Why or how could the House Republicans scuttle the deal and get away with it?

Locked in seats, that’s the biggest problem with the current system. With the Republicans controlling the majority of the state legislatures, they have constructed a systemic advantage that will stick around unless and until the Democrats win the legislature of the state during a redistricting year. The other option is finding a way to create an independent redistricting process. But you have to get a way to convince the legislature to give up their power, which is … difficult.

So the seats are going to be safe, along with the Republican majority in the house, until 2020 at the earliest. Even if there are wholesale defections among the voters, I can’t see many seats flipping. For example, in Pennsylvania, Obama won the state, but the Democrats won only 5 of the 18 house seats. And of those seats won by the Republicans, only one had a margin of victory under 13 points. In Georgia, the Republicans won their 9 seats (out of 14) by at least 25 points. Michigan, another state won by Obama, the Republicans won 9 out of 14 seats, with only one nail biter, (there were two more won by margins of 6 to 10 points).

You can go on and on and on to different states and the story is the same. Seats have been drawn to be incredibly safe for a single party. And those seats are typically held by people with no incentive to compromise. In fact they have a disincentive to compromise, lest they be attacked by someone who is ‘purer’.

The loss of the Blue Dog Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans have stifled any effort to compromise in the US House. And that’s to the detriment of the country as a whole.