Aside from little anomalies – like a
state with fewer than 600,000 residents has the same number of U.S. Senators as
a state with over 38,000,000 residents or that for decades, it’s been deemed
acceptable for incumbent parties to redraw congressional voting districts to
disenfranchise those who support the “other” party – elections in the modern
era bear little or no resemblance to how we used to vote or what most Americans
really expect from the democratic process.
Sensing a massive demographic shift –
younger and more ethnically diverse voters slowly replacing older white
Christian traditionalists – the GOP sees the writing on the wall; their
constituency is fading fast. They are conferring among themselves, trying to
find ways to embrace an increasingly alienated constituency of women and
younger voters. Unfortunately, their policies cannot do that. The easier button
is to further distort the election process.
Since the majority of legislatures,
governorships, the presidency, both houses of Congress (soon to be only the
Senate – the only one that approves federal judicial appointments) are
Republican, the GOP is gearing up to stay in power like never before. With the
President’s support, they are first making sure that minorities and those
unlikely to vote Republican are marginalized by the upcoming 2020 Census. To
deter minority participation, the Census form asks questions of immigration
status, and funding for outreach programs (those intended to identify minority
members and the poor) has been cut to the bone.
To make voting more difficult for
minorities, many state election commissioners and Secretaries of State are
adopting all kinds of little subterfuges to keep non-Republicans off the voting
rolls. Like requiring street addresses on voting records, knowing that many
Native American tribal communities don’t utilize traditional streets to locate
their residents. Or moving voting districts far away from minority communities
into lily white neighborhoods where those minorities are truly unwelcome (not
to mention the difficulty in getting to the polls). Alabama recently dumped
voters whose names did not precisely match the registered names, coincidentally
a factor where 70% of those disqualified just happened to be minorities who
tend to vote Democratic.
And of course, there’s good
old-fashioned gerrymandering, which the courts have side-stepped for most of
this nation’s history, only recently challenged when the underlying motivation
was naked racism. I’ve blogged on this subject incessantly, so if you want my
most recent effort, look at my September 27th blog,
Excluding Voters: How to Make America Grate. Will the Supreme Court address self-admitted voter
suppression against those who oppose the incumbent party? Stay tuned. There is
absolutely neutral and reliable software than can identify when a district is
gerrymandered (the “efficiency gap”) and can redraw district lines to reflect
actual voter sentiments.
But so much else
has changed. From the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs Federal
Election Commission – which took out statutes imposing spending caps on
corporations and organizations supporting candidates (other than those directly
controlled by the candidate) and political causes – to the 2013 case of Shelby County vs Holder – which lifted
the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that mandated federal supervision of
specified states with horrific voter exclusionary policies – the Supreme Court
has empowered rich contributors and miscreant states with voter exclusion in
mind, giving them almost a carte blanche to distort, exclude, overwhelm and
manipulate. The lifted federal oversight resulted in an instantaneous reversion
towards voter suppression in those specified states.
We can also add a
litany of distortions enabled in a digital universe. Tracking private individual
communications and postings across social networks to identify political
sentiments and then robo-tailoring messages to pander to such voter’s political
and social bias and weaknesses. Countries like Russia using sophisticated
algorithms to penetrate those same social networks to inflame voters, create
new biases and conspiracy theories with disinformation and foment false
suspicions of each other and those they wish to crush. It seems to work quite
well.
Lame duck
legislatures facing governors-elect from the opposing party have recently taken
to passing last-minute legislation to disempower the incoming governor. In
December of 2016, a North Carolina Republican legislature facing an incoming
Democrat-elect governor (Roy Cooper) hastily passed a sweeping
package of restrictions on the power of the governor’s office. The outgoing and
defeated Republican Governor, Pat McCrory, quickly signed the bill into law.
