The G(OP)rinch that Stole Democracy

      This morning, in front of my foggy bathroom mirror, I try once again to enunciate the phrase I've had trouble saying without a shudder now for more than a month, “President-elect T-tr-tr-um . . .”

      Don't worry. I'll get it right some day. But, I still wonder, why did just enough Americans in the right states pick a former-reality TV star with no experience in government to be the 45^th President of the United States?

      Is it FBI Director Comey's fault? Or, perhaps, the blame lies with Russian hackers? Or fake news? Or uneducated whites? Or, maybe, it's the fault of our anachronistic and undemocratic Electoral College?

      Take your pick. They've all been written about extensively, but one reason hasn't received nearly enough attention. That the winning party, the Republicans, has been involved in a long-term, well-funded project, not to steal Christmas like the Grinch – that would be small potatoes – but American democracy, itself.

      This project can be traced back to corporate lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's infamous 1971 memo, a reveille, not for radicals, but for big business to organize against – well, us, the people. Powell laid it all out, calling for “careful long-range planning and implementation,” backed by a “scale of financing available only through joint effort.”

      As chronicled in Jane Mayer's essential Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, a handful of right-wing billionaires, the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, the DeVoses, and a few others took up Lewis Powell's clarion call and have worked tirelessly over many years to turn our country rightward. To install a government to do their biding, to allow their companies the liberty to rook the suckers with impunity and pollute our air and water without the interference of pointy-headed bureaucrats.

      They have poured billions of dollars into a dizzying array of think tanks, foundations, and action committees. They've bought off media and universities. In fact, they've even founded their own media, with their own set of “facts.”

      Meanwhile, with gobs of ready cash, the right-wing funded the Federalist Society and bought their way into America's law schools to turn the courts and the country rightward. And their hard work has paid off handsomely.

      In 2010, the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling made our politicians even more reliant on the top 1%, whose interests are diametrically opposed to most Americans. But not stopping there, in 2013, Republican-appointed judges on the Supreme Court defanged the Voting Rights Act.

      Since then, Republican state legislatures have passed voter ID laws and purged voter rolls in order to deny their fellow citizens, mostly Democrats, their precious right to vote.

      As Mehdi Hasan explained inThe Washington Post, in North Carolina, “[on] the eve of the election, a federal judge said she was 'horrified' by the 'insane' process by which people were 'being purged' from the voter rolls. In July, a three-judge panel ruled that the state’s 2013 voting law could only be explained by 'discriminatory intent'” because it was obviously aimed at keeping African Americans from voting.

      This “systematic disenfranchisement,” according to political reporters Alice Ollstein and Kira Lerner, “was intentional and politically motivated. In the years leading up to 2016, Republican governors and state legislatures implemented new laws restricting when, where, and how people could vote — laws that disproportionately harmed students, the poor, and people of color. In several instances, lawmakers pushing such policies said explicitly that their goal was suppression of voters who favor the Democratic Party.”

      As Zachary Roth succinctly put it inThe Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy, “At its core, this bold campaign has amounted to nothing less than an effort to undermine democracy.”

      It's worth noting that Republicans originally got into the driver's seat in battleground states because in 2010 they used every trick in the book and then some to win majorities in order to gerrymander their way to more and more power during the decennial redistricting, regardless of their minority status.

      In 2010, they blanketed districts with libelous mailers, shamelessly sliming their Democratic opponents. Then having won, they redrew districts with laser-like precision by using a computer program called Maptitude. In Ohio, Republicans were able to win 75% of U.S. House seats with just 51% of the vote. In Pennsylvania, according to Dave Daley's accurately-named Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, Pennsylvania Republicans won 72% of the House seats with only 49% of the vote.

      So by hijacking the courts; using computer programs to ruthlessly redistrict and thus, to effectively disenfranchise so many voters; and by then passing voter ID laws while purging voter rolls, all to keep Democratic constituencies from exercising their right to vote, the Republicans have blatantly stolen American democracy in order to seize power.

