"California and Arizona have shown the way out by taking the job of redistricting away from politicians in the state legislature and turning it over to independent citizen commissions." Then let's do it in every state!

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COMMENTS: 
*  Gerrymandering ought to be a treasonous act for the sheer political corruption it depicts. Stacking the deck is the only method the GOP has available to corral a majority of anything lately.
*  Basically, there are two components of this that people need to understand. One, gerrymanding is fundamentally undemocratic, so any party engaged in it is undermining the values they claim to be protecting. Second, we've all seen the cry "throw the bums out!" but that already happened; over half of US Representatives were elected for the first time in the past 5 years, and many of them now have a comfortable lock on their seats thanks to gerrymandering.  Unfortunately, we are seeing the results of widespread political and geographic ignorance.
*  When a party continues to control a decreasingly small part of the electorate, the only way they can try to appear relevant is to rig the system to magnify their shrinking base. The result is legislative gridlock since there is no incentive or reward in compromising with moderate forces. The parochial interests of a few will frustrate the will of the many.
*  It a democratic republic where we elect people to make decisions for us. Only today, we have people elected who promise to give up that power and do whatever they are told. That's what the Norquist tax pledge is all about. And since money is now speech and politics, the Koch brothers can buy elections and put people into office who will do what they want.
*  Compromise is necessary for our republican form of government to function properly. However, TEA Partiers believe that compromise is for losers.  As Hedrick Smith notes, after TEA Partiers took control of numerous state government, they followed Karl Rove’s advice and gerrymandered congressional districts to guarantee that their candidates would have permanently safe seats.  We must also recollect that Rove has called for permanent Republican majority and, hence, control of the federal government.  The TEA Party/Freedom Caucus does not believe in compromise and wants a permanent one-party Republican-controlled government.  Why do TEA Partiers hate our republican form of government and our democracy?
*  These GOPers in control of Congress are nihilists. They would sooner destroy the very institution they inhabit rather than use it for the public good.  They serve only their corporate masters and the average voter has no idea.
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Gerrymandering may prove a Pyrrhic victory for the GOP
By Hedrick Smith, October 7, 2015

The 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.
 
RedMap was a smashing success. In 2010, Republicans picked up 675 legislative seats nationwide, giving the GOP control of legislatures in states that held 40% of all House seats, versus Democrats with only 10%. (The rest were under split control.) When it came time for gerrymandering, they ran a precision operation. They used sophisticated software to determine not only which town and which neighborhood should be allotted to which district but which street and which home. In the 2012 election, they saw the fruit of their labor. Republicans came out with a 33-seat majority in the U.S. House, even though they lost the popular vote.

But there was a hitch. The very strategy that cemented the party's House majority also entrenched the rump faction of anti-government extremists who toppled Boehner and will menace his successor.

So sharply targeted was the 2011 gerrymandering effort that all but two of the 45 anti-Boehner rebels — most of them now organized as the Freedom Caucus — are guaranteed reelection in politically engineered districts that insulate them from Democratic challengers.

Their congressional districts are so stacked in their favor that, in 2014, they beat their Democratic opponents by an average of 38 percentage points. Only two had competitive general election races. Three had such slam-dunk districts that no Democrat even bothered to oppose them.

With protected political monopolies back home, the rebels take little or no political risk and pay no political price for opposing their speaker and adopting extremist positions that bring Congress to a halt.

It matters little that the rebels are junior members of Congress. More than two-thirds were elected in the tea party class of 2010 and the RedMap classes of 2012 and 2014. More than 85% of them come from a GOP-gerrymandered state, which emboldens them.

There is no quick fix to the challenge they pose not only to the next speaker but also to our political system. Choosing a new speaker will neither quell nor placate the uprising. The rebels see their mission as blocking anyone from compromising with Democrats. Nor are they hung up merely on one or two prickly issues, such as defunding Planned Parenthood. The Freedom Caucus has immobilized Congress repeatedly — over funding the Department of Homeland Security, funding the Export-Import Bank and raising the debt ceiling. Twice they have forced the shutdown of the national government, and they will try again.

It is going to take fundamental change to dislodge the gridlock now baked into the system.

California and Arizona have shown the way out by taking the job of redistricting away from politicians in the state legislature and turning it over to independent citizen commissions. And in June, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Arizona-California method, giving the green light to citizen-led reform elsewhere.

Other states are also taking action. Seven have already set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan redistricting. In six more states, gerrymandering is under assault in the courts. And in yet another six, either political leaders or citizen groups have mounted campaigns to reduce or eliminate gerrymandering.

Perhaps public shock over Boehner's downfall will give new impetus to a long-overdue reform movement. Otherwise, these insurgencies will continue to shackle American democracy.
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