Once upon a time, the US House of Representatives was steeped in tradition: Its speaker was all powerful, and congressional leaders used seniority and political favors to get to the top. So how did a few dozen rookie lawmakers from the South and Midwest manage to topple Speaker John Boehner?

For starters, the so-called Freedom Caucus decided to challenge everything traditional about the House. Lawmakers like GOP Rep. John Fleming have acknowledged that the caucus is trying to steer the Republican Party, and the speakership.

“We want to hear what they want to do creatively and innovatively to begin taking back the powers that are guaranteed to the US Congress through the Constitution,” Fleming told C-SPAN.

Fleming is unafraid of confronting the speaker — or anyone else — because he comes from a "safe" district — almost all of the Republicans in the Freedom Caucus do.

Back in 2008, Fleming narrowly won his district, but by 2010, the district was re-engineered with a solid Republican majority, thanks in part to some gerrymandering by Republicans in the Louisiana legislature. In the 2010 election, Fleming won by a landslide, and by 2012, he ran unopposed on the Republican ticket and took in 75 percent of the vote over an Independent Libertarian candidate.

All 36 members of the Freedom Caucus started out as ideological soul mates, and many of them rode to Congress with the support of the Tea Party movement in 2010 and 2012. Now, because of nationwide gerrymandering, many command massive majorities in their own districts.

Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the executive editor of ReclaimTheAmericanDream.org, says winning national offices like the White House may be difficult for the GOP, but for a relatively small amount of money, the Republican Party has been able to buy a valuable insurance policy: Total control of the House of Representatives through strategic redistricting.

“After losing the presidency to Barack Obama in 2009, Karl Rove, the Republican campaign guru, said ‘He who controls redistricting can control Congress,’” says Smith, citing a Wall Street Journal editorial written by Rove in March 2010. “He was smart. They invested $30 million in state legislative campaigns — things way down the ballot that most of the media doesn’t even pay any attention to. They went after control of as many state legislatures as they could.”

Rove and the Republican Party were successful. In the last few years, the GOP has added 675 elected officials to its rolls. About 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state are currently in Republicans hands.

“In 2011, they proceeded to do a massive job of redistricting on a partisan basis — what we call gerrymandering — using very sophisticated and modern computer software,” says Smith. “They carved up the nation, and in seven really critical states, they tilted the results. They had a popular vote in seven key states, and [the outcome] was almost the same as Democrats, but slightly more. That should’ve given them one or two more seats. They came out with 19 seats. If you change those 19 seats, the Republicans would not have had a majority of the House in 2012.”

Now, Smith concedes there’s no way to officially tell whether a different outcome would have been possible had extreme redistricting not been introduced. But he says it is likely, considering that Democrats won the popular vote nationwide. One example he points to is the state of North Carolina.

“It’s historically been a state dominated by — at the state level, with the governor and the state legislature — by the Democrats, even though they’ve had Republican senators like Jesse Helms and others” he says. “After the 2010 election, the Republicans took control of both the governorship and the state legislature. They did a redistricting, and the Democrats, once again in the 2012 election, won a majority of the popular vote, but the Republicans came out with nine seats and the Democrats with four. That’s a shift of three seats, but nobody moved around.”

Some states are challenging the modern redistricting plan designed by Karl Rove. In 2010, Florida voters supported a constitutional referendum that banned lawmakers from drawing districts that favor one political party over another.

But during redistricting efforts in 2011, Smith says the Florida legislature ignored the results of the referendum, something that prompted a lawsuit from groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters. The Florida Supreme Court has since ruled that the state’s gerrymandering was unconstitutional, and has ordered that district lines be redrawn.

“It looks as though that, in at least three seats [in Florida], the incumbent is going to be vulnerable if not thrown out,” Smith says. “One of them, interestingly enough, is this guy Daniel Webster who is one of the leaders of the rebellion in the House among the Freedom Caucus. He’s the guy they’ve put forward as a candidate for speaker. His district has been totally dismantled, and Webster says he can’t win in the new district. The point here is that gerrymandering reform could actually fix this problem.”

Smith says that at least 20 states need some kind of gerrymandering and redistricting reform, but he doesn’t expect state legislatures to step up to level the playing field.

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.