      Republicans now control both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. And very soon, after a new right-wing justice is appointed, they will control all 3 branches of the federal government.

      This naked thievery of our democracy has been in reality a slow-motion coup that has led directly to the election of a rich vulgarian unfit by both temperament and experience to be the 45^th President of the United States and, also, to me, still sadly standing in front of my foggy bathroom mirror, trying not to choke on my own words.

2020: Welcome to Dystopian America: Like Us, But Only Worse

      It's 2020, and even the most jejune commentators are bored to death of the constant belaboring of the utter irony of 20/20 vision in the American dystopia of 2020. The very idea that anybody in the government, ensnared as it is in a gridlock so crippling that it can best be described as more akin to rigor mortis, has vision is ludicrous on the face of it. Polls show that amazingly Congress is even more unpopular than ever, scoring far below tech help, used car and insurance salesmen, and even below vegans.

      A small but dedicated cadre of the most-conservative of Republican House members, who because of gerrymandering have safe districts as long as they act like bombthrowers instead of reasonable legislators, have managed to stall almost every bill since January of 2019, even shutting down the federal government multiple times, using the always reliable debt ceiling as a cudgel.

      Adding to the general chaos has been Democratic representatives staging sit-ins whenever there is a mass shooting, which has averaged about once a month of late. And, if that's not enough, Black Lives Matter demonstrators have staged raucous protests and shut down major thoroughfares in Washington, D.C. out of frustration with the continuing inaction of the federal government. Throw the Democratic governors of California, New York, and a handful of other states threatening to declare their entire states Sanctuary States unless comprehensive immigration reform is immediately implemented into the mix, and you get the general idea that the Obama-era dysfunction is now on steroids.

      And all because of a computer program called Maptitude. After the 2010 elections, Republican operatives were able to use it to draw districts that resembled Rorschach blots that with computerized precision were able to combine different African-American  communities for a Democratic district, and then with the African-Americans safely ensconced in one Democratic-safe district draw several districts that would be Republicans-insured districts for years to come, regardless of the outcome of presidential elections.

      Before the midterms, Democrats were able to work with a handful of Republicans in order to pass a modest raise in the federal minimum wage, a substantial but inadequate infrastructure bill, and some tinkering at the edges of what was once called Obamacare. In 2018, almost all those Republicans who committed the deadly sin of cooperating with Democrats were soundly defeated by opponents so conservative they'd make Ronald Reagan look like the head of Politburo.

      In 2020, President Hillary Clinton has her hands full. Like her husband, she has been impeached by the House, and now, faces trial in the Senate. After her electoral college landslide victory in 2016, Republicans knew not to despair. They bided their time, until the midterm elections, when the electorate favors them by being whiter and older than the general population. And it paid off because of America's unique mid-term elections when a small percentage of voters can essentially overturn what the larger, more representative electorate in a presidential election year voted for.

      So the umpteenth rumor of the death of the Republican Party proved to be wrong yet again. In 2018, the House increased its Republican majority, while the Senate reverted back to Republican control. Facing a do-nothing Congress in the midst of out-right revolt, President Clinton decided to do the only thing she could – issue executive orders on a variety of issues, including immigration and the environment. Taking none of that lying down, Republicans played their trump card, so to speak, and got a special prosecutor with an open-ended mandate. After months of testimony, Republican researchers announced they found the smoking gun, what they believed to be perjured testimony given by the President, ironically not on Benghazi or emails, but on some inconsequential documents that one of the many congressional committees investigating her had subpoenaed.

      Besides impeachment, the Republican-led House hasn't done much, except busy itself with largely symbolic votes to overturn completely or partially what was once called Obamacare, but is now derisively labeled Hillarycare. The running tally now is 75 votes against and counting.

      Of course, 2020 is also an election year, and what a race it's been. Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, former TV-star Scott Baio, and Willie Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame lead another “yuge” pack of Republican presidential (and Fox News) hopefuls.

