Gerry, Meet Mandy

With all the demographics working against old-world, God-fearing rural voters, what is the party of this traditional segment doing to stem the tsunami of urban cultural diversity and their concomitant values from altering the legal landscape? The goal has to be to dilute and void the votes of the encroaching the new majority. And the Republican Party has found and implemented its path: redistricting (which takes place at the state level), many making blanket and immutable pledges against increasing taxes and adopting an approach of stopping policy vectors emanating from the other side and eschewing any semblance of compromise and cooperation with the other side. While the results threaten the viability of the United States to function, these methods have been wildly successful to accomplish the above goals.

Can you blame them? Many do, but you can hardly question their success. The collateral damage of a $30 million GOP effort to implement (successfully) the redistricting necessary to give them the platform to implement their policies is staggering. But numbers don’t lie. As Timothy Egan points out in his May 2^nd New York Times editorial, although the 2012 House elections generated 1.4 million more aggregate Democratic votes over Republican, the GOP has a 33 vote majority in that Congressional body. And the House is the bastion of the extreme power of the GOP right wing (Tea Party in particular).

The ability to separate and isolate Democrats into a small number of concentrated districts, but making the remaining districts 60% or more percent Republican is one method. In states where there are few representatives, the idea is to define the district boundaries as much as possible to spread and dilute the Democratic constituency so that their numbers cannot sufficiently concentrate to elect a Congressperson. This has effectively created a mass of Congressional districts where the GOP majority is so clear that candidates are effectively elected after the primary; the actual election just doesn’t matter because the Democrats simply do not have enough votes to win anything.

The net impact of such one-sided redistricting is that Republicans have only more conservative Republicans to fear. The Tea Party is waiting in the wings with replacement candidates should the incumbent not represent sufficiently right-wing sentiments.

You can spot the anomalies of this House GOP block in the numbers: “As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record — and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay or lesbian members, all of them Democrats.

“Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white. Women are 51 percent of the nation, but among the ruling members of the House, they make up just 8 percent. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side.)” NY Times.

There has been some serious blowback as this structure allows some pretty crazy kooks to gain office. They talk about “legitimate rape,” continue to press the birther mantra that President Obama is not US-born or is a Muslim or is sympathetic to terrorists, that the recent mass shootings are the result of a breakdown of Christian values, that the United States is and should acknowledge that it is a Christian nation… but this doesn’t cost the GOP the relevant office. They simply nominate a different conservative to replace their under-educated and over-the-top mouthpiece in the next election.

The net impact has been effectively to dilute votes such that on average a Democratic voter has 5/8 of the vote of a Republican constituent. In time, the rising culturally diverse and overwhelmingly urban majority will overtake this Republic blocking movement. In time, but the damage to American democracy might leave negative and lasting scars on the nation’s ability to survive.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we hate the roadblocks in Congress, we have only ourselves to blame for the system we just tolerate without change.