Observations from the Coffee Shop 11.19

Last week I started a post about our broken political system, which turned into a vent about Obamacare, and I wanted to get back to that. Yes the system is broken, it's not really a question open to debate, but what is startling is how much of it has nothing to do with the times or the economy but is by pure Republican design. There is a very good article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone that explains it all very clearly and is worth reading. Rather than get into it I'm posting some highlights of "How Republicans Rig the Game" and hoping that's enough to get you to read the entire article.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

Something to keep in mind, yes gerrymandering  has gone on forever but not in the nationally planned, calculated, well funded, and computerized way it was after the last census.

"National Republicans have waged an unrelenting campaign to exploit every weakness and anachronism in our electoral system. Through a combination of hyperpartisan redistricting of the House, unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate and racist voter suppression in the states, today's GOP has locked in political power that it could never have secured on a level playing field.

"Explicit racial gerrymandering is illegal under the 14^th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. So Hofeller used a proxy for race, redrawing boundaries by identifying the wards where President Obama received the highest returns in 2008. According to court documents, this approach 'allowed black voters to be carved apart from their white neighbors and friends, on a block-by-block basis.'

"Pennsylvanians cast 83,000 more votes for Democratic U.S. House candidates but elected a 13-5 Republican majority to represent them in Washington; Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress. In Wisconsin Republicans prevailed by a five-to-three margin in House seats despite losing the popular vote by more than 43,000. In Ohio, only 52 percent of voters cast ballots for Republicans, but thanks to maps drawn in a Columbus-area Doubletree Hotel, referred to by GOP operatives in court documents as "the bunker," John Boehner's home-state delegation swings 12-4 for the GOP.

But gerrymandering only effects the House, the problems of the Senate are Republican made with the aid of the founding fathers. When the Constitution was written the largest state, Virginia, had 10 times the population of the smallest, Delaware, while today California has 65 times the population of Wyoming.

"Half of the U.S. population now resides in just nine states. Which is to say that the other 50 percent of Americans control 82 votes in the U.S. Senate.

"In today's Senate, 41 small-state Republicans can mount a filibuster on behalf of 28 percent of the country. And the departure from historical practice is shocking: LBJ faced one filibuster as Senate majority leader. Harry Reid, the current majority leader, has faced more than 430. Nearly half the filibusters of executive-branch nominations in the nation's history – 16 of 36 – have occurred under Obama."

The scariest idea of all may be the Republican one that would restructure the electoral system which decides presidential elections. Personally I think the entire system is outdated in the extreme and should just go but the Republicans have an idea of their own. Electoral votes would be divided among a state's congressional districts instead of on a state by state winner take all basis. Due to the above mentioned extreme gerrymandering under that system we would have a President Romney today.

But, frustrating as this rigged political system has become, there is always hope as the final lines of the article show.

"The GOP may have postponed its day of reckoning at the hands of a younger, browner, queerer electorate, 'They're holding back the tides,' says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, but sooner or later, they're going to get swamped."

Read the article than vote whenever you can.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 2.8

I want to write down my other thoughts on drones quick because snow is beginning to fall in the Village, Nemo seems to have arrived right on schedule. Usually the world is very black and white to me but these drones just have me torn as you can probably tell by now.

The drone war is an important story but it doesn't seem to resonate at all with a public that at times seems tired of it all. Tired of war, tired of politicians who get absolutely nothing accomplished, or just tired of the total ignorance coming from one side of every issue. Yesterday morning Joe Scarborough said he was scared because nobody seems to care about the constitutional issues involved. As I said that is part of the reason I was writing about it because I don't understand why I don't care more.

It's an important issue but it's also a very cynical one. Would people care more if Dubya was still President? There is a huge amount of trust involved and people just trust President Obama more than they ever did him. At the same time Obama wont always be President so what then?

An even more cynical part is the story of the Justice Department memo that was released this week. Supposedly it was found and released by NBC News after much journalistic effort. You might think it was on the level of David Corn getting the "47 Percent" video of Willard but you would be wrong. Now it seems that in all likelihood the memo was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee itself to create some drama for their confirmation hearings of John Brennan.

The White House says there are rules that are followed before drone strikes but they refuse to release them saying they are classified. Actually the whole drone program itself is considered classified. The problem is the drone war is part of a larger war that has been going on for ten years now. A dirty, ugly, secret war that shows no signs of ending anytime soon. That statement was proved recently by the French intervention in Mali and the terrorist attack in Algeria that followed. There are secrets in any war, there have to be, even more so in a war fought in the shadows as this one is and today the Congress of the United States is quite possibly the worst place on Earth to keep a secret. Also the ACLU is suing the government in civil court to force the CIA and Justice Department to release any and all information on the drone program and war. The thought of that lawsuit is laughable in an age where the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab has a twitter account.

But than there is the other, the constitutional, side of the story. Senator Robert Kennedy once held hearings into the terrible treatment of farm and other migrant workers. During the hearings he questioned a California sheriff who admitted to arresting workers without reason because the sheriff said he had a duty to stop them from causing trouble before they caused it. When Kennedy asked how he could arrest someone when they hadn't yet broken a law the sheriff answered "They’re ready to violate the law." At the next break Kennedy stared down at the sheriff and told him he should "read the Constitution of the United States" over lunch.

President Obama is the only President who studied, not to mention taught, constitutional law before he became President. One could say he should know better.