“That’s part of the problem,” Tanner conceded when I asked him about the super-PAC ads flooding the airwaves. “But you can trace how the members got here back to gerry­mandering. I don’t give a damn how much money you spend. These guys are gonna be responsive to the people that elected them, to avoid a party primary. And so they come here to represent their political party, not their district or their country. That attitude has infected the Senate, too. Look at Orrin Hatch,” he said, referring to the veteran Utah senator who fought off a primary challenge from an ultra­conservative. “Now you’d think he was an original member of the Tea Party. It makes you sick to see him grovel.”

Some redistricting experts argue that Americans have polarized themselves, by gravitating toward homogenous communities, a demographic trend observed in Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s 2008 book, The Big Sort. But, says one Texas Republican map-drawer, “redistricting has amplified the Big Sort by creating safe Republican and safe Democratic districts. Look at Texas. If you count [Blake Farent­hold’s] 27th as the result of a fluke election, the [racially polarized West Texas] 23rd is the only swing district in the state.” In this sense, the only difference that the new maps will make is that instead of one swing district out of 32, there will now be one out of 36. As to what this portends, former Texas Congressman Martin Frost, a Democrat, told me, “I won’t mention anyone by name, but I know certain Republicans in the Texas delegation who would be inclined to be more moderate, if they didn’t have to fear a primary challenge.”

One Texas Republican who dipped his toe in the moderate waters, by voting for last summer’s debt-ceiling deal, was Congressman Michael Burgess. Tea Partiers lambasted him to his face, saying, “You caved.” An analysis by National Journal found that politicians like Burgess were the exception—­that most House members who voted to raise the debt ceiling were from swing districts, while “the further a member’s district is from the political center, the more likely it is that he or she opposed the compromise.”

We know what happened after that whole debacle: the Dow Jones plummeted, Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating, and Congress’s approval rating sank to an unprecedented low of 9 percent. That intensity of public disgust has hardly abated, and it is felt across the political spectrum: according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released this past January, at least 56 percent of all liberals, moderates, and conservatives would like to see everyone in the legislative branch fired this November.

If this is so, then perhaps Tom Hofeller is right. Perhaps redistricting reform is unnecessary. Perhaps instead the system is self-correcting: the extremists whom the map-­drawers have helped to create will be judged as obstructionists unworthy of their safe seats and, by means of electoral laxative, flushed out of the body politic. Thus cleansed, America can then slowly return to what James Madison called “this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities.” When that happens, we know who will be there to draw the battle lines.