Gerrymandering is a toxin so prevalent in our political bloodstream that we take it for granted.

In 1995, when the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether the Texas Legislature had redrawn its congressional map based on racial factors, Javier Aguilar, the state’s assistant attorney general, defended the map by arguing that Democrats in the Legislature merely were trying to protect the election prospects of incumbents in their own party. The fact that two of the incumbents being protected — Sheila Jackson Lee and Eddie Bernice Johnson — happened to be African-American was an incidental factor.

Aguilar didn’t even bother disputing the presence of partisan gerrymandering in that map, just the racial component of that gerrymandering. Of course, the state argued, legislators used the redistricting process to mangle the election system for their own partisan ends, but their gerrymandering was admirably colorblind.

In that case, the culprits were Democrats, because they controlled the levers of power in this state. Over the past 15 years, it’s been Republicans who pulled out the colorblind-gerrymandering defense during a recent case before a three-judge federal district court panel addressing the 2011 congressional maps drawn up by the GOP-controlled Legislature.

Lawyers for the state didn’t argue the lines on the 2011 maps were fair. They stated that lawmakers were driven by partisan — not racial or ethnic — bias.

The panel was left unpersuaded, and ruled last Friday that state mapmakers “acted with an impermissible intent to dilute minority strength” in three South and West Texas congressional districts.

This is where we are: Watching attorneys parsing the distinctions between discriminatory intent and discriminatory effect, and more or less conceding that redistricting is a case of the victors getting the spoils.

What can’t be denied is that redistricting court battles have been a prime spectator sport in Texas for the past 50 years and that both major parties abuse the system — at the expense of Texas voters — when they’re given the opportunity.

Friday’s court ruling only added another layer to the legal limbo in which we perpetually find our state’s voting process. The court ruled on a 2011 map that never has been implemented by the state, because it was redrawn by the courts.

At the same time, a couple of the key districts — including Lloyd Doggett’s winding District 35, which connects San Antonio and Austin —remained unchanged from one map to the next.

We don’t know what the court’s remedy will be, but we should have no doubts about what the long-term solution needs to be. Friday’s ruling told us something we already knew, that it's well past time for this state to put the redistricting process in the hands of an independent commission, an idea consistently pushed by state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin.

No redistricting system that involves human beings can be perfect, and even a bipartisan commission won’t be immune to the tug of party politics. But it will at least remove the element of elected officials using the state map to scratch each other’s backs.

Friday’s decision, just like every new chapter in the never-ending Texas redistricting soap opera, got me thinking about the Dirty Thirty.

The Dirty Thirty sounded like a Marvel Comics alliance of the world’s most diabolical villains, but, in fact, they were a loose coalition of reform-minded Republicans and liberal Democrats who rebelled in the early 1970s against the autocratic and corrupt leadership of Texas House Speaker Gus Mutscher.

In 1971, Mutscher used the redistricting process for his own vindictive ends, and set out to decimate the Dirty Thirty by forcing its members to run against each other.

Fortunately, the state Supreme Court found Mutscher’s map to be unconstitutional and ordered it redrawn. Mutscher ultimately was convicted of conspiracy to accept a bribe in the Sharpstown bank-stock scandal.

The Dirty Thirty won.

Unfortunately, any reassurance you take from the Dirty Thirty saga has to be balanced by the fact that one of its driving forces, state Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, became House speaker three decades later and turned into a new-model Gus Mutscher.

Craddick led the GOP on a wildly controversial mid-decade redistricting effort that resulted in lawsuits, special elections and Democratic lawmakers breaking quorum by hiding out in Oklahoma and New Mexico.

The lesson in Craddick’s story is that young reformers can turn into calculating gerrymanderers if you give them the power. It’s the game that’s corrupt, no matter who plays it.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470