“Trapped In A Conservative Box”: The Cost Of The GOP’s Redistricting Wins Presents A Real Problem
Sometimes in politics you can lose by winning. Witness the problems the Republican Party is experiencing trying to govern with a majority that is widely believed to be unshakeable in the near future thanks to the redistricting job GOP state legislators did after the 2010 census.
Politico’s Alex Isenstadt has a report today suggesting that the party’s success has trapped Republicans in a conservative box, “narrowing the party’s appeal at a time when some GOP leaders say its future rests on the opposite happening.”
This isn’t necessarily a new thought. As I wrote back in early March:
In a sense the GOP’s success in the last round of redistricting – creating what the Cook Political Report sees as over 200 safe GOP districts – is proving Pyrrhic. If you’re a Republican member of Congress your greatest existential threat comes from primary challenges, so that’s what shapes your agenda, even if it comes at the cost of national political viability.
I was writing then about the GOP’s doubling down on the same policy agenda that voters rejected last November. That hasn’t changed in the intervening months. In fact, if you watched most House Republicans (and more than a few senators and other elected officials) you would not know that the party lost last year on multiple fronts: The presidential race wasn’t close and Obama became the first candidate since Dwight Eisenhower to crack 51 percent two elections in a row; Democrats picked up seats in both chambers of Congress and won more House votes than did the GOP, though Republicans held the lower chamber because, in large part, of their redistricting success. Meanwhile, the national GOP brand remains terrible.
Isenstadt is writing about “recurring drama within the House Republican Conference – from the surprise meltdown on the farm bill to the looming showdown over immigration reform,” but it’s the same basic problem: Conservatives unchecked by practical considerations such as what will help the party nationally.
The Politico piece has a couple of telling nuggets:
Of the 234 House Republicans, just four now represent districts that favor Democrats, according to data compiled by The Cook Political Report. That’s down from the 22 Republicans who resided in Democratic-friendly seats following the 2010 midterms, prior to the line-drawing.
They’re also serving districts that are increasingly white. After redistricting and the 2012 election, according to The Cook Political Report, the average Republican congressional district went from 73 percent white to 75 percent white. And even as Hispanics have emerged as America’s fastest-growing demographic group, only about one-tenth of Republicans represent districts where the Latino population is 25 percent or higher.
The piece also has the obligatory conservative quote about how what the party really needs is not to broaden its appeal but more starkly state its case. But this proceeds from an incorrect assumption of conservatism’s nationwide appeal. I am always reminded of this passage from Ryan Lizza’s Eric Cantor profile a few months ago. Lizza spoke with Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price, a conservative leader:
He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
Price is no tea party freshman just finding his way around the Congress. He’s the vice chairman of the House Budget Committee and has been in Congress for eight years. And yet it only just recently occurred to him that not every district holds the same political beliefs as his. That’s a real problem for Republicans and it’s one their redistricting success is only exacerbating.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 1, 2013
“Preventing Access To The Ballot Box”: Polling Disenfranchisement Will Be More Difficult To Flag
Time for everyone to step away from their respective ledges.
A few days have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Some of the kneejerk liberal oratory, the gnashing of teeth, is completely out of step with reality. The court’s decision does not signal a slippage to Jim Crow antics like poll taxes and hatred so violent that merely registering a black person to vote could lead to murder.
Likewise, conservatives would do well to cease gloating about the landmark ruling that nullified an important part of the Act. After all, it’s not like the court found that the nine states and portions of six others receiving extra scrutiny have become bastions of free and equal treatment for all voters.
In fact, records compiled for Congress the last time it renewed the Voting Rights Act in 2006 reflect many examples of disparate impacts for voters in recent years.
Clearly, a black man in the White House does not mean the nation has eradicated discriminatory problems in voting, intentional or not.
The problem now is Congress.
Congress needs to rewrite the guidelines nullified by the ruling to consider new situations across the United States. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts tried to nudge toward that goal in the ruling.
