charts, McLaughlin establishes neatly that notwithstanding recent mythmaking, Democrats in the postwar period enjoyed a much longer period (through 1992) of benefiting from House gerrymandering than Republicans; 2012–18 seems to have been the only prolonged period in which the GOP enjoyed a robust advantage. (I’ve written myself about the party paradoxes; search “Bandemer”.) Some writers have pointed out that much of the gerrymandering through the 1990s was done by Democrats in the South; that group, however, often functioned as part of the national coalition favoring interventionist economics.

McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review, is also effective in pointing out the flaws of legislative remedies pushed lately by Congress’s Democratic leadership. The first go-round, a set of provisions in the misconceived For The People Act, presumed to force states to create independent citizen commissions, a step likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court under the “anti-commandeering principle” familiar from NFIB v. Sebelius, the Obamacare case.

The Freedom To Vote Act, billed as a narrower substitute for the first bill, dropped the obligatory commissions idea but was replete with other problems, which I explored in a recent brief piece for CQ Researcher. I argued that the act, which failed in the Senate in January, “would have saddled state officials with unclear redistricting standards that would baffle sure compliance, while actively discouraging sound districting criteria such as compactness. By mandating use of complex models, it would have shifted power to costly expert consultants while making the line‐​drawing process opaque to the public, at best.” For reasons of space I didn’t try to take up the bill’s complex provisions on race, but McLaughlin forcefully argues that those provisions are unreasonable and discriminatory in themselves and not incidentally crafted with Democratic Party interests in mind.

I part company with McLaughlin, however, on the evaluation of independent-commission formats, which he appears to view as a proven failure but I would describe more cautiously as so various in their results that it’s simply too early to generalize. As he points out, the giant, high-stakes California commission shows signs of having been manipulated by canny Democrats to yield favored results (using different methods this time than last). Yet the new independent commissions in states like Colorado and Michigan fared better. Why? He teases New York’s commission because, like those in several other states, it issued relatively reasonable maps that were then promptly ignored by state legislators. That seems to me a can’t-win standard in which the citizen commissions get blamed both for their own failings and for those of their opposite numbers.

Like me, McLaughlin favors the enactment of enforceable standards based on what Chief Justice John Roberts has called traditional districting criteria such as “standards of compactness, contiguity, and respect for political subdivisions in redistricting.” That step would not fully solve the problem, but it would almost certainly eliminate a lot of the worst of it. And a partial solution to this longstanding abuse of the democratic process would be a lot better than what we can expect for now, which is no solution at all.