Something is happening to the map of America that should concern every citizen who still believes representative democracy means what the framers said it meant. In the months since Donald Trump pressured Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional lines mid-decade, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, and Tennessee have followed. California voters approved Proposition 50 to redraw their own map in retaliation. Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi are queuing up. Virginia tried and was struck down by its own Supreme Court. We are watching one of the largest coordinated mid-decade redistricting waves in modern American history, and almost none of it has anything to do with the people who live inside those lines.
I want to be clear about where I stand, because the issue cuts in directions that frustrate both parties.
I do not support partisan gerrymandering. I also do not support the practice, now partially curtailed by the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais, of drawing districts whose primary purpose is to manufacture a guaranteed outcome for a racial or ethnic group. Both practices share the same fundamental defect. They treat a congressional district as a delivery mechanism for a predetermined result rather than as a community of neighbors who happen to share a piece of geography.
A congressional district should look like a place. It should follow county lines and watershed boundaries and metro-area edges to the maximum extent possible. It should be compact enough that a representative can drive across it on a weekend and meet constituents in person. When a district is one mile wide and five hundred miles long, snaking through three media markets to scoop up the right voters, it is not a community. It is a contraption. And the person elected from a contraption represents the contraption, not the citizens trapped inside it.
The framers understood this. The whole point of a House of Representatives, as opposed to a Senate, was to keep federal power tethered to local life. Your representative was supposed to be your neighbor. He was supposed to drink the same water, drive the same roads, send his kids to the same kinds of schools, and feel the same property tax pressure that you felt. When he voted in Washington, he was voting on policy that would shape his own zip code as much as yours. That is what made the connection between the represented and the representative meaningful.
Compare that to what we have now. Districts are engineered in software by national party operatives optimizing for partisan advantage. Members elected from those districts answer not to a coherent local constituency but to a national donor class and a national leadership structure pushing a national agenda. The result is a Congress that argues endlessly about issues that move cable ratings and raise online dollars, while the actual conditions of life in the actual places those members supposedly represent receive almost no legislative attention.
This is where John C. Calhoun, for all his historical baggage, identified something important. His doctrine of the concurrent majority held that a constitutional republic cannot survive if a numerical national majority can simply override the considered interests of distinct communities and regions. Calhoun argued for what he called a negative power, the ability of a meaningful local or sectional interest to check action that would harm it. You can set aside the antebellum context in which he wrote and still recognize the underlying insight. A republic of genuinely local communities, each represented by people who live the consequences of their own votes, is structurally different from a republic in which national parties carve up the country to maximize their seat count.
Today's mid-decade redistricting fight is the inverse of Calhoun's design. It is national parties imposing national priorities on local geography, redrawing the map to make sure that the local interest can never check the national one. Texas redraws to help Washington Republicans. California redraws to help Washington Democrats. The voters in both states wake up the next morning in a different district, with a different representative, advocating for a different agenda, and nothing about their lives has changed except the lines on a piece of paper.
There is a better standard, and it is not complicated. Districts should be drawn to maximize compactness, contiguity, and respect for existing political subdivisions. They should follow county and municipal lines wherever population allows. They should preserve communities of interest defined by economy and geography rather than by partisan voter file analysis or racial composition. They should be drawn by processes insulated from the legislators whose careers depend on the outcome. And once drawn, they should stay drawn for the full decade absent extraordinary cause.
The Supreme Court took one step in this direction in Callais by limiting race-based districting. That step alone is not enough. Until states adopt strict, neutral, geographic criteria for every district they draw, we will keep producing a Congress that represents party headquarters in Washington rather than communities in America. That is not what the framers built, and it is not what has made this country great.
A representative should be your neighbor. The map should look like the country. Anything less is not representative democracy. It is something else wearing the costume.