My mind is not boggled, I guess. Gerrymandering exists because the government in the US exists to maintain the status quo. So if you are elected as a member of some political party, it's your mandate to do anything you can to ensure that you stay in office, or if that's not allowed because of term limits, that your clone stays in office. There is an additional power dynamic; states control congressional districts, so if you want to be noticed by senpai (and get the support from your party to have their job when they get bored or too seizure-ridden to continue in their role), it's your job to make sure they win their election by a landslide. Hence, gerrymandering.

I think the way out of this mess is to generate districts algorithmically with well-defined fair constraints. (Minimize perimeter, basically.) But I worry that those setting the constraints will find a set of constraints that codifies gerrymandering.

In the end, I'm not sure how much it matters. I feel like the House of Representatives has pretty much no actual power. At the end of the day, the Senate has to approve everything, and we gerrymandered that 200 years ago. (We could fix that by adding DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam as states, split California into North/South, split Texas into East/West, etc. It will never happen, though, because the goal of Congress is to never change anything, and they already have a nice 50/50 split that assures that.)

There was a very comprehensive bill put forth that was short a handful of votes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan

There was lots of back and forth and attempts at cajoling representatives to vote for it, which did end up with a watered down version being passed. I do not see how one could conclude there was a “sincere lack of effort”.

How about the sincere lack of progress?

Sounds like a meaningless, ill defined question given that the USA is not a monarchy. And given that a compromise bill was passed, so there was some progress.

What's the opposite of pro? Con. What's the opposite of progress?

Gerrymandering probably doesn't affect outcomes much.[0] I know gerrymandering seems wrong, but every shape for an equal-population electoral district is more or less arbitrary, and some will inevitably be biased in favor of one party over another at the time it's drawn.

[0]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possib...

> ... but every shape for an equal-population electoral district is more or less arbitrary

They are arbitrary only if you take a look at raw population numbers. Gerrymandering these days is about tweaking urban/rural and ethnic ratios.

There have been efforts to address this. Several states have adopted independent redistricting commissions. The Congressional Democrats have also made several attempts to pass legislation making political gerrymandering illegal, but have been unsuccessful at changing the law.

> […] the continued existence of gerrymandering is truly mind-boggling.

Some people have an explicit goal of increasing gerrymandering:

> REDMAP (short for Redistricting Majority Project) is a project of the Republican State Leadership Committee of the United States to increase Republican control of congressional seats as well as state legislatures, largely through determination of electoral district boundaries. The project has made effective use of partisan gerrymandering, by relying on previously unavailable mapping software such as Maptitude to improve the precision with which district lines are strategically drawn.[1] The strategy was focused on swing blue states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin where there was a Democratic majority but which they could swing towards Republican with appropriate redistricting. The project was launched in 2010 and estimated to have cost the Republican party around US$30 million.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

Certain people want to implement their desired (economic, social) policies, and they need to attain political power to do that, so if the majority of voters do not want those policies, they will ignore / go around the majority to get things done.

David Frum:

> If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/frum-tr...

* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9077312-maybe-you-do-not-ca...