Is There A Remedy For The Dysfunction Of American Politics?

Financiers of the far right's anti-democracy jihad: 2 Kochs

Elizabeth Drew, in a fascinating piece for the NY Review of Books, The Stranglehold on Our Politics, talks about the determinative properties of voter turnout in midterm elections. Normally turnout sinks from between 51.7 to 61.6% for presidential elections into the high 30s for midterms. When the Democrats took back the House and Senate from the GOP in 2006, they managed to turn out a whopping 40.4%. The GOP learned a lesson and, with the help of right-wing billionaires and their zombie Tea Party brigades turned out 41.6% to rout House Democrats. (Important to note: while the GOP was turning out their forces at unprecedented rates, discouraged and disappointed Democrats were staying away from the polls rather than vote for Blue Dogs, New Dems and other Republican-lite candidates. This is the dynamic Steve Israel and the DCCC is setting up for the 2014 midterms again.)

The midterms, with their lower turnout, reward intensity. In 2010, the Republicans were sufficiently worked up about the new health care law and an old standby, “government spending,” particularly the stimulus bill, to drive them to the polls in far larger numbers than the Democrats. A slight upward tick in turnout numbers can have a disproportionate impact in Congress and many of the states, and therefore the country as a whole. The difference in turnout caused such a change in 2010; in fact, the Republicans gained sixty-three House seats and took control of both the governorships and the legislatures in twelve states; the Democrats ended up with control of the fewest state legislative bodies since 1946. The midterms go a long way toward explaining the dismaying spectacle in Washington today. State elections bear much of the responsibility for the near paralysis in Congress thus far this year and the extremism that has gripped the House Republicans and is oozing over into the Senate.

The difference in the turnouts for presidential and midterm elections means that there are now almost two different electorates. Typically, the midterm electorate is skewed toward the white and elderly. In 2010 the youth vote dropped a full 60 percent from 2008. Those who are disappointed with the president they helped elect two years earlier and decide to stay home have the same effect on an election as those who vote for the opposition candidate.

Little wonder, then, that there can be such a gulf between the president and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives-- but also between the president and the governments of most of the twenty-four states over which the Republicans now maintain complete control; almost half of these were elected in 2010. Democrats have complete control over fourteen states. The Republican-controlled states include almost all the most populous ones outside of New York and California. Since the midterms of 2010 the Republicans in most of these states have pursued coordinated, highly regressive economic policies and a harsh social agenda. Thus, while there’s largely been stalemate in Washington, sweeping social and economic changes that are entirely at odds with how the country voted in the last presidential election have been taking place in Republican-controlled states.

As a result of the relative lack of interest in state elections, we now have the most polarized political system in modern American history. It’s also the least functional. Many state governments’ policies are not just almost completely divorced from what is going on at the federal level-- but also in some cases what is prescribed by law and the Constitution. Systemic factors based in state politics explain more about our national political condition than tired arguments in Washington over who is at fault for what does or doesn’t-- mainly doesn’t-- happen at the federal level. The dysfunction begins in the states.

...[W]hile Obama won 51.1 percent of the popular vote in 2012, as a result of the redistricting following 2010 the Republican House majority represents 47.5 percent as opposed to 48.8 percent for the Democrats, or a minority of the voters for the House in 2012. Take the example of the Ohio election: Obama won the state with 51 percent of the vote, but because of redistricting, its House delegation is 75 percent Republican and 25 percent Democratic.

The state government’s power over the redrawing of congressional districts every ten years is probably the single most determining factor of our political situation. It’s clear that the Republicans were successful in winning and using the 2010 elections as a prelude to the most distorted and partisan redistricting in modern times.

...[But] when the Republicans began their intense effort in the run-up to 2010 to take over state legislatures and draw districts free of serious Democratic challengers, they failed to anticipate that this would leave their members more vulnerable to challenges from the right. The fear of being defeated in local contests by even more radical Republicans has also taken hold in the state legislatures, which in turn affects the nature of the House. The more established House Republicans, including the leaders, now live in terror of a putsch from the most extreme right-wing elements of their caucus, in particular the Tea Party. They are not yet a majority of the party but they have the power to behave like one through their use of fear. A lamentable result of the effort to draw safe districts is that only an estimated thirty-five House seats out of 435 will actually be competitive in the 2014 election. Therein lies the source of the near paralysis of the federal government.

Nate Silver wrote in the the New York Times after the 2012 election that while there had been earlier periods of great partisanship, in particular between 1880 and 1920, “it is not clear that there have been other periods when individual members of the House had so little to deter them from highly partisan behavior.” Under these circumstances, it’s harder than ever before to put together bipartisan coalitions to pass major legislation, as had long been done for civil rights bills and other major changes in economic, social, and even environmental policy. The fact that Obama had to pass the health care law with almost no Republican support rendered it more vulnerable later. The Republicans’ limp and deceptive explanation for their opposition to the law is that the Democrats left them out of consideration of the bill (which was actually based on Republican ideas).

The Republicans who took over the states following the 2010 elections arrived with an agenda strongly based on model laws supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), heavily funded by the Koch brothers along with some other big corporations. The other group that benefited most from the 2010 elections was the passionately anti-abortion Christian right-- which is not only an essential part of the national Republican Party’s base but also dominates the Republican Party in about twenty states, and has a substantial influence in more than a dozen other state parties. The Christian right is tremendously effective in motivating its followers to go to the polls-- and then threaten a loss of support if their agenda isn’t adopted.