Dramatic demographic shifts necessitate it. New populations of voters not fully considered in 1965 such as Hispanics, Asians and increasing numbers of less mobile elderly are bringing new challenges to ensuring access to the polls.
The Court’s 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder made irrelevant a portion of the law initially intended to halt the horrific abuses of the civil rights era.
Alabama’s Shelby County challenged a section of the Voting Rights Act that mandated so-called pre-clearance standards. Most of the states and some of jurisdictions covered are in the South. Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, they must first receive the federal government’s permission before redrawing legislative maps, shifting polling places or enacting new rules on voter identification.
These jurisdictions must prove to the Justice Department or a panel of federal judges that planned changes will not have a discriminatory effect.
Problem was, the areas were chosen by past abuses. Too far in the past, the court decided, nullifying the formula used to determine who is covered.
The court wants Congress to readdress the formula, using more current voting patterns. Congress failed to do that the last time the Voting Rights Act was renewed.
The Justice Department can and will still pursue abuses. They’ll be busy.
Accessibility to the ballot box is under assault in America. Legislatures nationwide are passing changes to voting laws, often under the guise of stopping voter fraud.
Repeatedly, politicians pushing for the measures cannot prove fraud exists. Often, they are mislabeling database errors as fraud. Problems like two people with the same name, inaccurate data entry of addresses or birthdays. The glitches need to be eliminated; new technology can be employed.
But the goal should always be increasing access for eligible voters, not making reaching the ballot box unnecessarily more difficult — and often placing that burden on older, poorer and minority voters.
Here is the thing.
Areas affected by pre-clearance standards could have been exempted from scrutiny years ago. All they needed to do was keep a clean slate, not have any violations for 10 consecutive years. This process, called “bailout,” is included in the act.
But problems continued. Most of the jurisdictions never met that mark.
No, they had to wait until a conservative-leaning court cut them some slack.
And now an ineffective Congress will make it that much more difficult to flag modern-era abuses.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, July 1, 2013
“All Rifles Welcome, Especially The Evil Black Ones”: Just A Small Reminder Of The Revolution To Come
While Adam Kokesh’s much-discussed July 4 march on Washington by gun-toting sons of liberty got called off (perhaps because of Kokesh’s frequent incarcerations), the spirit lives on in Colorado, as reported by TPM’s Tony Kludt:
A tea party group’s vow to march with guns in a Fourth of July parade has caused panic in a small Colorado town.
The Southern Colorado Patriots Club announced that its members would march with guns in the annual Independence Day parade in Westcliffe, Colo. to “make a statement that we still believe in our Constitution” to protest new gun control laws in the state, the Denver Post reported. A flier distributed by the group urged members to come to the parade with unarmed rifles.
“All rifles welcome especially the evil black ones,” the flier read.
The announcement prompted the Custer County Chamber of Commerce, the event’s sponsor, to cancel the parade as nervous citizens circulated a petition to stop the club. Donna Hood, president of the chamber, abstained from the vote to cancel the parade but told the Post that the matter has “polarized this community in a week.” The parade was ultimately saved when the Town of Westcliffe agreed to pick up the sponsorship tab.
And get this:
Although the group has marched with guns in the past, the passage of new statewide gun measures has heightened public sensitivity to the action. The state’s new 15-round limit on gun magazines is slated to take effect next week.
I’m guessing the “sensitivity” was mostly raised among second amendment absolutists, who want to remind their fellow citizens that if their “liberties” are further trifled with, they’ll feel free to respond with revolutionary violence, though they tend to call it “resistance to tyranny” or even “self-defense.”
