My mother’s cousin Henrietta (not her real name), up until that point a solid Democrat, was approaching her Chicago polling place in 1980 when she was greeted by her Democratic precinct worker. “Sorry, George,” she said, “I can’t bring myself to vote for Jimmy Carter again.” “That is all right, Henrietta,” George said without a pause. “We don’t care how you vote on the national ticket.”

Lost to history is whether George was expressing his own or the Chicago Democratic machine’s disaffection from President Carter, whom native son Ronald Reagan would beat in Illinois by almost 8%, or whether George was simply professional enough a political hack to pick his persuasion battles. But to understand why the US Constitution leaves the question of redistricting to the states, George’s “we don’t ca

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