A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a longstanding national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
Just another example of why we need district lines to be assigned by an explicit mathematical process rather than politicians deciding what will best let them retain power.
Least split line is an example of an attempt at that (basically if you have an even number of districts to split into, draw the shortest line across the region that splits the population into an even number of people on each side and put half the districts on each side. If odd, then do almost the same, except instead of an even split, one side gets the extra “share” of people and the extra district to split into. Repeat the process for each piece until you have one district on each side of the line.
For example, if a state has 5 seats, then draw the shortest line that puts 60% of the population on one side and 40% on the other (a 3:2 ratio). Then for the 40% side, draw the shortest line across it that splits the population in half. For the 60% side, you draw the shortest line that produces a 2:1 split, then the shortest line across the 2 side that splits the population evenly. Each district now contains 20% of the population, all drawn without regard to or consideration of political affiliations or identity groups, and all generally pretty compact. Inconvenient if you want to ensure your party’s continued power or create “majority minority” districts, but then those aren’t the goals (and are actually antithetical to the goal of preventing gerrymandering).