Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William Howell (R) killed the Inauguration Day sneak attack by Senate Republicans who hoped to pass a massive mid-decade gerrymander. Howell ruled that the Senate’s amendment to a House bill making minor technical corrections to the House legislative maps were not germane, as it was a “vast rewrite” and would “stray dramatically” from the legislation’s original purpose.

When a Republican colleague requested a ruling on the amendment’s germaneness, Howell told his colleagues:

[Germaneness] prevents the presentation to the House of propositions that may not be reasonably anticipated, and for which they may not be properly prepared. A proposition of a narrow or limited scope may not be amended by a proposition of a more general nature… even though they might be related… I am going to rule that Senate amendments are not germane and out of order.

The Senate passed the controversial maps on January 21 on a party-lines vote. The measure passed 20-19 because Senator Henry Marsh (D), a legendary civil rights leader, was absent attending President Obama’s inauguration.

As ThinkProgress previously reported, Republicans so effectively gerrymandered congressional maps before the 2012 election that Democratic House candidates would need to win the national popular vote by over 7 points in order to win back the House. Last November, the American people preferred Democratic House candidates to Republican House candidates by almost 1.4 million votes, yet Republicans still hold a substantial House majority due in large part to partisan gerrymandering.

A new study by Princeton molecular biologist and neuroscientist Sam Wang digs deeper into the effect of the Republican gerrymander, and finds that the gerrymanders in seven states were so powerful that they are the equivalent of 1.7 million Democrats simply deciding not to show up at the polls:

[G]errymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted.

Such gerrymanders can exist because five conservative justices refused to block partisan redistricting in a case called Vieth v. Jubelirer.

Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) poured cold water on a Republican plan to rig the Electoral College that is being considered in a number of states to all but ensure that the next president will be a Republican.

A number of states that have voted consistently for Democrats at a national level but are currently controlled by Republicans at a state level, such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, are considering a change to the way they dole out presidential electoral votes. Currently, every state, except for Nebraska and Maine, uses a winner-take-all system. But a handful of Republican-controlled blue states are looking at a system of appropriating electoral votes by congressional district, based on maps gerrymandered to the GOP’s favor.

One possible state where this could happen is Florida, which has voted Democratic the last two presidential elections but is currently run by Republicans. However, Weatherford announced on Thursday that he opposed such a move. The Miami Herald has more:

Florida, the largest swing state, won’t go along with changing the Electoral College if Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford has any say (and he has a major say).

“To me, that’s like saying in a football game, ‘We should have only three quarters, because we were winning after three quarters and the beat us in the fourth,” Weatherford, a Republican, told the Herald/Times. “I don’t think we need to change the rules of the game, I think we need to get better.”

Fellow Republican leader, Senate President Don Gaetz, wasn’t favorable to the plan either. He said he would prefer a more progressive proposal: abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote. Said Gaetz, “The farmer standing in his field in North Dakota should be just as important as the factory worker in Ohio.”

Yesterday, when Virginia state Sen. Henry Marsh (D) was away from the state capitol to attend President Obama’s inauguration, Virginia Republicans rushed through a gerrymandering bill that that could potentially transform the evenly divided Virginia senate into a 27-13 Republican majority. The Virginia senate is currently split 20-20 between Democrats and Republicans, and Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R) indicated that he would have opposed the gerrymander if given the tiebreaking vote. Thus the bill would not have passed if Republicans had not used Sen. Marsh’s absence to push it through when a key opposing vote was absent.

This is not an isolated incident. A memo from the Republican State Leadership Committee openly bragged that U.S. House Republicans kept their majority because of gerrymandering, and, indeed, these gerrymanders were so effective that Democratic House candidates would need to win the national popular vote by more than 7 points in order to take back the chamber. Meanwhile, top Republicans are also pushing a plan to rig future presidential elections by reallocating electoral votes in blue states to the Republican candidates for president.

