Congressman John Tanner, author of The Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act:

"This idea is one that originates, oddly enough, from Tennessee. Baker v. Carr was the case in the Supreme Court of the United States, that invoked the 'one person, one vote' rule. After 40-something years, it occurred to some of us that, rather than the constituents electing the members of the legislatures across the land and the Congress, the members of the Congress and the legislature elect their constituents. With the aid of computers and so forth, what we have seen perversely over those 40-something years is a situation where… the Congress is much more polarized than the country.

"There are a lot of independent-minded, independent-thinking Americans who, by this process that has evolved over some 40 years now in redistricting, are completely ignored and left out of the process. We think it’s time for that to change and for there to be, as best can be, a recognition of lines that make sense from the standpoint of compactness and so forth, with all of the other laws that we have involved…. Thank God this is not a Democrat or Republican bill – it’s an American bill, and it’s for America. We’ll have people on both sides of the aisle who won’t think a whole lot of it and some who will."

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