If the electoral college trend were to hold for next 100 years

[jimrtex]

One interesting thought: What if Congress drew Congressional districts?

This is certainly within their Constitutional authority.

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Or they could farm it out to an independent agency.  This is what they have done in the case of apportionment, where they have embedded the formula in law, and simply have the Census Bureau report the apportionment numbers.  This avoids debates over apportionment methods and number of representatives.

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There is a possibility that if conducted at a national level, any abuse would be more visible.

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Congress has directed that the representatives be elected from districts.  Since the manner of electing representatives is vested in the States (subject to Congressional override), the States have authority to modify their districts, just as they modify their other election laws.

In the Texas redistricting case, the plaintiffs argued that it was illegal to use 2000 census numbers for redistricting in 2003, if the redistricting was done voluntarily, based on an argument that it violated the equal protection clause.

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The Texas legislature did not draw the plan used in in the 2002 elections.  It was drawn by a federal district court.  Under the US and Texas Constitutions, as well as federal and Texas law, the authority to district is vested solely in the Texas legislature.  At best, the federal court plan should be considered a remedy for 2002 only, subject of course to the continued dereliction of the Texas legislature.   In their 2001 decisions, the district court noted that they were incompetent to consider many issues that were legitimate considerations for the legislature.  The plaintiffs were told to go tell the legislature.  This was appealed to the US Supreme Court (in essence arguing that the federal district court could and should legislate from the bench).  The USSC refused to take the case.  The best term for the 2003 redistricting is simply "redistricting" or "reapportionment" (for historical reasons, districting is also referred to as reapportionment.

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There may be a bias here.   Many Democrats tend to be indifferent to such things.  They may think that they are merely redressing past grievances.

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No Constitutional amendment is needed.

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Historically, when electors were elected from districts, they were chosen from electoral districts (eg Maine would be divided into 4 electoral districts, each choosing a single elector).  The current system used by Maine and Nebraska of having a mixed system (district plus at large electors) is unusual.

[jimrtex]

Were some of the concurences in judgement of certain U.S. Supreme Court Justices on the 2005 case regarding the 2003 or 2004 Texas congressional redistricting, ... did any justices basically say that the second redrawing of the lines (not getting into the issue of TX-23) was only okay because the first drawing wasn't done by the Legislature?  I know certain Republicans have said that while fuming against Democratic attempts to redistrict Ohio by citizen initiave while justifying the 2003 Texas redistricting, but I'm curious if any Supreme Court Justices (like Scalia perhaps) came to that conclusion.

I don't think that there was any dissent as to whether authority to redistrict is vested in the state legislatures, and that there is no constitutional or legal bar to mid-decade redistricting.  Where there was dissent was in the manner such redistricting occured.  I don't think that it would have mattered whether there were multiple legislative redistrictings.

There were 3 parts to the decision.

III - VRA violation in South Texas, particularly TX-23.  That was 5-4;
Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens, Brever v. Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Thomas.

IV - VRA violation in DFW area, particularly TX-24, Rejected 4-5; Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer v. Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Thomas.

II - Partisan Gerrymander.  This had two subparts.  One was whether, a voluntary re-redistricting done for partisan purposes denied equal protection to supporter of one party.  This was rejected on a 4-5 vote, Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer v. Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Thomas.

Kennedy emphasized the point that such a standard would have left in place the 1991 Democrat gerrymander (because it was done during an effort to create equal population districts), while disallowing the 2003 Republican gerrymander (because equal population districts already existed).  In addition, Kennedy found that partisan districting wasn't the sole motivation behind the district plan.

Based on that, I don't see how Kennedy could object to one partisan redistricting plan drawn by a legislature being replaced by another 2 years later.

II - The second subpart was whether voluntary (eg. non-necessary) mid-decade redistricting violated one-man/one-vote.  This was rejected on a 2-7 vote, Stevens, Breyer v. Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Thomas.   Basically the argument was made that it is OK to use census figures for redistricting, if you had to redistrict, but not if you were redistricting voluntarily. 

Scalia and Thomas would have rejected all of the partisan gerrymandering claims, and re-iterated that there was no justiciable standard.  Roberts and Alito, rejected the partisan gerrymandering claims for this case, but said that it was not at issue in this case whether such a standard could ever be found.

Basically you have the 4 activist justices who claim that there are standards that could be applied for partisan gerrymander cases (though they disagree on what those standards should be); Kennedy who insists that there might be such a standard, he just hasn't seen it yet.  And there are 4 conservative justices that say that there never is going to be a standard found.  So as long as Kennedy is around, you may still be getting these kind of cases.

[jimrtex]

Yet another map.  This one shows how things would look in 2100 if each state had the same net increase of people as they did from 2000-2005 every five years.  (ND was the only state to have a net loss from 2000-2005 according to Census estimates).

Interesting that SC would eventually gain a seat.  It has gone the longest without changing of any state with more than 2 seats without change.

1 - DE since 1820
2 - NH since 1880
3 - NE since 1960
4 - AR since 1960
5 - OR since 1980
6 - SC since 1930
7 - AL since 1970
8 - MD and MN since 1960
9 - MO since 1980
10 - MA since 1990
11 - VA since 1990
13 - NJ since 1990