{"id":9436,"date":"2012-11-11T07:31:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-11T15:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=9436"},"modified":"2012-11-11T07:31:34","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T15:31:34","slug":"how-the-minority-won-the-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/11\/how-the-minority-won-the-house\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Minority Won the House"},"content":{"rendered":"

I trust that most of you are aware that, in spite of the Republican lie that winning the House gives them a mandate from the voters, over 500,000 more Americans voted for House Democrats than they did for House Republicans.  Lets look at how Republicans Gerrymandered the districts to subvert the people\u2019s will and at who is preventing reform.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"11ohioredblue\"\u2026Although the Republicans won 55 percent of the House seats, they received less than half of the votes<\/strong> for members of the House of Representatives. Indeed, more than half-a-million more Americans voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republicans House candidates. There was no split-decision. The Democrats won both the presidential election and the House election. But the Republicans won 55 percent of the seats in the House. This seems crazy. How could this be?<\/p>\n

This answer lies in the 2010 election, in which Republicans won control of a substantial majority of state governments. They then used that power to re-draw congressional district lines in such a way as to maximize the Republican outcome in the 2012 House election<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

To give a simple example, imagine four neighboring congressional districts, two of which are 60 percent Democratic and two of which are 60 percent Republican<\/strong>. One would expect that each party would win two seats in the House. But if the Republican state legislature re-draws the district lines so as to make one district 100 percent Democratic, and the other three districts each 67 percent Republican<\/strong>, then instead of each party winning two representatives, the Republicans will win in three of the four districts. <\/p>\n

It was by engaging in such "partisan gerrymandering" that the Republican Party was able to turn a Republican defeat in terms of the national popular vote for members of the House into a significant Republican "victory" in terms of the number of Republicans elected. In Pennsylvania, for example, although citizens cast almost 100,000 more votes for Democratic than Republican candidates for the House, partisan gerrymandering enabled Republicans to 12 of the 18 seats in the House of Representatives<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Thus, that the Republicans will control the House for the next two years tells us nothing about how the American people voted on Tuesday, and a lot about how the Republican Party misused its political power in the state legislatures to manipulate the election and frustrate the will of the people<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Huffington Post<\/a>><\/p>\n

Ohio is similar, look how Republicans squeezed the Democratic majority into five districts, leaving twelve for the Republican minority.<\/font><\/p>\n

Once upon a time the courts were a backstop to prevent such extreme abuse of power, but that was before the fascist five took control of the Supreme Court and used it for extreme partisan activism, while ignoring the Constitution.  Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito have repeatedly refused to intervene in spite of protests from the three moderates and one liberal on the Court.  Republicans will continue to steal power in this manner until SCOTUS is restored to it\u2019s judicial function, masking it imperative to keep a Democrat in the White House.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I trust that most of you are aware that, in spite of the Republican lie that winning the House gives them a mandate from the voters, over 500,000 more Americans voted for House Democrats than they did for House Republicans.  Lets look at how Republicans Gerrymandered the districts to subvert the people\u2019s will and at […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}