https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-gops-bid-to-claim-a-rigged-house-majority/
The GOP’s Bid to Claim a Rigged House Majority
Voters repudiated the GOP congressional agenda. Court-sanctioned gerrymanders made sure it didn’t matter.
By David Daley NOVEMBER 10, 2022
An aggressive—and likely unconstitutional—partisan and racial gerrymander demanded by Governor Ron DeSantis helped provide Republicans with four of those seats from Florida alone. Maps that likely violated Voting Rights Act (VRA) protections against racial gerrymanders were allowed to proceed in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. A conservative district court in Texas endorsed a blatantly discriminatory congressional there that reduced the political power of Latinos even as they drove 95 percent of the state’s population growth over the last decade.
Wisconsin’s conservative court mediated a redistricting deadlock between the Republican-controlled legislature and Democratic governor by mandating a new map that made the fewest possible changes to the current one—meaning that the previous decade’s toxic GOP gerrymander was locked in place for another 10 years. In Ohio, meanwhile, the state supreme court twice rejected congressional maps drawn by GOP lawmakers as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. A bipartisan majority of justices declared these maps wildly out of line with a 2018 statewide initiative backed by more than 70 percent of voters mandating that districts be drawn up with lines that did not favor or disfavor any political party, to better bring them into alignment with the state’s partisan balance. Lawless GOP officials used the maps anyway. They ignored the courts, ran out the clock, and—won 10 out of 15 House seats—two-thirds of the delegation—in a state where J.D. Vance defeated Tim Ryan by only 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent for the US Senate.
Pretty soon, these gift-wrapped seats begin to add up, especially when the national voting margins seem to be tight. Four seats in Florida, three across the Deep South, another handful from Texas and Ohio, one in Wisconsin, a pickup in Iowa won from playing hardball with the state’s independent commission, one in Arizona from hijacking that state’s “independent” in name only commission, another gain in Tennessee by cracking Nashville in half: More than a dozen newly Republican seats came not from ousting Democratic incumbents but by redrawing districts to their advantage.