If someone is willing to serve in Congress in the first place -- to endure the contempt and ridicule of the world when they do their job poorly, upgraded to hatred and vituperation when they antagonize powerful interests by doing their job well -- then they're probably not in it for a paycheck that doesn't even cover the costs of getting and doing the job.

Inveighing against something in statute doesn't mean it actually gets outlawed. Any adjustment to district boundaries, whether it's justified by equalizing population, by making districts more compact, or by following existing political and geographical boundaries more closely, will have the effect of favoring one party over the other. The people drawing the district boundaries will know this, unless we have some selection process that ensures extraordinarily ignorant boundary-makers.

The current state of the art in mind-reading is not sufficient to enable effective outlawing of intent.

http://fairdistrictsnow.org/redistricting/amendments/

"SECTION 20. Standards for establishing congressional district boundaries.—In establishing congressional district boundaries:
(a)?No apportionment plan or district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent; and districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice; and districts shall consist of contiguous territory.
(b)?Unless compliance with the standards in this subsection conflicts with the standards in subsection 1(a) or with federal law, districts shall be as nearly equal in population as is practicable; districts shall be compact; and districts shall, where feasible, utilize existing political and geographical boundaries.
(c)?The order in which the standards within subsections 1(a) and (b) of this section are set forth shall not be read to establish any priority of one standard over the other within that subsection."

The Constitution can be changed. The real problem is that the effect would be unequal on legislators of different levels of wealth. Under the current system, the loss of pay itself would not matter. Congress is a millionaires' club. But if middle-class people (let alone proles) could get into Congress, they would have to capitulate (or go corrupt) when the budget comes due. The message to voters and political insiders would be clear: unless you want your district to get screwed in the budget negotiations, make doubly sure your representative can afford to go without pay as long as the others.

wish there were a stronger nationwide push to outlaw the gerrymandering

How do you propose to outlaw gerrymandering? You can reduce the severity by having a commission do it, but it's still going to happen. You can use an algorithm, but then the fight is over what the algorithm will be, and the computer will be set up to gerrymander in favor of whoever wins that. That also would be less severe than the current system of unlimited gerrymandering in favor of whoever controls the state legislature. But no proposal in general circulation would amount to actually outlawing gerrymandering, as far as I know.

I have my idea, of course, which I mention incessantly (or so it seems to me). But I'm curious what anyone else will say.

One other law passed by referendum is going to be mighty weird next election -- the "only the top 2" law which states that in a primary, the top two vote-getters move on to the general election. This could set up many Dem-Dem or GOP-GOP races in the general election, but it will kill any third party's chances of ever getting that far.

I'm not so sure. Districts for state legislature are so small, and people pay so little attention, that I would expect odd things to happen fairly often. For example in a district where Democrats are less than a third of the voters, they might not bother to run a serious candidate. Then the Republican vote could be lopsided, because no one seriously challenges the incumbent. (Or switch the roles of the major parties: it doesn't matter.) That would lead to a basically uncontested election, where a third-party candidate could get on the general-election ballot with relatively little effort.

One other law passed by referendum is going to be mighty weird next election -- the "only the top 2" law which states that in a primary, the top two vote-getters move on to the general election. This could set up many Dem-Dem or GOP-GOP races in the general election, but it will kill any third party's chances of ever getting that far.

nypoet22 -

CA is also trying to kill gerrymandering, as we're trying a new citizens' commission for redistricting, rather than leave it in the hands of the legislature. Again, the jury's still out, but the maps I've seen so far look a LOT better than the gerrymandered districts we have now.

-CW

this is at least partly because many states still permit gerrymandering. i sincerely wish there were a stronger nationwide push to outlaw the gerrymandering of both state and congressional districts, as well as a requirement for the citizen initiative to be part of the state and federal political process.

in that vein, i'm going to re-post a link from gravel's 2008 speech:

http://nationalinitiative.us/

I could not agree more. It used to be that if you did not like how your elected official was doing their job you could vote them out of office. This is almost impossible to do now unless their own party puts up a challenger against them in the primaries. I was especially pleased that this new law does not allow them to receive back pay once a budget has been passed.

...Stan