Nevertheless, it is not certain that the Virginia GOP’s underhanded move to gerrymander the state senate will survive contact with the courts or the Department of Justice. Although the fate of any challenge to this partisan gerrymander is uncertain, here are four ways the gerrymander could still go down:

• No Mid-Decade Gerrymanders: The Virginia Constitution provides that “[t]he General Assembly shall reapportion the Commonwealth into electoral districts in accordance with this section in the year 2011 and every ten years thereafter.” When a constitution specifically instructs a legislature to take a particular action or grants a specific power to those lawmakers, courts sometimes read it to implicitly prevent them from taking other actions. Thus, when the state constitution instructs Virginia lawmakers to redistrict every ten years, it implicitly instructs them not to engage in mid-decade gerrymanders, and the new maps are invalid. The Virginia Supreme Court has not weighed in on this question, but a Virginia trial court concluded in 2012 that one purpose of this provision in the state constitution was “to preclude ‘politically convenient redistricting whenever one political party or the other might gain the upper hand and find it attractive to redraw political boundaries to consolidate power.’”
• Voting Rights Act: The Voting Rights Act not only forbids state voting laws which have a discriminatory impact on minorities, Section Five of the Act also requires new voting laws in some parts of the county to “pre-clear” those requirements with the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, DC before they can take effect. Much of Virginia remains subject to Section Five, so the maps could be stopped if they diminish minority voting strength in the covered areas. There’s only one problem: the conservatives on the Roberts Court are widely expected to strike down Section Five before the Court adjourns this June.
• What’s Left Of The Voting Rights Act: Even if the conservative justices strike down Section Five, Section Two of the Voting Right Act still prohibits redistricting that dilutes minority voting strength. To the extent that the new GOP maps dilute the minority vote, they could be subject to a lawsuit under Section Two. Such a lawsuit, however, would ultimately appeal to the same Republican-dominated Supreme Court that is expected to strike down Section Five.
• The U.S. Supreme Court Could Actually Do It’s Job: As a final note, the entire purpose of partisan gerrymanders is to weaken the voting power of people who hold one viewpoint (in this case, Democrats) while strengthening that of people who hold an opposing view (in this case, Republicans). This is a textbook violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have refused to even consider cases challenging partisan gerrymanders, although Justice Kennedy suggested that his opposition to gerrymandering lawsuits is not entirely absolute.

Virginia Senate Republican Leader Tommy Norment defended Monday’s GOP sneaky maneuver to subvert majority rule and gerrymander the Senate maps as nothing more than politics. And, even though he voted for the current bipartisan maps, he blamed Senate Democrats for having employed an unfair process two years ago.

Norment conceded that the sneak attack “may have been annoying, painful, and even strained some friendships,” but attacked Senate Democrats for being sanctimonious:

NORMENT: I would remind those who have been so critical of what happened yesterday: redistricting is always a combination of politics and policy and that is what was dealt with yesterday. When the original redistricting plan came through, there can be cries of how collaborative it was and how inclusive. And it was so inclusive that originally it ran me almost from the North Carolina line to the outskirts of Richmond. … and [that 2011 initial bill] was voted out, strictly on a partisan line. In other words, the will of the majority was invoked against the will of the minority, and that is the process.

But Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) vetoed that initial bill. And the amended bill he signed, establishing the current maps, passed the Senate on a 32-5 bipartisan vote with Norment’s own vote in support as well as the majority of Norment’s Republican colleagues.

Seemingly forgetting his own support for the existing maps — and the Department of Justice’s pre-clearance of those maps as acceptable under the Voting Rights Act — Norment defended the GOP re-redistricting as necessary to fix an inadequate map. “It corrects the egregious and gratuitous splits of localities which existed under those boundaries,” he explained, “Deliberately, intentionally, and with calculation, they split towns, they split precincts, and they did it for one reason.” That reason, he added, was “trying to maintain a Democratic majority for years to come.”

