The real dangers ahead

In the past few months I have been following the Republican strategy for getting back into power and it is one of the most cynical and despicable strategy indeed that I have seen any political party employ. *

It rests on five pillars:

a. An attack on civil liberties seeking to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1965 thus disenfranchising the minorities. This path lies through the Supreme Court and a look at their docket shows the gains that have been made. Witness the Blum story in Washington Post today which lays out one of the many strands at play. According to liberals he is leading a charge which could gut affirmative action and key voting rights protections for minorities and could upend decades of civil rights law. 

Derfner, who helped shape the Voting Rights Act through Supreme Court arguments in the late 1960s, exchanged polite conversation with Blum during the flight. But he left wondering: “How can a nice person be doing such awful things? The notion that the tiny infinitesimal group of circumstances in which a black person may get some favoritism . . . is the nation’s issue when blacks are on the bottom every single day, in every single way is just insane...What people like Edward Blum are doing is ignoring reality.”

The Voting Rights Act is the Republican Party’s worst enemy because it contains mechanisms to prevent policies that will disenfranchise voters based on race.  Under Article 5 of the VRA, the worst offenders of racist voting policies must seek preclearance of proposed voting policies changes with the Department of Justice. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will listen to arguments in Shelby County Alabama vs. Holder.  In its brief,  Shelby County claims that racial segregation and discrimination no longer exist so we really don’t need Article 5. 

b. Redestricting. This has been going on in the Republican states ever since Abrahamoff started the move some ten years ago. By deliberately cordoning off areas favorable to the Republicans, the attempt is to create rock solid red districts for a long time to come.

Republicans know that most of America rejects their increasingly extreme ideology and they can’t win a fair election.  That is at the core of their war on the voting rights in the form of gerrymandering, voter ID laws, restricting voting days and hours. The available data shows that these methods not only establish a system in which some votes carry more weight than others establish, but also seeks to disenfranchise particular groups of people: minorities, women and the working poor. 

According to Republican strategist Karl Rove "He who controls redistricting can control Congress." In 2010 state races, Republicans picked up 675 legislative seats, gaining complete control of 12 state legislatures. As a result, the GOP oversaw redrawing of lines for four times as many congressional districts as Democrats. How did they dominate redistricting? A ProPublica investigation has found that the GOP relied on opaque nonprofits funded by dark money, supposedly nonpartisan campaign outfits, and millions in corporate donations to achieve Republican-friendly maps throughout the country. Two tobacco giants, Altria and Reynolds, each pitched inmore than $1 million to the main Republican redistricting group, as did Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads; Walmart and the pharmaceutical industry also contributed. Other donors, who gave to the nonprofits Republicans created, may never have to be disclosed.

c. Restricting voting by the minorities. The most blatant example of this was in Pennsylvania and Florida where the republican leadership openly campaigned for Romney by restricting efforts of minorities to vote. Thus voting on Sundays before the elections was cancelled, duration of voting cut down and new obstacles placed through voter ID laws.

Jim Greer, the former head of the Florida Republican Party, recently claimed that a law shortening the early voting period in the state was deliberately designed to suppress voting among groups that tend to support Democratic candidates. “The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,...It’s done for one reason and one reason only...‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.’"

Pennsylvania Republican House Leader Mike Turzai (R-PA) finally admitted what so many have speculated: Voter identification efforts are meant to suppress Democratic votes in this year’s election.

d. Undisclosed Money. The Citizens United case was the first shot in controlling the flow of funds to the parties. By getting all restrictions removed through the Supreme Court, the republicans in effect hoped to outspend the democrats through their deep pocketed sponsors.

The Citizens United ruling, released in January 2010, tossed out the corporate and union ban on making independent expenditures and financing electioneering communications. It gave corporations and unions the green light to spend unlimited sums on ads and other political tools, calling for the election or defeat of individual candidates. In a nutshell, the high court’s 5-4 decision said that it is OK for corporations and labor unions to spend as much as they want to convince people to vote for or against a candidate. The decision did not affect contributions. It is still illegal for companies and labor unions to give money directly to candidates for federal office. The court said that because these funds were not being spent in coordination with a campaign, they “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” But what was the real life effect of this ruling?

