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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

"... the GOP’s sheer desperation means it would be foolish to ignore this ongoing threat to our democracy."

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COMMENT: Not one of you people who withheld your vote in November has any right to complain about this.  Some battles are fought on Election Day, not by "the Democrats" but by voters, and 63.3% of you just held the door so Republicans could walk in and hack away at democracy some more.  I thought you were supposed to be the smart end of the political spectrum.
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Now they’re trying to steal 2016: The demented GOP schemes to rewire the Electoral College and elect a Tea Party president

Republicans know they can't win the popular vote. You won't believe sick schemes they've launched to get around it

By Paul Rosenberg, December 6, 2014

Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once in the last 25 years, a steep decline in their fortunes from the period from 1972 to 1988, when they won the popular vote every time but one–1976, the aftermath of Watergate. Add to that massive policy failures and demographic trends against them, and the motivations to cheat are overwhelming.

Voter suppression seemed promising at first—and it’s helpful in many downticket races—but it’s not going to be enough to secure the White House. So they’ve been working on another idea as well—make the popular vote totally irrelevant by leaving red states just as they are, with statewide winners getting all the electoral votes, while making electoral votes more or less proportional in as many blue states as possible—many of which the GOP controls at the state level. If they can rewrite the rules fast enough, they could even win in 2016, with no more votes than Mitt Romney received.

Republicans have been fiddling with various Electoral College schemes since at least 2011 (in Michigan and Pennsylvania), with an upsurge of interest in early 2013, following Romney’s disappointing loss. “How Romney Could Have Won: A changed system would mean changed results” was the title of a January 2013 National Review story, capturing the mood at the time. Romney needn’t have won a single additional popular vote, you see. Just divvy up Electoral College votes by congressional district, and voilà! President, President Romney, Mr. 47 Percent! “[F]or those frustrated over 2012’s results,” the story concluded, “it might be worth thinking about whether it’s time to overhaul the system itself.”

The buzz faded rather quickly, but now, post-midterm elections, it seems to be staging a modest comeback—and the GOP’s sheer desperation means it would be foolish to ignore this ongoing threat to our democracy. Renewed talk of rewrite schemes actually began even before the midterm election, according to a late-October story by Michigan political columnist Susan J. Demas, and a watered-down scheme emerged after the election, she reported, which would give most of the electoral votes to the statewide winner, but give some to the loser as well. “It’s like a participation trophy in pre-school tee-ball,” Demas wrote, “only Michigan is trying to build up the self-esteem of Republican wannabe leaders of the free world.”

If that sounds like a comedown from electing President Romney, so be it. “Something is better than nothing,” Demas told Salon. “It would help Republicans more than they’ve been able to achieve since 1988, the last time the GOP took Michigan’s EV votes.” It’s also something that could happen quite soon, as we’ll see below—and it might, in turn, help revive efforts in other states. But before we get into the particulars there, we need to spend some time reflecting on the broader view.

First, we should note how serious these Electoral College schemes are; they’re popular in many GOP circles—although not with everyone. RNC Chair Reince Priebus has endorsed it. “I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at,” he said in January 2013.

The next month, the Michigan Republican Party convention overwhelmingly endorsed a proposal for their state to allocate electoral votes by congressional district—the vote was 1,370-132. Outgoing Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett endorsed the idea as far back as September 2011, while others such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Michigan’s Rick Snyder have danced back and forth, and the National Review has weighed in favorably as well, as already noted. Interest fizzled at the time, but just after the midterms, the National Review ran an even more gung-ho story pushing the scheme, “The Constitutional Idea that Could Guarantee a GOP Win in 2016.” A “Constitutional” idea to quash majority rule; who could argue with that?

Lots of people, obviously, which is a big part of why the idea fizzled in early 2013. And it wasn’t just Democrats or the “liberal media.” Mike Duncan, RNC chairman under George W. Bush, was “unimpressed,” Steve Benen noted. ”This is not a viable pathway for the party to win nationally,” Duncan opined. And it wasn’t just an establishment view. Benen also cited Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli telling Dave Weigel, “I don’t like breaking up states,” after a discussion sponsored by the National Review. “I think winner-take-all is part of how a state matters as a sovereign entity…. It makes the state, as a state, matter more.”

More generally, state legislative leaders did not seem enthused, and they were the ones needed to make the whole plan go, since it requires getting bills through state legislatures. That doesn’t mean the plans are dead—only that the earlier rollout was premature. If you’re going to throw a couple hundred years of precedent out the window, you need to do some spadework first. Republicans have spent decades nurturing voter fraud myths, and developing narratives to rationalize voter suppression laws. Electoral College schemes are quite new, by comparison—they’re just getting started with them. Which is why Democrats should not be complacent about them. There’s still time for them to be implemented before the 2016 election, and the first such plan could be passed by New Year—although it’s a relatively muted alternative.

There are two very good reasons for Republicans to continue down this road—and thus for the rest of us to worry. First, it’s likely to be the only realistic shot they’ve got at winning the White House for a long time to come. Despite the GOP’s midterm success, there’s little chance the presidential picture will change any time soon, a point made compellingly by conservative Republican Chris Ladd, writing for the Houston Chronicle, and quoted at length by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “Once again, Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level across the most heavily populated sections of the country while intensifying their hold on a declining electoral bloc of aging, white, rural voters,” Ladd wrote. “The 2014 election not only continued that doomed pattern, it doubled down on it.”

[major snippage]

They also involve “extremely high stakes,” which is why they qualify as constitutional hardball. Constitutional hardball tears at the fabric of our constitutional order, which is bound up in those norms. This is not to say that norms never can or should  change, but only that they play a very important role—as important, at least, as the written letter of the law—and therefore great care is required if one contemplates their overthrow. Once the practice of constitutional hardball is begun, it can be very difficult to stop. “[T]he incentive to fight fire with fire is overwhelming,” Bernstein points out. “Not only is sticking to outdated norms while your opponents don’t a sure recipe for losing, but in fact the very norm of following norms rapidly disappears and should be replaced by loophole-exploiting by everyone.”

This is where we are today, headed for complete destruction of our constitutional order, driven by people who claim a unique relationship with the Constitution, unwilling and unable to change in light of the fact that they cannot win national elections anymore—and therefore determined to destroy national elections, one way or another. Will they try to steal the 2016 election? They’re already working on it. But that’s only the symptom, not the disease.

We should not expect them to “return to normal,” if only we do this or that thing properly. We should not expect “the fever to break,” as Obama did during the 2012 election. We should only expect more of the same madness, using every last letter of the law to kill every last shred of its spirit..

It’s not constitutional hardball, actually. It’s constitutional beanball. Batter up?
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