      Amazingly after their last electoral drubbing, the Republican field has even outdone the Trump of 2016 in their xenophobic, anti-immigrant rants. They promise not only to build a wall but to send troops to the border to stop disease-infested, gang-banging, criminal Mexican and Central American immigrants or, depending on the day or audience, to stop ISIS-inspired terrorists who are, they claim, sneaking in the US by the truckload.

      And yet, multiple polls have shown that the American electorate has moved even further to the left, fewer and fewer identifying as conservative or Republican. Hefty majorities now favor a single-payer system of national health insurance and giving the undocumented a path to citizenship. And, it's widely agreed that President Clinton, if she survives her impeachment trial, will be reelected easily.

      If she does, the Republican drought in winning the popular vote for the presidency will then stretch to twice in 32 years, a truly horrendous record, almost unparalleled in American history. But with the inspired scheming of the Republicans, each Democratic victory has proven diaphanous, almost-Pyrrhic-like. They can win the presidency, but can't do anything once they're elected.

      The net effect is that we have a center-right government of a center-left country with your average citizen left with no way to effectively change government policies – all because of a well-financed and well-organized political minority interested more in fundraising and doing the bidding of the billionaire class than in governance. In 2020, I promise you, you won't need 20/20 vision to see the system is utterly broken.

True Confessions: My Boring, Boring, Boring Life Exposed!

You know your life might be getting just a little too boring when . . .

• You look forward to the automated calls from your library telling you that the item you ordered has just come in, and you even engage in conversation with the computer-generated voice. What's really weird is when it turns out to be one of best conversations you've had lately.
• One day you suddenly realize you haven't spoken face-to-face with a real human being, except for your daughter and sales clerks, for weeks.
• The highlight of your social life is going to the downtown library every other week, especially if you get the good circulation clerk, not the frowny, unfriendly one.
• You actually look forward with eager anticipation walking around downtown, while alternatively dodging and getting tangled up with the annoyingly clueless throng of Pokemon Go! players.
• You know the schedule of your local NPR affiliate so well that you can tell what time of day it is by what's playing on your radio, and sometimes you even know what day of the week it is by what program is on.
• You are so bored you waste hours engaging in what passes for political “debate” these days with a couple of knuckle-dragging, Trump-loving, crude-to-the-max, name-calling conservatives on an on-line comment section, even though you know from the beginning that it will change nobody's mind.
• You get excited making the grocery list for your weekly trip to Target, a store you've been to literally hundreds of times before. And for added excitement you decide to go in the morning rather than making your usual afternoon trip. Then for a really wild time, you throw caution to the wind and go an alternative route. Life in the fast lane, watch out!
• Even though you're not normally that great at crossword puzzles, you become obsessed one Sunday with the New York Times Sunday crossword and finish it completely. And you still have time to clean the house and make your usual Sunday phone calls to your siblings and dad.
• You realize with utter mortification that you could describe in explicit detail, leaving out nothing, all the dates you've been on since you became a widower in front of your daughter, any child of any age, mixed company, even the Pope, without censoring anything. And if that's not depressing enough . . .
• It then dawns on you with deep and utter embarrassment that your social life isn't rated triple-X, a single-X, R, not even PG-13, but G for general audiences, or, more appropriately, E for Extremely Boring.

Beware the Coming Zombie Republican Apocalypse!

      Here's a sentence I never figured on writing: I agree with George W. Bush. He may well be, as he fears, the last Republican President. After a primary season historical in its tumult, easily the most chaotic convention since 1968, and a smarmy conman, light on specifics and posing as a strong man who can single-handily solve all our problems, as its standard bearer, a real danger exists now that the Republican Party will become a zombie party, the party of the living dead – too weak to win the presidency but strong enough at the state level and in the House to prevent Democrats from doing anything significant for at least the next four years and perhaps longer.

      Out of the past 7 presidential elections, the Republican Party has only won the popular vote twice, in 1988 and 2004. For Donald J. Trump to win in 2016 so many things have to break right for him I'm doubtful he can pull it off.