The overall result of the new Republican domination has been that these states have cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations and moved toward a more comprehensive sales tax; slashed unemployment benefits; cut money for education and various public services; and sought to break the remaining power of the unions. Not only did Republican officials in these states manipulate the constitutionally guaranteed right to vote in their effort to win the presidency in 2012 and preserve their own power by keeping Democratic supporters from voting, but they are at it again. The constitutional right to abortion granted under Roe v. Wade has been flouted. The new strategy among anti-abortion forces is to limit legal abortions to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Several states have adopted this measure and others are in the process of doing so.

Pregnant women’s privacy has also been invaded through state measures requiring them to be subjected to transvaginal ultrasound examinations of the fetus, and forcing them to look at or hear described the result of any sonogram. Doctors have been ordered by state law to lie to women about supposed dire consequences of abortion, for example that abortions can lead to breast cancer. Abortion clinics in some states have been shut down or eliminated. Funding for other medical services for women, such as mammograms, has also been greatly reduced. Many of these state laws are under legal challenge and some of them may end up in the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade may be doomed.

...In 2014, thirty-six governorships, an unusually large number, will be up for election, including in such important swing states in presidential elections as Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Until 2010, all of them but Florida were governed by Democrats and carried by Obama, but since then they have been governed by Republicans determined to impose highly conservative policies on previously Democratic states carried by Obama.

Who controls the country’s statehouses can matter a lot in presidential elections. For one thing, that’s where the rules and conditions for voting are set. In 2012 we saw the Republican governor of Florida and the attorney general of Ohio cut the number of polling places and the number of days and hours they were open in an obvious effort to limit the votes of blacks and other minorities, as well as poor seniors.

Though great numbers of voters rose up and insisted on casting their ballots, it’s still the case that large numbers-- estimated at a minimum at hundreds of thousands-- were prevented from voting. And in a close election a governor can be of significant aid to the national candidate: the state’s party machinery and the governor’s political network can be called on to help out. The ultimate example of how helpful a governor can be was provided by Jeb Bush in Florida in 2000.

...[I]n their zeal to eliminate a law that’s been passed and is on the books [the Affordable Care Act], congressional Republicans may have built their own trap. Whatever they do in the name of getting rid of the program or cutting it back is attacked by the most militant Republicans as insufficient; there’s always a more drastic proposal, and a demand from the base that they support it. A recent idea-- backed by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee-- was that the government be shut down unless “Obamacare” is defunded. But some senior Republicans with memories of the calamity to their party caused by the Newt Gingrich–led shutdown in 1995–1996, as well as governors with national ambitions, were outspoken in calling this a stupid idea. Cruz, at the center of the effort, showed in his first weeks in the Senate that he’s not above McCarthyite tactics (as in the Hagel hearings); and he freely breaks the rules and understandings by which the Senate functions at all. Most uncommonly, he is actually hated and feared by most of his colleagues (including Republicans)—such strong feelings about a fellow senator are rare. The Harvard Law graduate and able advocate before the Supreme Court dismissed his senior Republicans’ concerns and in his mellifluous tone said that they were misreading history, and he carried on a crusade for a shutdown, which few of his colleagues liked.

But the ruffian Cruz overstepped and made a big mistake. As he traveled around with DeMint, he aroused great cheers from crowds at town meetings in August—but his colleagues held firm; no additional sponsors of the shutdown proposal came forth. Beyond that, Cruz and DeMint threatened Senate Republicans-- true conservatives such as Tom Coburn and Lindsay Graham-- who refused to back the shutdown with primary challenges. (Cruz is far more intelligent than DeMint but in defying the leaders of his party he is following his own agenda.) The base doesn’t mind if he’s unpopular in Washington, though.

Struggling once more to convince his far-right caucus members to take a less self-damaging route than the shutdown, the beleaguered Speaker John Boehner suggested that instead of shutting down the government unless Obamacare is defunded or postponed—anything to keep it from going into effect by the 2014 elections—they delay passing an increase in the debt ceiling. Holding up the debt ceiling in 2011 brought all kinds of obloquy down on the heads of the House Republicans and also stupidly hurt the credit standing of the US. Boehner has been leaping from ice floe to ice floe, each one more dangerous. So far his strategy of postponing calamity has worked—but what happens if he runs out of ice floes?

The agony of the current Republican Party is that most of the far right isn’t concerned about the possible effects of their tactics on the national party-- on its ability to win not just the next presidential election but also other offices down the line. The Tea Party members of Congress are responding to their districts. But the mainstream Republicans are panicked that they have lost four out of the last six presidential elections, and they have yet to figure out how to placate their base in the nomination process and still win the general election. But the far right has its own version of reality. Some even plan to run for president on it.

...Can this chokehold on our politics be broken? Several states are considering the possible removal of the power to control redistricting from the politicians who stand to benefit from their own decisions. Arizona and California have adopted independent commissions to redraw districts.

Theoretically, Congress could pass legislation requiring the states to reform their redistricting practices for federal elections; but that would require a sufficiently powerful movement-- of which there is no sign-- to put pressure on members of Congress to act against their own perceived interest.

The citizens of a state have it within their power to press for such changes in the nature of their state governments and the consequent effects on their immediate lives as well as the functioning of the nation’s political system. By rousing themselves to vote, they could have a stronger voice in filling state offices that may not seem so exciting but are highly consequential. Is it possible that the off-year elections could be taken almost as seriously as the presidential ones? The radicalism of the right has become so extreme that it may have unintentionally provided an impetus in that direction.

In the end only the members of the electorate can restore the institutions and procedures that make our democratic system work, starting with the next chance they get.

And speaking of "the next chance they get." October 15 is the date of the Massachusetts primary special election to replace Ed Markey in the House. There are a bunch of garden variety hacks running and one-- just one-- real progressive leader, state Rep. Carl Sciortino. You can help his win this seat here and help the forces of reform get rolling towards a good midterm despite Steve Israel's incompetence at the DCCC.