In assessing the current controversy over Texas Republicans’ proposed redistricting of the state’s U.S. House seats, two historic facts should be considered.

One is that the principle of equal representation by population is well established in American history. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention required the members of the House of Representatives to be apportioned according to population as determined by a census to be conducted within three years and every 10 years thereafter.

This was a remarkable provision — the first example, so far as I know, in which representation was directly linked to population, and in which it was to be adjusted by what was the first regularly scheduled national census.

The Framers were thinking demographically. They were certainly aware of the 1780s controversy in Britain over “rotten boroughs,” in which a wealthy Indian merchant could elect two members of the House of Commons by buying four pieces of property in Old Sarum. Their numbers included Benjamin Franklin, who in the 1750s accurately predicted that the population of the English-speaking colonies would exceed that of Great Britain in a hundred years.

The second thing to remember is that the Founders were aware of partisan redistricting. Another signer of the Declaration and member of the Constitutional Convention was Elbridge Gerry, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a state senate redistricting bill that combined a grotesquely shaped group of towns in Essex County into one district, drawn by cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale with the wings and claws of a salamander. This was the original gerrymander (pronounced by purists like Gerry’s surname, with a hard “g”), which clustered Gerry’s Federalist opponents in a single district.

Congress in 1842 required equal-population districts within a state, but that provision was overturned in the 1929 law, which automatically reapportioned House seats among the states by applying an arithmetic formula to the census results. The predictable result was gerrymanders within the states, topped off by plans jamming the disfavored party’s voters in bloated districts signed by Nelson Rockefeller (R-N.Y.) and Pat Brown (D-Calif.) in the nation’s two most populous states in the 1960 cycle.

The Supreme Court ended this in 1964, requiring one-person-one-vote congressional and state legislative districts. As a close student of every redistricting cycle since the 1960 Census, I have observed how the equal population standard severely limits the political gains for even the most partisan redistricters.

You can only jam so many opposition voters into a limited number of districts. And suppose you create too many 53% districts for your own side. In that case, you risk losing the whole bunch when opinion generally or within specific voting segments 5% the other way, which tends to happen at least once every 10-year interval between censuses.