POLITICO details the effort by Democrats to get new congressional maps for New York and Wisconsin because of changes in the composition of the highest court in each state. As the story observes, “Democrats previously excoriated GOP operatives for plans to seek new maps in North Carolina and Ohio after a shift in the balance of power in the high courts of both states.” I also remember when Democrats decried the Texas mid-decade redistricting that led to the LULAC litigation.

The pathology of partisan gerrymandering by both parties, including the tactic of trying to defend partisan maneuvers as “only trying to level the playing field”–as Democrats claim now, and which was the Republican defense of the Texas mid-decade redistricting in LULAC–can only be redressed by taking the redistricting power away from partisans (including, regrettably, partisan-aligned elected state courts). One way to do this is genuinely independent and nonpartisan redistriciting commissions, as yesterday’s ASD-ERN report advocates, although guaranteeing the genuine independence and nonpartisanship of these commissions can be a challenge (as the report notes). The other way to take partisanship out of the districting process is the “self-districting” system that I’ve proposed, in which individual voters would self-select which congressional (or state legislative) constituencies they wished to join.