Watch Norment’s speech:

While Norment concluded by admitting, “I understand that yesterday was not one of the finest days in the Senate,” he admonished Democrats not to attempt to block future legislation because they had their “feelings hurt on a political move.” But should this bill become law, he will have done exactly what he attempts to scold the Democrats for.

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) expressed displeasure Monday with the Republican Senate’s sneaky maneuver to subvert majority rule and gerrymander the Senate in such a way that could give themselves a super-majority — but has not yet said whether he would veto the bill. But to live up to his previous promises, he will have to do just that.

Yesterday, with civil rights legend Sen. Henry Marsh (D) attending the inauguration, Senate Republicans rammed through new maps on a party-lines 20-19 plurality. Republican Lt. Governor Bill Bolling, who can break ties in the Senate, would have voted against the plan had the vote been tied. The maps were not considered in committee nor available for public comment — rather, Sen. John Watkins (R) offered them as a surprise floor amendment to House Bill 259 — and the Republican plurality limited floor debate to just minutes before forcing a vote on final passage. As Blue Virginia notes, it is unclear whether this mid-decade redistricting is even constitutional, as the Virginia constitution calls for new maps only once every decade.

Assuming the measure passes the Republican-controlled House of Delegates, it will be up to Gov. McDonnell to decide whether to sign the bill — setting up a likely court fight — or veto. But just two years ago, he demanded a bipartisan plan and a transparent process.

In January 2011, McDonnell created an Independent Bipartisan Redistricting Committee to suggest and review new district maps, saying:

As Virginia redraws its legislative districts later this year, the process should take place in a manner that is fair and open. Legislative districts should be drawn in a way that reflects commonsense geographic boundaries and communities of interests as required by law. This Bipartisan Redistricting Commission will contribute to public involvement, openness, and fairness in the redistricting process.”

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While the eyes of the nation were turned toward President Barack Obama’s second inauguration on Monday, the Virginia State Senate managed to hurriedly pass a bill that would redistrict the state’s senate seats.

The vote, 20-19, would have been a tie had Democratic Senator Henry Marsh been present. Marsh, a civil rights leader, was in Washington, D.C., attending the inauguration.

Had Marsh been present, however, the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Bill Bolling, would likely have broken the tie. The bill was reportedly pushed through in a matter of hours.

According to Virginia politics blogger Ben Tribbett, the move could potentially eliminate at least one Democratic seat, the 25th district, which currently belongs to former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Sen. Creigh Deeds (D).

This isn’t the first time that Virginia has attempted to redraw district lines conveniently for Republicans. Just last month, the state’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli lobbied to have the state exempt from the Voting Rights Act’s redistricting requirements because the state had “outgrown” racism. Largely, redistricting has disenfranchised Democratic votes.

The gerrymandering bill now goes to the heavily Republican House of Delegates for a vote, where it will likely face little opposition.

In a classic Kinsley gaffe, the Republican State Leadership Committee 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″. It details how the group spent $30 million in the 2010 election cycle to sweep up low-cost state legislature races in blue states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Their efforts were so successful, in fact, that Republicans went from controlling both legislative chambers in 14 states before Election Day to 25 states afterward.

In 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.”

This effort paid off in spades. As the RSLC’s report concedes (and ThinkProgress has documented extensively), a majority of Americans voted for Democratic congressional candidates on Election Day, but only through the miracle of gerrymandering did Republicans wind up controlling the House. From the report:

Farther down-ballot, aggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, suggesting that 2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats.

But, as we see today, that was not the case. Instead, 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. The only analogous election in recent political history in which this aberration has taken place was immediately after reapportionment in 1972, when Democrats held a 50 seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives while losing the presidency and the popular congressional vote by 2.6 million votes.

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.”