At some point, it would be nice if regular old conservatives would denounce this sort of nonsense, not because it’s embarrassing, but because it reflects the “constitutional conservative” belief that the public policy preferences of self-styled right-wing “patriots” cannot be overridden by democratic majorities operating according to the rule of law. The thinly-disguised motive for these armed demonstrations is to remind the rest of us that we can have our Obamacare or our legalized abortion or our gun safety regulations only so long as the real Americans choose to let us by leaving the ammo at home.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 28, 2013
“The Party Isn’t White Enough”: Get Ready For More Republican Party Race Baiting
You, unsuspecting citizen, probably take the view that the Republican Party is too white. It’s the conventional wisdom, after all, and last year’s election results would seem to have proven the point resoundingly. But you’re obviously not up with the newest thinking in some conservative quarters, which is that the party isn’t white enough, and that the true and only path to victory in the future is to get whiter still. Some disagree, which gives us the makings of a highly entertaining intra-GOP race war playing out as we head into 2016. But given this mad party’s recent history, which side would you bet on winning?
The situation is this. The immigration reform bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go to the House. A few weeks ago, as I read things, there were occasional and tepid signals that the House would not take up the Senate bill. Now, by contrast, those signals are frequent and full-throated. For example, yesterday Peter Roskam, a deputy GOP whip in the House, said this: “It is a pipe dream to think that [the Senate] bill is going to go to the floor and be voted on. The House is going to move through in a more deliberative process.”
“Deliberative process” probably means, in this case, killing the legislation. House conservatives, National Journal reports, are increasingly bullish on the idea that they may be able to persuade John Boehner to drop the whole thing.
Last December, such an outcome was supposed to mean disaster for the Republicans. But now, some say the opposite. Phyllis Schlafly and talk-radio opponents of the bill like Laura Ingraham have been saying for a while now that the party doesn’t need Latino votes, it just needs to build up the white vote. And now, they have the social science to prove it, or the “social science” to “prove” it.
Sean Trende, the conservative movement’s heavily asterisked answer to Nate Silver (that is to say, Silver got everything right, and Trende got everything wrong), came out with an analysis this week, headlined “Does GOP Have to Pass Immigration Reform?,” showing that by golly no, it doesn’t. You can jump over there yourself and study all his charts and graphs, but the long and short of it is something like this. Black turnout and Democratic support have both been unusually high in the last two elections, which is true; Democrats have been steadily losing white voters, which is also true; if you move black turnout back down to 2004-ish levels and bump up GOP margins among whites (by what strikes me as a wildly optimistic amount), you reach White Valhalla. Somehow or another, under Trende’s “racial polarization scenario,” it’ll be 2044 before the Democrats again capture 270 electoral votes. Thus is the heat of Schlafly’s rhetoric cooled and given fresh substance via the dispassionate tools of statistics.
Karl Rove says this is bunk. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that to win the White House without more Latino support, a Republican candidate would have to equal Ronald Reagan’s 1984 total among whites, which was 63 percent. Rove thinks this unlikely—Trende thinks it’s pessimistic—and counsels some Latino reach-out (naturally, none of them ever says anything about black reach-out). The party used to listen to Rove, but most of them have zoomed well past him to the twilight zone of the far, far right.
These Republicans and the people they represent—that is, the sliver of people they care about representing—don’t want any outreach. They almost certainly won’t let a path to citizenship get through the House. And they’ll attack minorities in other ways, too. It’s been mostly civil rights advocates who’ve denounced the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision, and one can obviously see why. But trust me, that decision, as Bloomberg’s Josh Green shrewdly noted the day it came down, is a “poisoned chalice” for the GOP.
Why? Just look at what’s already happened since the decision was announced—the party is launching voter-suppression drives in six of the nine freshly liberated states. All the states, of course, are down South. These drives might “work.” But they will attract an enormous amount of negative publicity, and they’ll probably induce massive backlashes and counter-movements. This effort will lead to even greater distrust of the GOP by people of color, and it will reinforce the captive Southern-ness of the party, making it even more Southern than it already is. And Republicans won’t stop, because they can’t stop. Race baiting is their crack pipe.
