Gerrymandering may prove a Pyrrhic victory for the GOP

[meow2u3]

he next House speaker, whoever he may be, will almost certainly face crippling mutinies by the 45 Republican rebels who systematically opposed John A. Boehner and ultimately succeeded in pushing him out. Maybe not right away, but eventually, because these ideological insurgents know they can defy their party leadership without fear of punishment from the voters.

How will they get away with it? The answer is gerrymandering. Yes, gerrymandering has been around since the dawn of American politics, but it's a far different game today, played on a national scale with 21st century software.

In 2009, Republican Party leaders decided to heed Karl Rove, the campaign guru, who told them pragmatically, "He who controls redistricting can control Congress."


Following the Rove dictum, the party poured $30 million, mostly raised from corporations, into what it called "RedMap," a strategy to dominate the once-a-decade redistricting process in 2011 by capturing majority control of as many state legislatures as possible in the 2010 election.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1007-smith-gerrymandering-20151007-story.html

Right now, there are only three ways to get rid of the tealiban seditionists in Congress. One way is to have them expelled; the other is to charge them with seditious conspiracy; and the third is illegal and not endorsed by meow2u3.

[0rganism]

1. long term, gerrymandering will hoist them on their own petard

in order to get their majorities, they had to turn safe districts into tossups weighted in their favor
through the magic of demographic shift, they exposed themselves to a lot of tight elections in the future
it's going to be easier to tip 5 districts where there's currently a 5% bias than one district with a 25% bias

[saturnsring]

2. petard ... wasnt he one of the captains of the enterprise