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.

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!