District Nein

Both parties do it, and consider it the spoils of victory. But I've always found the super-partisan exercise of redistricting to be abhorrent, no matter who does it. To find a decent congressman, who's done a good job and is rewarded with reelection, suddenly out of a job because the opposite party in his or her state suddenly gerrymandered her/his district out of existence turns democracy on its head. It's a teabaggR year, so the latest examples are of Ds being done. (And here's another example that popped up after I'd written this.)

So here's my idea, based on the concept that congressional districts ought to be based on an attempt to achieve reasonable population equivalence, and to be devoid of political shenanigans.

Divide each state into equal parts by making vertical or horizontal lines through their maps. The number of lines would depend on the number of representatives from the state: for a couple of states, it's irrelevant.

For those states with only a few representatives, there'd only be lines in one direction, moved east or west, or north or south, to make each segment contain roughly the same numbers of voters. For those states with enough representatives to make unidirectional lines impractical, there'd be another set of lines running perpendicular, which would be moved similarly, to get to equal numbers. No politics. No squiggly lines, only horizontal and vertical ones. Just geography and math. And fairness.

Allowing for the exigencies of the occasional irregular border, what could be wrong with that?