It has led to led to the creation of the super PACs, which act as shadow political parties. They accept unlimited donations from billionaires, corporations and unions and use it to buy advertising, most of it negative. So far in the 2011-2012 election cycle, super PACs have spent $378 million, while non-disclosing nonprofits have spent $171 million, at times praising, but mostly badmouthing candidates, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Worse the totals now spent on presidential election are topping $ 2 billion.

e. Right wing Media. Here the work of Fox news should not be underestimated. By having a 24x7 network continuously pumping out their propaganda the republicans gain a significant advantage in shaping the public dialouge. This dialouge is further corrupted by the radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and others like him.

I realize some of the above is just the rough and tumble of politics but the sinister way that the Republicans are plotting their return to power does need to be exposed and countered. At the base the  Republicans continue to believe that they can reclaim the lucrative levers of national authority by making the country as ungovernable as possible while a Democrat is in the White House, essentially holding governance hostage until they are restored to power. Then, the Democrats are expected to behave as a docile opposition “for the good of the country” (and usually do). The “destroy Obama” game plan tracks most closely with Newt Gingrich’s strategy for undermining Bill Clinton 16 years ago. But today’s strategy also traces back to Richard Nixon’s sabotage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s October Surprise gambit against President Jimmy Carter’s Iran hostage negotiations in 1980. In all four cases – covering the last four Democratic presidencies – the Republicans did not behave as a loyal opposition but rather as a single-minded political enemy that viewed the White House as its birthright and Democratic control of the Executive Branch as illegitimate.

In each of the areas marked above, the average citizen and particularly the democrats need to be alive to the dangers ahead and remain active that these efforts do not undermine democracy in the country. The real danger lies in the fact that the democrats may underestimate the desperation of the republicans to gain power and treat these as isolated attempts to change the scales. The fact is that the republicans have seen the future through the looming demographics and come to the conclusion that the only way to power in the future will be through cheating and fixing the scales. Heaven hath no fury than a man denied what he thinks he is entitled to.

Thankfully Frank Rich has a better perspective:

" It’s gotten so gloomy that at the annual House Republican retreat just before Inauguration Day in January, the motivational speakers included the executive who turned around Domino’s Pizza and the first blind man to reach the top of Mount Everest. Were the GOP a television network, it would be fifth-place NBC, falling not only behind its traditional competitors but Univision. Every postelection poll, with the possible exception of any conducted in Dick Morris’s bunker, finds that voters favor the Democrats’ positions on virtually every major issue, usually by large margins: immigration reform, gun restrictions, abortion rights, gay marriage, climate change, raising the minimum wage, and the need for higher tax revenue to accompany spending cuts in any deficit-reduction plan. Given that losing hand, what’s a party to do? It’s far easier for NBC to cancel Smashthan for the GOP to give the hook to an elected official like Steve Stockman, the Texas congressman whose guest at the State of the Union was the rocker turned NRA spokesman Ted Nugent, best known for telling the president to “suck on my machine gun.” For every Todd Akin who fades, another crazy Stockman (or two) springs up. Strategies to work around the party’s entrenched liabilities have been proliferating since November 6, as Republicans desperately try to stave off the terminal Kübler-Ross stage of Acceptance.

The Republican Plan is simplicity itself: steal future elections by disenfranchising those Americans who keep rejecting the party at the polls (blacks, young people, Latinos). This strategy was hatched even before Election Day, with widespread local efforts to reinstate Jim Crow obstacles at the ballot box, from reduced voting hours to new identification requirements. After the election, a parallel scheme was revived: state laws that propose slicing and dicing the Electoral College to increase the odds that a Republican presidential candidate could win an election while losing the popular vote. Next up is the Supreme Court, ruling this term on a new challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That signature civil-rights law, born in the crucible of Martin Luther King Jr.’s incarceration in Selma, was reenacted with bipartisan unanimity in 2006 (the vote was 98-0 in the Senate, 390-33 in the House). But now that the GOP is under existential threat, the highly political chief justice, John Roberts, seems poised to do what he has to do. He’s already on record saying that “things have changed in the South”—which may come as news to the African-Americans forced to wait for hours in Florida (and elsewhere) to vote last November."