In a massive "redistricting" of the country, the Republican-controlled Congress has redrawn the boundaries of the states to favor Republicans.

"There's nothing wrong with it," said Rep. Tom Delay, mastermind of the scheme. "If Democrats were in power, this is what they'd be doing."

The boundaries of New York State now include only the relatively conservative upstate area and Staten Island, which is solidly Republican. Democratic New York City is now part of Rhode Island, which will have four electoral votes in November.

Florida now constitutes only those counties that solidly voted for Bush in 2000 and most of Louisiana, to form "Louisiorida," a "Super State" with, according to Delay, "a zillion" electoral votes.

It occurs to me, though, that while shifting NYC to Rhode Island and giving conservative upstate NY control of that state's electoral votes would be a good move for the Republicans, combining Bush-solid counties of Florida with Louisiana would not be.

The gimmick underlying the Electoral College is that because the number of electoral votes each state gets is determined by the number of representatives it has in the House (which number depends on population) plus the number of Senators it has (2), small states are over-represented in the College in relation to their population. What this means is that the GOP shouldn't try redistricting by consolidating states, or parts of states, it should be creating new states and enjoying the additional 2 Senators and 2 electoral votes they represent.

So, instead of carving out the Bush counties of Florida and combining them with Louisiana, it should make those counties into a brand new state, perhaps to be called Jebida. But the best thing they could do would be to break Texas up into two states (presumably East Texas and West Texas, but I'm not familiar enough with Texas politics and culture to know where the dividing line should be or what criteria would be the basis for the split). By doing so, they would retain the same number of Representatives, more or less 1 or 2 (since they are determined by population, and the population of the two states combined would be the same as the old state, give or take some rounding error), but gain two Senators and two Electoral Votes.

With that kind of edge, their hold on the Senate would be assured for years.

Now, the Democrats could try the same thing, splitting California up into two states, North and South, but, even given the recent demographic changes there, they probably wouldn't control South California the way they control the combined state now. Besides, I believe it takes an Act of Congress to add a new state to the Union, and the current Congress isn't likely to approve of anything the Democrats come up with along those lines.

So, in the future, if you hear any talk about dividing up Texas or Florida, you'll know the context behind it -- get another Republican power grab. (The Republican Party -- slogan: "Allergic to democracy, and proud of it.")

P.S. If the GOP combined NYC with Rhode Island, I believe the combined entity would have a lot more than 4 Electoral votes, since NYC has about half of NY State's population.

Who thought this Electoral College thing was a good idea anyway? Apparently, like many ass-backwards institutions, it was part of a compromise necessary to get enough states to approve the Constitution:

One common misconception about the Electoral College is that it was a clever scheme that the Framers' considered at length and that they unanimously agreed upon. In fact, the Electoral College was part of a last-minute compromise (the Connecticut Compromise) that many Framers opposed.