All Intensive Purposes

Matt Yglesias has a few thoughts, and winds his way around to this:

A better solution for such states might be to appoint a commission that was mandated to gerrymander in accordance with some objective criteria. You could come up with an operational definition of a "competetive district" and then mandate that the commission draw up the maximum feasible number of competetive districts. That would mean states would include a few super-safe districts in the hands of the local majority party but would still mostly be competitive. The resulting boundary lines might well look very odd, but most members of congress would need to face contested races every two years. On the other hand, leadership autority in both parties would naturally pass to people holding super-safe seats who would rack up seniority. But the House's legendary party discipline might well break down -- thus rendering the seniority issue less pressing -- if most members had to live in constant fear of getting booted from office.

I'm thinking something along these lines as well, and one of these days I'll get around to doing it justice here.