In assessing the current controversy over Texas Republicans’ proposed redistricting of the state’s U.S. House seats, two historic facts should be considered.

One is that the principle of equal representation by population is well established in American history. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention required the members of the House of Representatives to be apportioned according to population as determined by a census to be conducted within three years and every 10 years thereafter.

The second thing to remember is that the Founders were aware of partisan redistricting. Another signer of the Declaration and member of the Constitutional Convention was Elbridge Gerry, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a state senate redistricting bill that combined a grotesquely shaped group of towns in Essex County into one district, drawn by cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale with the wings and claws of a salamander. This was the original gerrymander (pronounced by purists like Gerry’s surname, with a hard “g”), which clustered Gerry’s Federalist opponents in a single district.

Congress in 1842 required equal-population districts within a state, but that provision was overturned in the 1929 law, which automatically reapportioned House seats among the states by applying an arithmetic formula to the census results. The predictable result was gerrymanders within the states.

The Supreme Court ended this in 1964, requiring one-person-one-vote congressional and state legislative districts. As a close student of every redistricting cycle since the 1960 Census, I have observed how the equal population standard severely limits the political gains for even the most partisan redistricters.

You can only jam so many opposition voters into a limited number of districts. And suppose you create too many 53% districts for your own side. In that case, you risk losing the whole bunch when opinion generally or within specific voting segments 5% the other way, which tends to happen at least once every 10-year interval between censuses.

This is a useful background for appraising the uproar over Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s plans to redraw the state’s district lines this summer, which is much louder than when New York Democrats tried something similar last year. The Texan Republicans’ stated purpose is to increase their majority of their state’s House delegation from 25-13 to 30-8, a significant gain considering that Republicans control the current House (with vacancies filled) by just 220-215.

Protests and promises of retaliation came from Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York, whose delegation is 19-7 Democratic (and would be more so if a state court had not rejected an even more partisan plan), and Gavin Newsom of California, whose districts (drawn by a supposedly nonpartisan but obviously liberal-leaning independent commission) are currently 43-9 Democratic.

Today, with nearly half the Black members of Congress elected in non-Black-majority districts and in a nation that has elected and reelected a Black president, and with growing numbers of Blacks voting Republican, that jurisprudence is on the brink of obsolescence. The Supreme Court has announced it will rehear arguments in a Voting Rights Act case next fall.

So what should be done about gerrymandering? Nothing beyond strictly enforcing the equal population rule, which limits but cannot eliminate partisan district-drawing.

As for grotesque shapes, there are multiple formulas for assessing districts’ compactness, but there’s no principled basis for a court to choose one over another. Congress could choose, as it did in 1929, between equally valid formulas translating Census population results into integer numbers of House seats. But it doesn’t seem eager to address an issue that might put in play proposals to increase its seats from the not-constitutionally-required 435.

There’s a case where gerrymandering doesn’t make much difference. The 10 largest states elect a majority of House members and are currently the only venues where partisan redistricting can switch more than one or two seats. One hundred and ten Republicans and 125 Democrats currently represent them. The Texas change would switch that to 115-120. That would be 49% of those states’ seats, the same as the 49% of their popular votes won by Donald Trump there in 2024.

Maybe the Framers got it right when they opted for the equal population principle as the key to fair representation.