Though party officials typically dance around the unseemly issue of gerrymandering, this report is surprisingly candid and unabashed. The RSLC, after all, is tasked with winning control of state legislatures in large part so they can redraw congressional maps to the GOP’s benefit after redistricting. Because most states allow partisan redistricting, its understandable that the RSLC would release a report boasting of its gerrymandering success that “paved the way to Republicans retaining a U.S. House majority in 2012.”

A little over a year ago, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) proposed rigging the presidential election for Mitt Romney by allocating electoral votes based upon which candidate carried each individual congressional district, rather than upon who wins the state as a whole. Thanks in large part to Republican gerrymandering, if Corbett’s election-rigging plan had been in effect last November in the Republican-controlled states of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, Romney would have won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus did not simply endorse this election-rigging scheme, he indicated that it should be targeted towards consistently Democratic states where it is most likely to skew the presidential election to the GOP’s benefit:

Republicans are in a unique position to make headway with such a plan nationally because Wisconsin and other key states that have gone to the Democratic presidential candidate in recent elections are currently controlled by Republicans at the state level. The change would give Republicans a chance to claim some of those states’ electoral votes.

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at,” Priebus said of the plan to change how electoral votes are granted.

Such a system “gives more local control” to the states, he argued.

This would not be the GOP’s only effort to rig elections so that they win no matter what the will of the American people may be. Last November, Democratic House candidates won the national popular vote by nearly 1.4 million votes. Yet, thanks to Republican gerrymandering, they would need to win the popular vote by over seven points in order to take back the House.

[HT: Dave Weigel]

As of this writing, every single state except Hawai’i has finalized its vote totals for the 2012 House elections, and Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1,362,351 votes in the overall popular vote total. Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only 48.03 percent — meaning that the American people preferred a unified Democratic Congress over the divided Congress it actually got by more than a full percentage point. Nevertheless, thanks largely to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have a solid House majority in the incoming 113th Congress.

A deeper dive into the vote totals reveals just how firmly gerrymandering entrenched Republican control of the House. If all House members are ranked in order from the Republican members who won by the widest margin down to the Democratic members who won by the widest margins, the 218th member on this list is Congressman-elect Robert Pittenger (R-NC). Thus, Pittenger was the “turning point” member of the incoming House. If every Republican who performed as well or worse than Pittenger had lost their race, Democrats would hold a one vote majority in the incoming House.

Pittenger won his race by more than six percentage points — 51.78 percent to 45.65 percent.

The upshot of this is that if Democrats across the country had performed six percentage points better than they actually did last November, they still would have barely missed capturing a majority in the House of Representatives. In order to take control of the House, Democrats would have needed to win the 2012 election by 7.25 percentage points. That’s significantly more than the Republican margin of victory in the 2010 GOP wave election (6.6 percent), and only slightly less than the margin of victory in the 2006 Democratic wave election (7.9 percent). If Democrats had won in 2012 by the same commanding 7.9 percent margin they achieved in 2006, they would still only have a bare 220-215 seat majority in the incoming House, assuming that these additional votes were distributed evenly throughout the country. That’s how powerful the GOP’s gerrymandered maps are; Democrats can win a Congressional election by nearly 8 points and still barely capture the House.

For two months, the nation has suffered through a “fiscal cliff” argument that threatened to plunge the nation into another recession. If the incoming Congress bore any resemblance to the one the American people voted for, however, this threat would have disappeared on Election Day because Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi would have no problem rounding up the votes to eliminate this so-called cliff and set America back on the path to economic growth.

Worse, top Republicans are already threatening to use the looming debt ceiling fight to torpedo the entire U.S. economy unless Congress agrees to slash Social Security or Medicare benefits for seniors. They will have the leverage to attempt this because the incoming House bears no resemblance to the one America actually voted for. And individual Republican House members will be able to engage in this political dangerous game of chicken comfortable in the knowledge that partisan gerrymandering makes many of them untouchable in a general election.

Partisan gerrymanders, like the one that now all but locks the GOP majority in place, have been the subject of repeated court challenges. America can thank the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court for allowing these gerrymanders to continue.