      Today, Nate Silver's 538 blog gives Trump a 39.7% chance of winning. However, we're only a terrorist attack, a mass shooting, another police assassination, and/or another Clinton scandal away from a change in that trajectory. And how likely are one or more of the above to happen? The way this year has gone, I'd say, pretty likely.

      So Trump certainly could win. No reason exists for Democrats to be complacent. Hillary Clinton's present standing in the polls is roughly the same as John Kerry's in 2004, and we all remember President Kerry's moving inaugural speech after he took the oath of office on January 20, 2005, don't we?

      But even if Clinton wins, the dysfunctional Republican Party, the party of the living dead that cannot win a presidential contest, will still have more than enough power to prevent a President Clinton or any Democrat in almost every state from doing any of the people's business till at least 2020 and perhaps beyond.

      How did we get into such a fine mess? After the shellacking Republicans took in 2008, when Democrats picked up 21 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate, the Republicans didn't give up. They got even.

      As recounted in Salon editor David Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, soon after its 2008 defeat Republican strategist Chris Jankowski had an epiphany when he noticed a simple fact. The next election in 2010 ended in a zero.

      In other words, 2010 would not be just any election. If Republicans won at the state level, they would be in charge of redistricting. As Karl Rove said, “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” If the Republicans could pull it off, they'd be the masters of their own fate.

      Republicans could gerrymander U.S. House congressional districts and state congressional districts to favor their party. Financed by dark money by far right-wing billionaires wanting lower taxes and no regulations and using a fraction of the money it costs to run a national campaign, Jankowski and his allies were able to make amazing gains in the midterm elections in 2010. It was a tsunami, “the biggest midterm swing since 1938.” Republicans gained 63 seats in the U.S. House, and, more importantly, won an astounding 680 new seats in state legislatures across the country.

      With those victories and the help of a little computer program called Maptitude, Republicans were able to redraw districts in such a way as to give themselves overwhelming majorities even in blue states where they lost the popular vote, like Pennsylvania and Ohio. In fact, the congressional districts were drawn in such a way as to potentially protect Republican incumbents, even in the case of a Democratic landslide in a presidential election.

      So even if Clinton wins and, perhaps, wins big, the House will still, more than likely, remain in Republican control. And not just Republican control, control by Republicans whose main reelection worries will be solely from their right-wing flank. All because of redistricting, they will have no reason to compromise and every reason not to.

      The Republican Party post-Trump could well be a party in chaos, nostalgic for an imagined past, veering between white populist nationalism and big business libertarianism – yet still powerful enough and with plenty of what ex-Senator Phil Gramm called “the most reliable friend you can have in American politics . . . ready money” to block anything Democrats want to get done.

      Then, of course, next will come the midterms of 2018, when a proportionately older and whiter electorate – who will have been steeping in anti-Hillary messages – will show up at the polls angry and voting Republican. It's not difficult to see that Republican gains in 2018 could be substantial.

      As Americans we face any number of incredible challenges that need to be addressed – a decaying infrastructure, among the worst inequality of any Western democracy, the shrinking of the middle class, the hollowing out of our industrial base, a political system too controlled by wealthy and secretive special interests – to name only a few. Chances are that none of these problems, as great and as important as they are, will be solved, even if Hillary wins big. So beware, Beware the Coming Republican Zombie Apocalypse!

An Open-Letter to Speaker Ryan: The People's House, Really?

Dear Speaker Ryan:

      I was just gobsmacked when I heard you use the phrase “The People's House” in your scolding of the Democrats after their gun control sit-in.    Although, I took it as a minor miracle you didn't immediately choke on your words or that lightning didn't strike any where near you. Granted, I didn't check the D.C weather reports for that day, so it's possible the latter happened.

      How, I wondered, were you able to utter the phrase, “The People's House,” especially after criticizing Democrats for doing a sit-in because they wanted to debate what were, after all, fairly mild gun safety regulations with which the majority of Americans agree.

      According to a CBS News poll taken after Orlando, 57% of Americans now support a ban on assault weapons, a much more substantive proposal than anything the House Democrats were putting forth. One bill the Democrats wanted to debate was universal background checks, which a super majority of 89% of Americans support, including substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans.

