Resize shapefile

I have a shapefile for each US state and I would like to add all shapefiles together which I do using Basemap and readshapefile and so on. Now my problem is that Alaska is huge and doesn't fit into the map. I would like to add Alaska extra in the west of Texas (left bottom corner) which is the normal approach to solve this problem. Therefore I manipulated the shapefile of Alaska to move the shape using this code:

for t in range(len(shape)):
            l = list(shape[t])
            l[1] -= 4000000
            l[0] += 1000000
            tup = tuple(l)
            shape[t] = tup

Well as I mentioned Alaska is huge so is there any easy way to resize the shapefile?

Thanks for your ideas!

Edit:

Some additional information: I am using the whole thing to visualize the Census 2013 data. My current output looks like this:

Projection: Albers Equal Areas

Whoa, wait a second.

There is no "resizing" in GIS. Not without losing important geospatial properties of your geometries. You should not do that.

First of all, what is the purpose of this map? What tools are you using to render it? In what geospatial projection (different projections have different properties, making maps look very different when rendered)?

The traditional approach around this is to render two maps and compose them, as images. If you move the shapefiles, you WILL lose the coordinates and you won't be able to generate, let's say, correct graticule lines for Alaska.

If this is just one time thing, you can perhaps move it or resize, but I strongly advise against that.