A New Year's resolution for 2014: Ignore the coming avalanche of rhetoric, and kick out those do-nothing House Republicans

With the New Year upon us, what do we have to look forward to?  Well, we are going to have to suffer another year of non-stop partisan political grandstanding, in which we will be told ad nauseam by Republicans what they are against, and not what exactly they are for. It is going on four years since the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have taken productive action on any law or bill since the new majority was elected in 2010; that is really the only thing we need to know. 

What chance is there to change this, meaning ending the Tea Party stranglehold on government business? Probably not much about those so-called Tea Party people, save to elect more “reasonable” people under the Republican banner. We (or rather, the media) can start by calling these people by their right names; the Tea Party is merely the extremist fringe of the Republican Party, elected in districts that are rabidly Republican to start with. All they have done is give themselves a “cute” name and all of a sudden they have the relevance and power out of all proportion.

But what the Tea Party is in fact is a façade to conceal racial paranoia. It is no “coincidence” that the Tea Party was formed practically the day after Barack Obama was elected in 2008; the election of a black man drove these people insane with nightmare visions of a world where the “bottom rail” is on “top.” The talk about the budget, debt and taxes was always a shibboleth, because they didn’t seem to mind much about it during the Bush years when the Republicans controlled all branches of government.  What this is really about is their fear of “income redistribution” if it benefits people who isn’t a “real,” white American—as they envision themselves.

As for the “non-radical” Right House districts, Republicans have spared no effort to insure that their “RedMap” strategy since the 2008 election has borne fruit. Despite the fact that in both 2010 and 2012 more votes were cast for Democratic candidates than Republicans in the House, Republicans still won a large majority of seats both times. The Republican State Leadership Committee hasn’t bothered to conceal its strategy:

As the 2010 Census approached, the RSLC began planning for the subsequent election cycle, formulating a strategy to keep or win Republican control of state legislatures with the largest impact on congressional redistricting as a result of reapportionment. That effort, the REDistricting MAjority Project (REDMAP), focused critical resources on legislative chambers in states projected to gain or lose congressional seats in 2011 based on Census data.

The rationale was straightforward:  Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn.  Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.

What it has been concealed has been its tactics.  In Wisconsin,  redistricting was done in secret by a law firm hired by Republicans; a lawsuit demanding the release of records of how the redistricting was done revealed that “hundreds of thousands” of relevant files were destroyed. How did the Republicans win 13 out of 18 House seats in Pennsylvania in 2012 when Democrats won a majority of the total House candidate vote?  Some claim that it is due to geography, not to gerrymandering by Republicans, because Democratic-leaning voters tend to reside in more compact urban areas, while Republican voters tend to be more spread out in rural areas. But how can this be? House districts are supposed to be divided into equal population units of 710,000 people. This argument only makes sense if Democrats win by significantly higher margins in the urban districts than Republicans do in rural districts.  

Others, such as the Princeton Election Consortium, believe that gerrymandering has had a far greater effect on the House swing than “structural” considerations. “Packing” votes tightly in certain districts, and diluting opposition votes elsewhere—often with the help of computer software that makes this something than can be constructed in a matter of hours—is the principle method of achieving this result. According to the PEC, Republican gerrymandering had a five times greater effect on the House turnaround than any other variable; gerrymandered districts accounted for nearly the entire change of seats from Democrat to Republican.

This suggests that the Republicans have high-jacked government business by fraud, and the supposed “shift” of the electorate to the right after 2008 is more myth than  reality. Claims after the 2008 elections that the Republican Party was “dead” were obviously self-serving hyperbole; on the other hand, the impression left by the media that the Tea Party signified a “dramatic” shift in the public mood was proven to be overstated by Obama rather handily winning reelection and the Democrats gaining seats in the Senate in 2012.  

Nevertheless, Republicans control the governorships and legislatures in six states that are nominally Democratic-leaning nationally—Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Gaining control of such states’ redistricting process—and passing voter suppression laws—have had the effect of taking election process away from voters who do not normally vote in the manner that puts Republicans in control. Before the last term ended, the Republican-controlled legislature in Wisconsin passed a new voter ID bill, laws that cut absentee voting hours, made it more difficult for people with special needs to vote , and authorized the employment of thuggish “poll watchers” to harass presumably “Democratic-looking” voters.

Wisconsin Republicans also passed a measure to make recall elections nearly impossible.  Many have questioned how this formerly “progressive” state can tolerate such regressive actions that disenfranchise the electorate; some speculate that this is due to the influence of the alliance of “big money” and the religious right in the state. Another factor may be the influence of illegal “dark money”—in which the Koch Brothers are implicated—which is currently part of “John Doe” investigation in the state. 

What we need to realize is that Republicans are all about power—for themselves and their billionaire backers. In fact, Republicans these days are little more than “fronts” hand-picked by the corporate powers behind the scenes. They use the propaganda of fear—particularly racial fear—to keep enough  of the below the median wage white voters in line.  What people with broader minds must do is see Republican partisan rhetoric for what it is, and send the message that we have seen what they “stand” for, and it is time to drop the chute on them.