The redistricting arms race now roiling American politics was not merely predictable, but inevitable. It began the moment President Donald Trump picked up the phone last year to demand that Missouri, Texas and other red states gerrymander their congressional districts mid-decade to give Republicans an advantage in the upcoming midterms. Some Democratic-held states have responded in kind.

The result is that in much of America this November, voters won’t be allowed to choose their politicians; the politicians are instead choosing their voters. It’s an untenable situation that will only get worse unless and until Congress steps in with legislation to impose uniform redistricting standards, putting the process outside the political whims of any president or party.

Gerrymandering — twisting congressional boundaries to favor one party or the other — is a rotten old bipartisan tradition that, before now, always occurred after the release of new census figures every 10 years.

But any argument that the current situation is merely an extension of that both-sides-do-it phenomenon must be forcefully rejected. This was all Trump. The president demanded that states controlled by his party re-gerrymander mid-decade without even the pretense of it being anything but a partisan power play.

That was, until now, unheard of. With that seal broken, Democrats in California and elsewhere were not merely justified in doing the same thing, but virtually obligated to.

Still, the current scorecard shows that Republicans have been far more successful at this dark stunt than Democrats have: To date, ruling Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida and Tennessee have all re-gerrymandered at Trump’s insistence to stack the deck with friendly House districts.

Democrats have responded in kind in California, Utah and Virginia — though the Virginia Supreme Court last week shot down Virginia’s re-gerrymandering bid based on a technicality.

Pretty much all of it is being fought out in the courts. If everything stands, Republicans nationally could in theory add as many as eight seats to their thin House majority in the fall midterms. But that’s based on the assumption that voters in these newly redrawn districts will all do exactly what the map-drawers expect, based on past elections and demographics. Gerrymandering isn’t an exact science. It can backfire.

The whole point of Trump’s end-run around long-established redistricting norms is to try and break the usual historical pattern in which the president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms. But his own dismal 40% approval rating of late could still make that an uphill climb.

In Missouri, the state’s redrawn map divides the Kansas City-based Fifth District House seat, currently held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver, in an attempt to ensure it goes to a Republican in November. That would leave the state with just one Democratic House member out of eight seats, despite the fact that Democratic voters routinely account for 40% of statewide votes.

Missouri voters aren’t helpless against this cynical game. The pending referendum effort aimed at letting the voters scuttle the corrupt new map later this year is among the issues before the Missouri Supreme Court this week. Should that measure make it onto the ballot, anyone of any party who cares about fairness in elections should step up and support it.

In any case, now that the once-solid norm of only redistricting in response to new census figures has been knocked down like the East Wing of the White House, the national situation will only get worse going forward.

The New York Times reports that at least four additional red states — Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi — are already planning re-gerrymandering schemes after this year. It’s not hard to imagine (in fact, it’s impossible not to) that scrambling the map in almost every state with an eye toward partisan advantage will quickly become the new norm every two years.

That cannot be allowed to happen. “Regular” gerrymandering after every census was bad enough. But a scenario in which states’ maps are constantly being redrawn to shut out voters of whichever party isn’t in power is intolerable to democracy.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding congressional elections. That would presumably include setting a standardized, nationwide fair-map process to not only end mid-decade re-gerrymandering, but finally get rid of “regular” gerrymandering as well.

Of course, that would require a Congress far more functional than the current one is. But it’s something the country must start talking about. The alternative is a system in which the only votes that matter anywhere are the ones in the statehouses.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch