Partisan Gerrymandering: The Real Fix Is Smaller Government

The term has been with us for more than two centuries. In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a redistricting plan that included a district so misshapen it looked like a salamander. A cartoonist fused the two words, and gerrymander entered the language. Since then, every decade has brought the same ritual. Politicians accuse each other of rigging maps. Editorial boards demand that courts save the republic. Voters are told the system is broken because some district's border has more curves than a mountain road. The anger is real, but the diagnosis is shallow. Partisan gerrymandering is a genuine problem, not because we lack truly fair maps, but because government has become so large, so intrusive, and so rich with spoils that the map is worth fighting over in the first place. We do not need better central planners to draw lines. We need to shrink the state until those lines no longer decide who gets to pick your pocket.

The constitutional baseline

Start with the text. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution is clear. The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations. In other words, the initial power over congressional districts lies with state legislatures, and the corrective the Constitution offers is political, meaning Congress, not judicial. That matters. The Founders established a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. Representation was meant to connect representatives to communities, not to guarantee each party a proportionate share of power. Nothing in the Constitution promises fairness as measured by efficiency gaps, partisan symmetry, or any other metric invented by modern political scientists. Demanding that a map produce a particular partisan balance is equality of outcome applied to political parties. Our Constitution never promised that.

The Supreme Court got this right in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019. The Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims present a political question beyond the reach of federal courts. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote, federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions. That is not a defense of ugly maps. It is a defense of the separation of powers. If judges can decide which party deserves a seat, we no longer have a government of laws. We have a government of judges. That was John Adams's warning, and it remains the right concern today.

Let me be precise about one thing, because the distinction matters. Racial gerrymandering is a different matter. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Voting Rights Act impose real constitutional and statutory limits on drawing districts to deny minority voters equal protection or the right to vote. But partisan fairness is not a justiciable standard. A court can strike down a racial gerrymander because the Constitution speaks to racial equality. It cannot strike down a partisan gerrymander because the Constitution is silent on how many seats each party should hold. That silence is a feature, not a defect.

The mirage of a fair map

Here is where the reformers' dream collides with reality. There is no such thing as a neutral map. Every line has political consequences. A district that looks fair to one side is rigged to the other. And a nationally balanced map may sever a local community in ways that make no sense to the people who live there.

This is Friedrich Hayek's knowledge problem applied to cartography. No commission, court, or algorithm can know the correct district boundaries because that knowledge does not exist in a single place. It is scattered across thousands of neighborhoods, towns, church parishes, school districts, and local economies. A map-drawing central planner cannot possess the dispersed knowledge of millions of citizens. The demand for an apolitical map is a demand for a planner who can see what no planner can see.

What about independent redistricting commissions? They are not independent. They are unaccountable. The people who staff them have their own preferences, their own notions of fairness, and their own political allies. Moving the power from elected legislators to appointed experts does not remove politics. It removes accountability. When you hear someone say, let's take politics out of redistricting, translate it accurately. They mean, let's hand redistricting to people whose politics I prefer.

The technocratic metrics are no better. The efficiency gap, partisan symmetry, and mean-median difference are not neutral laws of nature. They are choices about what fairness means. Each one can be gamed. Each one rests on assumptions about how voters ought to be distributed. And none of them appears anywhere in the Constitution. Asking nine unelected judges to referee an academic fight over these metrics is not constitutionalism. It is a quiet transfer of legislative power to the bench.

The real driver: too much loot

So why do parties fight like bare-knuckled boxers over district lines? It is not love of geometry. They fight because a single congressional seat now controls billions of dollars in spending, regulatory favors, and legal privilege. A modern representative does not merely vote on war and peace. He votes on healthcare subsidies, infrastructure grants, student loan forgiveness, energy tax credits, and thousands of pages of rules that decide who wins and who loses. A district line is not just a boundary. It is a pipeline to federal power.

That is the unseen cost of big government. Henry Hazlitt taught us to look beyond the visible. The visible problem is a crooked map. The invisible problem is the Leviathan that makes the map so valuable. When Washington redistributes trillions, every race becomes a zero-sum fight over the spoils. That incentive would corrupt any map-drawing process, no matter how many nonpartisan panels you appoint.

Look at what a single member of Congress can now do. She can steer a federal earmark to a favored donor. He can pressure a regulatory agency to approve a project in his district. A committee chair can block a bill that would cost one industry billions while rewarding another. When the federal government exercises that much discretionary power, the shape of a district becomes a matter of life and death for entire industries. No wonder the parties fight over the pen.

James Madison understood the underlying temptation. In Federalist No. 10, he observed that the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man. You cannot eliminate faction without eliminating liberty. The task, he argued, is not to remove human self-interest but to control its effects. A republic with limited powers does exactly that. A sprawling administrative state does the opposite. It multiplies the prizes government can hand out and then invites every faction to fight over the map that determines who gets them.

The Founders did not design Congress to be a national wealth redistribution machine. They designed it to deal with genuinely national questions, including defense, foreign policy, interstate commerce, the coinage, and the federal courts. If the federal government were limited to its enumerated powers, would anyone care about the exact curvature of a district? Of course not. A seat would be worth a representative, not a treasury raid. The stakes would collapse, and with them the gerrymander.

The real reform

So what should be done? First, shrink the state. Return Congress to its constitutional bounds. End the entitlement empire, the corporate subsidies, and the regulatory discretion that lets a member steer benefits to his district. The less money sloshing through Washington, the less reason to rig the map.

Second, restore federalism. Let states and localities handle more of their own affairs. If education, infrastructure, and welfare were decided closer to home, national elections would matter less, and local boundaries would matter more to the people who actually live there. That is the opposite of the direction Washington has taken for a century.

Third, punish grotesque map-drawing politically, not judicially. States can and should adopt constitutional rules requiring contiguity, compactness, and respect for county and municipal boundaries. Those are legitimate, objective safeguards, if the people of a state choose them through their own legislature or ballot initiative. What they should not do is ask federal judges to impose a national theory of fairness.

Fourth, demand republican character. The Founders assumed that self-government requires virtuous citizens and honorable representatives. A legislator who carves out an opponent's voters is not clever. He is corrupt in the classical sense, placing party over the public good. We should say so plainly. The cure for that vice is not a new commission. It is the civic virtue Madison wrote about and the electoral accountability that comes when voters see exactly what their representatives are doing.

Answering the obvious objection

Some will say, aren't you just defending the party that benefits from gerrymandering? No. Both parties do it, and both deserve scorn. Illinois and Maryland have been gerrymandered by Democrats. Texas and Florida have been gerrymandered by Republicans. The common thread is not partisanship but power, the same swollen power that makes every election a war over the treasury.

The constitutional conservative answer is not to give that power to a new set of map-drawing planners. It is to reduce the power so the map stops being a weapon.

Here is the test. Ask yourself why a state party will spend millions of dollars and months of litigation over a single district. Is it because the representative will vote on whether to declare war? Rarely. It is because the representative will help decide who gets a federal grant, which health system receives a waiver, which union keeps a regulatory advantage, which energy source gets a tax credit. Those are exactly the decisions the Constitution never gave Washington in the first place.

The fight over partisan gerrymandering is really a fight over who controls the loot. We can keep arguing about the lines, or we can finally ask the question few in Washington want asked. Why does a seat in Congress control so much of your life in the first place? Cut the loot. Lower the stakes. The maps will begin to draw themselves.