Virginians did what they needed to do Tuesday. 

The idea of redistricting a state in the middle of a 10-year Census period is odious. Naturally, it originated with Donald Trump. 

He demanded Texas find more Republican seats in the House, and yapping Republicans said “Yes, master!” The legislature voted to alter the district boundaries in a way that supposedly would put five seats held by Democrats in the Republican camp.

What Trump and the lapdogs thought was that Democrats, being normally high-minded and spouting stuff about fairness, wouldn’t dare do something similar.

But they did. 

In fact, in California and now in Virginia, they gave it a loincloth of legitimacy by having voters approve. It was close in Virginia, a state so split that it had a Republican governor –  in his final days – when this year started. But at least the people of the commonwealth had a chance to say “yes” or “no” – more than Texans, Missourians and North Carolinians did.

For all the bellyaching by Trump and Republicans after the Virginia vote, the gerrymandering mishegas isn’t even the most unfair thing about the House of Representatives.

It’s this: just as in the U.S. Senate, Wyoming is over-represented in the House and California is under-represented.

That’s not supposed to happen. The Senate was designed to be the states’ “protection.” Wyoming, with 590,000 people, has two senators. So does California, population 39.5 million.

But in the House, which was meant to be representative of the American people as a whole, Wyoming has one representative for all 590,000 people. California has one for every 760,000. That’s about 28% less representation for Californians, a gap about the size of Escondido.

It’s actually worse for Texas – a red state, by the way. The nation’s second largest state has one representative for every 830,000 people, an underrepresentation of more than 40%.

The reason this is the case is a law passed during the Hoover administration – when I imagine Trump and his sycophants thought America was great. The Reapportionment Act of 1929 set a permanent limit to House seats at 435.

Republicans controlled everything that year, and this was thought to be a way for middle America to counterbalance the shift to a more urban, more immigrant population. 

Same crap, different day.

I played with the math a little – only partly because I love any excuse to play with the math. If we allowed a base of 1 seat for the least populated state – in this case, Wyoming, at 590,000 people – there would be 577 seats in the House of Representatives, 142 more than the current number.

California, now with 52 seats, would have 67. Texas would actually add more, up 16 to 54. Even small states like Delaware and Idaho are unfairly penalized in the current system; both would add a representative to become more representative.

The only states that wouldn’t add at least one seat are Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont and, of course, Wyoming.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the states I’ve mentioned so far that seem to be underrepresented are both Republican-dominated and Democratic-dominated. Not to mention Florida and New York. Alabama and Minnesota. Oklahoma and Massachusetts. 

So if everybody isn’t getting a fair say in the House, it should be a relatively simple matter to change this. How could politicians resist the idea of a nearly one-third increase in employment that fair apportionment would provide?

Here’s how:

Yes, red states and blue states would be equally affected by this. But remember why this stupid Reapportionment Act was approved in the first place. It’s not so much red vs. blue as it is rural vs. urban and immigrant vs. been here a while.

If Texas got 16 more seats, it would be harder for Greg Abbott and his unmerry band to redistrict the state so that more Republicans get seats. Smaller districts would temper a lot of the gerrymandering, since you couldn’t as readily mitigate the impact of city voters by including a lot of country folk and suburbanites.

That’s why it’s a reform we need partnered with federal rules about drawing district lines. Anti-gerrymandering legislation.

If districts are fairly drawn and representative of the population, you might not end the bitter partisan divide we have in this country. But at least people will feel more like they have some say in the matter.

Take a look at some of the bizarre lines that have been drawn in places like Texas and Ohio to protect Republican incumbents, You couldn’t draw Jim Jordan’s district in Ohio as ridiculously if you were blindfolded.

Here’s the good part: A reform of Congressional apportionment that includes fairer representation and anti-gerrymandering protection wouldn’t require a Constitutional amendment.

The Constitution doesn’t specify how many members the House has. All it says is that every state has one district. And we’re more than taking care of that.

The big money would hate this. More lobbying expenses. It would fight it.

But it’s something a Democratic Congress should consider – if we get one later this year. And if Republicans weren’t such damn hypocrites, whining about the Virginia vote after what Texas did, they’d be on board as well.