Let's party like it's 1789
Crazy maverick senator Zell Miller has said, with his face hanging out, that we should no longer directly elect our senators. The esteemed Georgia senator thinks that the founding Dads had it straight the first time, and that senators should be appointed by the legislatures of the several states.
Now, those of you who are devoted readers of this webthingy will know that I am all about originalism, the genius of the founding fathers and our comparative unwisdom, and in thinking that almost every political development since about 1800 was generally for the worse. However, I must beg to differ with Democrat in Name Only (DINO) Miller.
Because of the curse of gerrymandering, the vast majority of seats in the People's House, the House of Representatives, are elected by "safe" districts. There is, thanks to careful (not to say maniacal) line drawing, absolutely no chance that these seats will ever face a competive election, even when an incumbent steps down. The only interesting competition you'd see is in the primaries for the dominant party.
Contrariwise, the shark like operatives for both parties have not yet devised a method for gerrymandering whole states. Senate elections are (aside from Presidential elections) the only place where our votes can truly make any sort of difference in who represents us in Washington. Of course, this is completely at odds with the intent of the founders. They envisioned the Senate being the calm, wise, reserved debating soceity that would restrain the whims of the democratic mob in the House. Instead, we have the mob in the Senate, and party hacks from safe districts in the House.
Zell's proposal would remove the one democratic part of the Congress. And we can't really afford that. I would agree to his plan only if we passed an amendment that somehow removed the problem of gerrymandering. (I have no idea how you might accomplish that, but if you have ideas, please use the comments.)
[wik] Rich Lowry has more on this up at the National Review Online.
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"... and in thinking that
"... and in thinking that almost every political development since about 1800 was generally for the worse."
I like the 21st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States myself. Oh wait. That was correcting an earlier, post-1800 mistake.
How about Marbury vs. Madison of 1803? Judicial review over Constitutional matters ain't always a bad thing. Nor was the ascendance of Federalism over State's Rights. Some profoundly good things happened as a result of these post-1800 changes. Small things like the end of slavery, the preservation of the union over the "right" to secessation, the civil rights acts, and the extension of the franchise to non-landowning wealthy white men. Ditching the white stockings and buckle shoes wasn't bad either.
As for an anti-gerrymandering
As for an anti-gerrymandering amendment, the most obvious would be mandating that only north/south(or east/west, thake your pick) lines can be used as district boundaries, or even allow the one that would split the state least - e.g., Cali gets E/W lines and Mass gets N/S. Also(as should be obvious), mandate that they have to be within a very low percentage in population(+- 1% seems reasonable). You'll end gerrymandering, but you'll also make districts ugly as sin.
The other obvious option is to find some way of creating something impartial to decide it - a group of ~9 random citizens, or perhaps something like the state's Supreme Court, or something similar. There may be flaws in such a system, but hopefully they'll be less than when it's being done by a blatantly political legislature.
I did say almost every...
I did say almost every... Naturally, we cannot have gone 200 years without making some, scattered improvements.
Among the positive changes: ending slavery is the clear leader, followed by women's suffrage, and the end of isolationist foriegn policy.
Non-political changes have been more fruitful, but not without a few barrels of bad apples.
As for ending gerrymandering,
As for ending gerrymandering, I wonder that decreeing the nature of the lines will make that much of a difference. Legislators would be arguing over where to put them just as now... The real problem is not that we couln't figure out how to draw equal sized boundaries in a state - but that we have to draw districts that have roughly equal populations. If some genius programmer could come up with a method for generating equal population districts while keeping the districts as close to circular as possible or at least with the smoothest boundaries possible, we would probably avoid the worst of current practices.
As for your other suggestion, there really can't be a completely impartial group. Even people from another state would have partisan interests. You might get a fair group, if you're lucky, but not an impartial one. Still, we need to do something.
Iowa's isn't too bad.
Iowa's isn't too bad.
Independent commission determines districts, trying to balance straight-lines with population; Representatives cannot edit this, only accept it or send the commission back to the drawing board while media reports this.
The Lowry article that I
The Lowry article that I linked in the update mentions that Washington state has also modified its practices, for the better.
BH: Hence why I said that
BH: Hence why I said that they all have to be vertical/horizontal strips of essentially equal population. There's no room for gerrymandering anything more than a street or two either way when you do that.