I find it really hard to look at electoral district maps in the USA without feeling like “this is where the all the problems started”… I’ve NEVER seen a valid justification for the sorts of egregious gerrymandering you see all across the USA. It’s like poison,once it’s gerrymandered and the incumbent is safe, they can push their most radical agendas and slide the Overton window slowly towards their own views.

And because it benefits them all, I expect reforming who is responsible for district boundaries to never change. The more frustrating thing is under the present political status quo, the only enduring fix would require a constitutional amendment to enshrine a “federal district boundary committee” with something like 33 people serving lifetime appointments like the Supreme Court (even if the pay isn’t that good, a lifetime appointment means they can give the politicians the middle finger as appropriate, once they are in the job), since there’s a lot of district boundaries to look after and the larger the group the harder it is for one party to “pack the court”. But without it being constitutional level law, it would get battered about by congress, and the states and Supreme Court until it died in some disused basement in a bathroom behind a sign that said beware of leopard.