Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.
1. Win under-the-radar local elections:
2. Use new majorities to gerrymander state legislature and congressional districts in their favor:
3. Use redistricting to ‘win’ seats in the US House of Representatives in 2010 and 2012:
4. Change state-level electoral college rules so Democratic candidates can’t win the presidency:
And just to ratchet up the slime factor, the Virginia Senate waited until Democratic Senator Henry Marsh left to attend the president’s inauguration before voting on the bill. “Virginia senators had to wait until he was gone because the Senate is equally divided in Virginia, with 20 Republicans and 20 Democrats,” exclaimed an appalled Maddow. Because of the even split, Virginia’s Lt. Governor, Bill Bolling typically casts the tie-breaking vote in situations like this. But even the state’s number two Republican thought this was a dirty trick and refused to support it. That left the GOP lawmakers with no option but to wait until a Democrat left town and they could skew the numbers in their favor without having to rely on Bolling. As it so happened, they waited until one of Virginia’s most preeminent civil rights icons (and the first black mayor of Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy) was at the second inauguration of the nation’s first black president to launch their attack. Throwing up yet?
Yet Virginia’s law — the first of its kind — still stands, and other states are poised to follow suit. Already, Pennsylvanian Republicans have a similar bill in committee.
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