      How can you call it “The People's House” when no debate is allowed over what the vast majority of the people want? To call the present Republican House “The People's House” makes a mockery of the term. As Sean Illing pointed out in Salon in 2015, “the GOP’s control of Congress is . . . a scandal.” Obama beat Republican candidates twice “with more than 50 percent of the popular vote.” Also, “Democratic congressional candidates received 1.4 million more votes than their Republican opponents in 2012. And yet Republicans lost only eight seats that year. In a remotely representative system, such results would not be possible.”

      So what has happened in the world's last best hope? Your party, fueled by dark money, was extraordinarily successful at rigging the system in its favor by gerrymandering at the state level.

      As Illing explained, “Something like 55 percent of America’s congressional districts have been redrawn to favor the GOP, while a paltry 10 percent have been redrawn to favor Democrats. It’s difficult to overstate how anti-Democratic that is. Republicans have essentially short-circuited the Democratic process.”

      And how did your party do that? “They’ve used advanced technology and algorithms based on the most recent census data to redraw borders and create the safest districts possible.” So because of your party's rigging of the system, its influence in Congress is much greater than its support among the actual people of America.

      Another more interesting way to say it is that all of us have collectively been ratf**ked as Salon editor-in-chief David Daley puts it in his provocatively titled new book, RatF**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy. Daley points out that because of your party's successful effort to subvert our democracy, blue states like Ohio and Pennsylvania that voted for Obama end up sending super majorities of Republicans to Congress, all because of gerrymandering. In Ohio's case, Republicans have a 12-4 advantage and Pennsylvania's delegation is 13-5 Republican.

      Of course, your party was only able to pull off this little coup because of dark money. In fact, if it weren't for a handful of right-wing billionaires, the Kochs, the Scaifes, the DeVoses, and a few others, your party's hard right turn over the past few years would never have been possible. They bought off media and universities. They established think tanks and a 24-7 365-days-a-year campaign mode that has transformed our nation for the worse.

      As described by Jane Mayer in her well-researched Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, the present-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell once explained to a college class that there are only three ingredients to building a political party: money, money, and money. So according to your counterpart in the Senate, such quaint notions as the people's will or the common good are not ingredients in building a political party. Good to know.

      After years and years of your party filling its coffers with dark money, while doing nothing, being the Party of No, you have the gall to lecture those who want to do the people's business. And to add insult to injury, you call your bought-and-paid-for House, “The People's House.”

      Given all the above, I don't know whether to call your utterance of the phrase “The People's House” chutzpah, delusional thinking, the meaningless mouthing of political platitudes, or just politics as usual as practiced in the second decade of the 21st century? Yet no matter what I call it, the people, whose well-being should be the primary objective of “The People's House,” will continue to be the losers.

What I Did Not Tell You

1

At the yellow house on our street –

the one where the son once sold crack

out of his converted garage window,

his driveway like a drivethru,

a couple weeks into your hospital stay,

his sister wandered off from bathing her 10-month old.

Maybe to text someone,

or probably to bitch about how absolutely bored

to tears she was, or maybe just to stream

a movie, quien sabe? To cut to the quick,

the 10-month old drowned

in just a tiny bit of soapy water.

The paramedics tried, but no.

All the family stood in their front yard

of hard dirt and high weeds –

and wailed and wailed.

2

It sucks to get old.

Our family doctor, around my age,

was going through something.

Dyed the gray out of his hair,

shaved his mustache,

pumped iron in earnest.

Even I noticed. Surreptitiously,

I checked his wedding band.

Still on, but just barely.

You see, he texted our 28-year old daughter,

nothing gross, no pics of his package,

just an “innocent” invite to coffee.

While you were splayed out

on yet another hospital bed,

I phoned him from your bathroom.

When I told him he lost us as patients,

he started crying, honest-to-God tears,

telling me how sorry he was

doing this when he knew

how afraid I was for you.

I will never forgive him those tears.

(Blogger's note: This poem was originally published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review last month.)