There are only two things that are worse than a Legislative engineered gerrymander, that would be a “non-partisan” commission engineered gerrymander or a judicial engineered gerrymander. Redistricting is a function of elected representatives. If the voters don’t like it, they can get rid of the elected representatives. They can’t get rid of some commission and certainly not from judges.
Baker v. Carr (1962) was a landmark scotus case that decided that redistricting issues present justiciable questions, thus enabling federal courts to intervene in and to decide redistricting cases. The defendants unsuccessfully argued that redistricting of legislative districts was a “political question”, and hence not a question that may be resolved by federal courts.
Tennessee had not adjusted district lines since 1901. By the 1950s, some rural districts had one tenth the population of growing urban districts. Nonetheless, TN argued that the composition of legislative districts was a political question, not a judicial one, as had been held by Colegrove v. Green, in which Justice Frankfurter warned that “Courts ought not to enter this political thicket.” Frankfurter believed that relief for legislative malapportionment had to be won through the political process.
Frankfurter, joined by Justice John Marshall Harlan II, dissented in Baker, arguing that the Court had cast aside history and judicial restraint, and violated the separation of powers between legislatures and Courts. He wrote: “Appellants invoke the right to vote and to have their votes counted. But they are permitted to vote and their votes are counted. They go to the polls, they cast their ballots, they send their representatives to the state councils. Their complaint is simply that the representatives are not sufficiently numerous or powerful.” The court reversed a uniform train of cases going back to the 1840s. One of the cases, Colgrove v. Green, was only sixteen years in the past.