Must-read Sam Issacharoff piece in the Boston Review:

Texas shows that asking the wrong question yields no good answer. So long as the question is how many seats Republican insiders should give to Democratic and Hispanic outsiders, the answer will produce an ugly legal mess. The solution lies in taking the process of redistricting away from the insiders—as does every democracy in the world that has to draw district lines. When the question is posed in states with ballot initiatives, the wisdom of moving to independent redistricting bodies is obvious. Voters in California and Arizona did not waste their opportunities to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians.