A QUICK CIVICS class question: When do we in the United States draw new districts for legislators?

If you said “every 10 years, after the census,” I fear that your answer is outdated.

Redistricting frequently has been a nasty business in state legislatures, but at least it was a nasty business that came around only once per decade. The practice of doing a second, blatantly partisan congressional redistricting in the same decade, after a big election win, might be spreading like the common cold — and the results will be just as unpleasant.

This week, Georgia is considering a redistricting plan that is more generous to Republicans than the one passed at the beginning of the decade — when Democrats had more power, including Roy Barnes in the governor’s office. Republicans defend their new maps as splitting up fewer communities.

In decades past, that would not have been reason enough to wade back into the swamps of redistricting, a divisive process that often ends up in court. Instead, the Republicans would have worked to consolidate their gains and looked forward to drawing better lines in 2010. The new motto seems to be: Why wait?

The best reason to wait, of course, is the tensions that redistricting conjures up. State legislatures do not need another excuse to have a partisan fight, one that would make it more difficult for them to work as designed: to seek compromises and the best ideas, wherever in the political spectrum they should come from.

What kept this from happening before? Only deference to tradition and collegiality held it back. Those two things are important forces in keeping elected government running. Without them, the system tends to choke under partisan pressures.

Those two virtues gave way first in Texas.

Texas legislators were pressured to do a mid-decade redistricting by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who saw a chance to pad the GOP’s margin in Congress. Desperate to avoid the second redistricting, Democrats fled the state to keep the Senate from having a quorum, and Republicans tried to hunt them down, even reporting them as “missing” to aviation officials. This is not good government, folks.

Rep. DeLay got his redistrictingin the end, and it had the desired result: Five Democratic seats went to the GOP under the redrawn maps.

Now Republicans are looking at Georgia, which is represented in the U.S. House by seven Republicans and six Democrats.

Republicans are acting in states where they have gained power since the turn of the decade. But politically, the country is polarizing state-by-state — and don’t think Democrats nationally are above this sort of thing. They have threatened to retaliate by redistricting states where they have gained power, such as Louisiana and Illinois. Some Democrats in Illinois even raised the idea of drawing U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert out of his district.

That’s the magic of breaking the precedent of redistricting every 10 years. Doing it to scoop up a few districts in one state opens the door to nastiness from either party in every state, forever.

All this fighting over district lines obscures the real debate we ought to be having over redistricting: Does it too often protect incumbents? Is it time to let someone other than incumbent politicians draw the lines?

During the last election, the GOP picked up only a handful of House seats, despite President Bush’s win. That’s because so few seats are in play. Seats are decided as Republican or Democratic at the redistricting drawing table, not in the voting booth. And such polarized districts tend to elect more partisan legislators from the wings of each party, making the legislative body less able to find common ground.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing to take redistricting out of the hands of the California legislature. His state is an amazing example of the problem. In the 2004 election, not one seat in the U.S. or California House changed hands from one party to another. His presence as governor — a celebrity elected by the people in a recall vote — certainly indicates that Californians want change; redistricting and party politics frustrate that wish.

Of course, Gov. Schwarzenegger intends to change the rules by going around his legislature to the people. He wants to pass a ballot referendum making redistricting the job of a panel separate from the legislature. That’s mostly how California is governed now: Change things with a referendum, then have more referendums later to deal with the problems caused by earlier votes.

One problem with the Governator’s plan: California has 2 million more people than it did when the last census was taken. Any redistricting done mid-decade will be suspect because of outdated data.

Such ballot initiatives are no way to run a government, but it might spur caution in those who want to make redistricting an ever-more-constant political battle. If the pain of redistricting becomes never-ending, the voters just might see fit to take it out of legislators’ hands. And maybe they should.

Reach Mr. Fitts at mfitts@thestate.com.