This report released by the Republican State Leadership Committee is a gaffe in its truest form - accidentally revealing a truth.
The RSLC's report is entitled "How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013":
[The RSLC] released a report boasting that the only reason the GOP controls the House of Representatives is because they gerrymandered congressional districts in blue states.
The RSLC’s admission came in a shockingly candid report entitled, “How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013″.
Their report details how they spent $30 million, a tiny amount in today's post Citizens United election climate, to sweep up state legislatures, which then led to redrawing Congressional districts to favor Republicans.
As the report states:
n turn, the new Republican majorities would be tasked with redrawing congressional districts for the 2012 election. “The rationale was straightforward,” the report reads. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn.”
and
The report credits gerrymandered maps in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with allowing Republicans to overcome a 1.1 million popular-vote deficit. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 12 out of 16 House races “despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” The situation was even more egregious to the north. “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”
It has been
well documented that today's House GOP "majority" was engineered by this redistricting, and in reality Democrats in the House received millions more votes than Republicans, belying John Boehner's and the rest of the House GOP's constant claims to their GOP majority and Americans' preference for a divided government.
Republicans can't win on the issues, so they change the rules. Their latest proposal has electoral votes being awarded according to Congressional district - which would have handed Mitt Romney the win in 2012 while losing the popular vote. Now Pennsylvania legislators are trying to implement this strategy to rig the 2016 election for themselves. The answer is to fight back on the local level, as they have found is a worthwhile strategy. Another tactic is to take redistricting out of the hands of legislators as Howard Dean has suggested and as currently done in CA and FL.
Republicans cheat and fight with dirty tactics and the only solution is to fight fire with fire.
4:52 PM PT: ACTION UPDATE: h/t to Jacoby Jonze for this article describing HR 278 designed to counteract the negative effects of partisan redistricting.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) and six other House Democrats have put forward legislation that would prevent state-level politicians from redrawing congressional districts. Instead, they would have be redrawn after each nationwide Census by an independent commission.
Cohen said his bill would help prevent the partisan redistricting of states, which many Democrats and Republicans have said creates districts that favor one party or another and allows hyper-partisan candidates to get elected.
"It's time to take politics out of the redistricting process," Cohen said. "Congress is so polarized today that we're unable to find common ground on the major issues facing our country.
Call you Representative and tell them to co-sponsor this bill.