With only about a quarter of U.S. voters
registering “Republican,” and their numbers facing harsh demographic realities
– ages skew a lot older, whiter and more rural in a world that’s getting
younger, more diverse and urban – unless they change to their core (what they
should do), there is only one way for GOP candidates to get elected in numbers:
make sure voters who support opposing Democrats either don’t vote or that their
votes don’t count (or count as much).
Today, with the electoral college,
the fact that the Senate allots two Senators per state regardless of
population, tons of subtle (keep polling stations in lily-white neighborhoods
only) and unsubtle (cut voter rolls in minority areas) voting controls,
disinformation (blacks: “your vote doesn’t count,” swift- boating and pizza
gate with a little help from Russian bots), deep rich SuperPac support (thank
you Citizens United) and
gerrymandering (a little by Democrats – Maryland – but much, much more in red
states threatening to turn purple like North Carolina and Texas), the result is
that a GOP-leaning supporter casts the voting equivalent of 1.8 times an
average Democratic vote.
Without that manipulation,
Republicans would not, as they do now, control 27 gubernatorial and 30 state
legislatures plus the U.S. Senate and the Presidency, despite the fact that
Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by almost 3 million votes. By 2040,
16 states will hold an estimated 70% of the U.S. population, which states will
control less than one-third of the U.S. Senate. As the prestigious U.K.
periodical, The Economist, calls it,
the United States is a “flawed democracy” by reason of a form of government
that is not representative of the population.
Cases are at or wending their way to
the conservatively (read: Republican) controlled U.S. Supreme Court on whether
a Department of Commerce proposed add to the 2020 Census – a question as to whether
the person filling out the form is a U.S. citizen – is an attempt to
discriminate and, separately, whether a federal court has a right to intervene
against a state openly manipulating voting districts to suppress voters
supporting the party opposing the incumber party in charge. As of now, based on
questioning by the Court, odds-makers are betting that the Administration is
likely to win on both these matters by a clear 5-4 partisan split. The
conservative justices seem to be leaning to keep courts out of what they see as
purely an exercise of political prerogatives.
The truth, however, seems to suggest
a deeply malevolent intention by Republican incumbents to remain in power by
any and all means possible. For example, as David Savage (writing for the May
31st Los Angeles Times) tells us, look at a written GOP strategy on
the subject: “Newly revealed documents appeared to confirm Thursday [5/30] what
many critics had long suspected — that the Trump administration’s drive to add
a citizenship question to the 2020 census began as a plan to bolster Republicans
and to undercut Democrats in state legislatures and Congress.
“Thomas Hofeller, a Republican expert
on redistricting and gerrymandering, died last year in North Carolina. His
daughter found documents on his computer hard drive urging the Commerce Department
to change the census to ask all residents whether they are citizens.
“With this data, states could draw
new election maps based on the number of eligible voters, not the total
population. That ‘would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites’
and ‘would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats,’ he wrote… His advice
came to light Thursday [5/30] because the Supreme Court is weighing whether to
uphold the Trump administration plan to add a citizenship question to next
year’s census.
“Federal district judges in New York,
San Francisco and Baltimore blocked the move, holding that Commerce Secretary
Wilbur Ross had not put forth a legitimate explanation for such a significant
change… Census Bureau experts had predicted that millions of immigrants would
refuse to answer the question, for fear of drawing attention, thereby creating
a severe undercount in some areas.
“Lawyers who challenged the proposed
question noted that the Constitution calls for ‘an actual enumeration’ that
includes ‘counting the whole number of persons in each state.’… But when the
Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April in the case of Department of
Commerce vs. New York, the five conservative justices sounded ready to rule for
the administration .
“American Civil Liberties Union
lawyers sent a letter to Judge Jesse Furman, who handled the New York case,
saying that this ‘new evidence contradicts the sworn testimony’ of two advisors
to Ross who concealed Hofeller’s role. Since 2015, Hofeller had been urging
Republicans to add a citizenship question to the next census.
“The ACLU lawyers said Mark Neuman,
an advisor to Ross, had consulted Hofeller and said he believed the citizenship
question would ‘maximize’ representation for the ‘Latino community.’ They said
both Neuman and Hofeller knew it ‘would have exactly the opposite effect. It
would disadvantage Latinos and benefit ‘Non-Hispanic Whites.’’
“On Thursday [5/30] afternoon, the
lawyers sent a letter to the Supreme Court alerting the justices to the new
information… ‘We always had suspicions about the real motive of the
administration, but this is the clearest evidence we have that the genesis of
this was an effort to dilute minority voting power,’ said Dale Ho, director of
the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. ‘The real reason behind this was the opposite
of what they were saying.’
“A Justice Department spokeswoman
issued a statement saying that ‘these 11th-hour allegations by the plaintiffs …
are false.’ She said the government lawyer had ‘never heard of the unpublished
study’ cited in the documents and it ‘played no role’ in the 2017
recommendation to add the citizenship question.
“Ross told Congress that he chose to
add the citizenship question in order to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Sometimes, when judges are called upon to redraw new voting districts, they
want to know whether an area has enough African American or Latino voters to
elect a minority representative.
“Voting rights experts scoffed at
this explanation. For decades, judges have relied on data from the American
Community Survey, an ongoing survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau into
the nation’s changing workforce, population and housing.” Funny how the Justice
Department can, without a trial, unilaterally determine that factual evidence
is “false.” The Court could easily reject this new information as “too late,”
but truth is truth… something GOP incumbents appear to have trouble
understanding. And sooner or later…
I’m Peter Dekom, and a claimed democracy
that squirms to reverse free choice will not stand.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment