The only goal right now for a lot of people in Washington is to make "Number Go Up" ahead of November. So far the current strategies haven't been working, so they're going to have to get a lot more aggressive. Medium and long term consequences are a problem for the future.
Skirting close to or breaking the law has substantially worse outcomes in divided government. The GOP paranoia about November smacks of a belated realization that there might be consequences for things that were done.
They are going to pass the save act, which disenfranchise is something like 60% of women voters in the United States.
This will effectively invalidate a significant portion of Democrat voters right before the election, and before they were able to change their data
Gerrymandering (on any side) isn't going to decrease unless the federal government begins enforcing it under Constitutional and civil rights law, with Supreme Court blessing.
Among its many flaws, the Constitution should have had a "elections run by an objectively fair method to each citizen" caveat before giving states the right to run their own elections.
But that would have been pretty progressive for the late 18th century...
In my dream world, we'd put enforceable boundaries on how much gerrymandering is acceptable via statistically stable methods (e.g. efficiency gap calculations).
The easier solution would have been parliamentary-style proportional party list representation, but I'm not sure the fairness benefits outweigh the "not being able to vote for your individual" drawbacks.