And here’s the worst part of this story. If the House Republicans kill immigration reform, and Republican parties across the South double down to keep blacks from voting, then they really will need to jack up the white vote—and especially the old white vote—in a huge way to be competitive in 2016 and beyond. Well, they’re not going to do that by mailing out Lawrence Welk CDs. They’re going to run heavily divisive and racialized campaigns, worse than we’ve ever seen out of Nixon or anyone. Their only hope of victory will be to make a prophet of Trende—that is, reduce the Democrats’ share of the white vote to something in the mid- to low-30 percent range. That probably can’t happen, but there’s only one way it might. Run the most racially inflamed campaign imaginable.
That’s the near-term future we’re staring at. We can take satisfaction in the fact that it’s bad for them, but unfortunately, it’s not so good for the country.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 28, 2013
“Slipping A Little Deeper Into Madness”: The Imaginary White House Immigration Ruse
Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) told Dave Weigel yesterday one of the main reasons he and his House Republican colleagues will not support comprehensive immigration reform.
“If you’re the White House right now,” he theorized, “and you have a signature law — that is, Obamacare — that is completely a legacy issue for the president, and it’s looking like implementation is going to be a disaster, and if you’re on your heels in terms of these scandals, and you’re flummoxed by the NSA, there’s one issue out there that’s good for the White House. That’s immigration. The question is: How much energy does the White House actually put into getting the legislation, or do they want to keep the issue for 2014?”
I hear this quite a bit from the right. Democrats say they want to pass reform legislation, the argument goes, but it’s a sham. What those rascally Democrats really want, conservatives argue, is for immigration reform to fail so Democrats can use the issue against the GOP in the 2014 midterms and beyond.
And every time I hear this, I’m convinced our public discourse has slipped a little deeper into madness.
Look, this isn’t complicated: Democrats want to pass immigration reform. President Obama wants to pass immigration reform. When the reform bill reached the Senate floor yesterday, it received 100% support from Democratic senators, and support is expected to be at a similar level among House Dems. If the party were engaged in some elaborate ruse, they’ve apparently managed to fool everyone, including themselves.
In fact, I’d love to hear Roskam and others who share his ideology explain the electoral rationale behind their strategy. He seems to be arguing, “Democrats want immigration reform to fail so they can use it against us, therefore, we should make sure reform fails so that they can use it against us. That’ll show ’em!”
If Roskam and his like-minded allies really believe their own rhetoric, wouldn’t they want to pass a reform bill, take the issue off the table, and undermine Democratic efforts to beat them over the head with the issue?
As for the notion that the president is keeping a low profile on immigration, Roskam thinks it’s part of a fiendish plan. In reality, Obama is giving lawmakers space because proponents in both parties asked him, too — the more the president is directly associated with the legislation, the harder it is to earn support from Republicans who are reflexively against anything and everything Obama is for.
Behind the scenes, however, the White House is heavily invested in helping reform succeed — it’s not because the president’s team secretly wants it to fail, delusional arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.
As for the policy approach Roskam would prefer, Weigel’s report added:
Roskam insisted again and again that “up until now, the immigration issue has been a powerful political issue for the White House,” and that Team Obama likely wouldn’t be “willing to give that up in 2014 in order to have a bill.” But “if they’re willing to get a remedy, that suggests we go to the consensus. The consensus is on a border that’s secure.”
First, the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate includes so much border security one of its conservative Republican supporters characterized it as “almost overkill.”
Second, Roskam is describing a fascinating scenario. The point of comprehensive reform is that the two sides effectively accept the others’ condition — Dems get a pathway to citizenship; the GOP gets increased border security.
Roskam’s argument is amazing: as soon as Democrats agree to give Republicans what they want, in exchange for nothing, then there will be a “consensus” bill.
And if Dems don’t agree to this, it’ll prove once and for all that they’re secretly against immigration reform.
And to think some policymakers find it difficult to negotiate with the House GOP….
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 28, 2013
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