Republican presidential candidate John Kasich is calling for an end to gerrymandering in Ohio, where he is governor. I was really surprised when I read this, but he's got a really good point, that gerrymandering is hurting the Republican Party as much as it is hurting the Democratic Party, if not more.

In Ohio they set things up so that the Republicans have a 12-4 majority of House seats, even though they're just half the population. The same thing has happened in states that were controlled by Republican legislatures after the last census, in 2010. This has meant that the Republican Party, even though it's not the majority party in the US, has a lock on control of one of the houses of Congress. 

Now the problem is that the way things are set up, all of the Republican seats are still vulnerable to challenges from more and more extreme candidates. That's where the lunacy in the Republican Party is coming from. It's why a small minority of the population has extraordinary power in Washington.

The Senate was already tilted to the Republicans because they tend to control less populous states that each have the same representation in the Senate as the most populous ones. So a state like Wyoming, that has a population of a small county in New York State has just as much voice in the Senate as the whole of New York.

I'm sure this isn't making Kasich a lot of friends among incumbents in Ohio House seats, because they have to look even more extreme than they already are, which is saying a lot, to head off the challenges that are coming in 2016. 

But until we bite this bullet, government in the US is going to be lunatic.

No matter what, it's a brilliant tactic, at least, by Kasich to throw out a lifeline to more sanity-oriented Republicans, saying "I'm not crazy" like Trump nor crazy like Christie or Cruz, or just a nasty fuck like Rubio or a spineless oligarch like Jeb Bush.