The Republicans
“deprived Cooper of his
authority over the state elections board, preventing him from restoring voting
rights throughout the state. They also denied Cooper the ability to appoint
hundreds of employees to the executive branch in an effort to immobilize it,
and packed state commissions with allies. Later, they restructured the judiciary to preclude
Cooper from appointing judges, attempted
to throw state
Supreme Court elections, slashed
the budget of
his attorney general, and barred
the governor from
suing to block unconstitutional laws.” Slate.com, December 3rd. North Carolina
is also subject to several gerrymandering cases wending their way through the
courts. Courts are also addressing the above-noted legislative attempt to limit
Cooper’s governorship, leaning towards banning such lame duck actions. But
that’s not enough to stop others from trying.
Enter
Wisconsin, facing its own set of judicial challenges based on gerrymandering. “Last month, Wisconsin voted to replace
Republican Gov. Scott Walker with Democrat Tony Evers. GOP legislators… have
proposed a
series of bills to strip Evers of power in the lame-duck session. In
other words, Wisconsin Republicans have adopted the North Carolina playbook
for a
legislative coup to kneecap an incoming Democratic governor
before he even takes office…
“Republicans seek to accomplish three broad
goals: manipulate the 2020 state Supreme Court election; rob the governor and
attorney general of their executive authority; and curb voting rights. If
passed, these proposals would constitute a sweeping overhaul of the Wisconsin
government, illegitimately entrenching Republican control.” Slate.com. The
legislation would delay an election for a new Supreme Court judge to a very
inconvenient time resulting in a reduced turnout. Noting the statistical
reality that Democratic voters tend to opt for early voting in substantial
numbers over Republicans, legislature wants severely to limit such early
voting.
Wisconsin “[Democrat
Governor-elect Tony] Evers and [Democrat Attorney General-elect Josh] Kaul rode
to victory partly
on their promise to
withdraw from multistate litigation seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care
Act’s most popular provisions, such as protections against pre-existing
conditions. Now Republican legislators seek to prevent this withdrawal by
transferring law enforcement authority to the legislature. Special
Session Bill 2 would
require the governor and attorney general to obtain explicit legislative
approval before withdrawal from the suit—which the legislature is certain to
withhold.
“But the bill goes much further
than that: It also abolishes the principle that the attorney general represents
the state in litigation. The bill authorizes legislative leadership to hire
private lawyers, using taxpayer money, to defend state laws in court when
legislators do not trust the attorney general to litigate a case. It also makes
it difficult for the attorney general to operate by eliminating the office of
the solicitor general, which oversees high-profile cases. Finally, the bill
bars the attorney general from reaching settlements without legislative
consent, while moving settlement and victory funds from the attorney general’s
purview to the legislature’s general fund.” Slate.com. Simply, if the Democrats
do get elected high-ranking office, let’s make sure they cannot do anything
without Republican approval.
I am reminded
of the fact that “The US has been downgraded to a ‘flawed democracy’ from a ‘full
democracy’ by the Economist Intelligence Unit in its 2016 ‘Democracy Index’
report…
Although the report's publication comes shortly
after the election of President Donald Trump, the EIU analysts write that the
US was not downgraded because of him. Rather, they argue, his surprise election
was an effect of the underlying causes that led the EIU to downgrade
the US.
“According to the EIU, ‘full
democracies’ are countries in which basic political freedoms and civil
liberties are respected, and are ‘underpinned by a political culture conducive
to the flourishing of democracy.’ The government functions satisfactorily;
media are independent and diverse; the judiciary is independent and their
decisions are enforced; and there's an effective system of checks and balances…
“The analysts write that
a key factor in the drop [of status] was Americans' growing distrust in
governmental institutions… ‘Popular trust in government, elected
representatives, and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels in
the US. This has been a long-term trend and one that preceded the election of
Mr. Trump as the US president in November 2016,’ they write.” Business Insider,
1/25/17. Makes you go all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it? And if it was bad
in 2016…
I’m Peter Dekom,
and if you want a textbook view of how nations unravel and then fall apart,
read the news right here in the United (??) States of America.
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