Like many of you, I was very distraught by the fact that gerrymandering effectively ruined our chances at taking the House. Even though we managed to knock off a few teabaggers, the Republican majority appears to be set in stone until 2020. However, there is a controversial way in which we could possibly get the majority back into our hands by 2016 at the latest if everything goes right.
We normally assume that redistricting is something that only happens once a decade. But as we should realize from Texas history, that's not the case. In 2003, Tom Delay and his pals in the Texas state legislature passed a new congressional district map that practically destroyed the Texas democrats in Congress. Even though the case was sent to the Supreme Court and part of it was ruled illegal, the court ruled that it was legal to have redistricting done in the middle of the decade.
Case summary of League of Latin American Citizens v. Perry from OYEZ.org
The Supreme Court held that the Texas Legislature's redistricting plan did not violate the Constitution, but that part of the plan violated the Voting Rights Act. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a majority of the justices, stated that District 23 had been redrawn in such a way as to deny Latino voters as a group the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choosing, thereby violating the Voting Rights Act. Justice Kennedy also wrote, however, that nothing in the Constitution prevented the state from redrawing its electoral boundaries as many times as it wanted, so long as it did so at least once every ten years.
I'm not entirely fluent on every state's laws regarding redistricting, but I'm sure this is our best bet to get out of the congressional mess we our in. We need to target swing state legislatures like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that we lost last time in order to get the legislators and governors who are willing to redraw the maps. If we manage to fill up those houses and redraw the lines, we have a much better shot than we ever did before at getting back the House of Representatives.
There's a good chance however there will be a huge backlash against this. Which is why I propose to create ballot initiatives once we are done redrawing the lines in order to put redistricting into a non partisan panel. I propose making our districts along somewhat neutral to slightly D lines in order to still be competitive while making sure the panels don't completely ruin the maps.
I know this all sounds like a huge stretch and I might actually be wrong if there is some redistricting law I don't know about. But this plan can give us the House of Reps back and make sure Republicans don't use gerrymandering to such an effect again.
P.S. just don't vote in the poll, I know this idea might sound stupid, but I'd prefer constructive feedback and I don't think I can remove it.