How Republicans Rig the Game

[hue]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-republicans-rig-the-game-20131111

Through gerrymandering, voter suppression and legislative tricks, the GOP has managed to hold on to power while more and more Americans reject their candidates and their ideas

As the nation recovers from the Republican shutdown of government, the question Americans should be asking is not "Why did the GOP do that to us?" but "Why were they even relevant in the first place?" So dramatically have the demographic and electoral tides in this country turned against the Republican Party that, in a representative democracy worthy of the designation, the Grand Old Party should be watching from the sidelines and licking its wounds. Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote. What's more, the party controls 55 seats in the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the House received well over a million more votes than their Republican counterparts in the election last year. And yet, John Boehner still wields the gavel in the House and Republican resistance remains a defining force in the Senate, frustrating Obama's ambitious agenda.

The GOP's real agenda: How Republicans' politics are harsher than ever

How is this possible? 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.

Despite the fact that Republican Congressional candidates received nearly 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates last November, the Republicans lost only eight seats from their historic 2010 romp, allowing them to preserve a fat 33-seat edge in the House. Unscrupulous Republican gerrymandering following the 2010 census made the difference, according to a statistical analysis conducted by the Princeton Election Consortium. Under historically typical redistricting, House Republicans would now likely be clinging to a reedy five-seat majority. "There's the normal tug of war of American politics," says Sam Wang, founder of the consortium. "Trying to protect one congressman here, or unseat another one there." The Princeton model was built, he says, to detect "whether something got pulled off-kilter on top of that."

Did it ever. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates took 51 percent of the vote across the state's 18 districts, but only five of the seats. In Wang's model, the odds against Democrats emerging at an eight-seat disadvantage are 1,000-to-1. And Pennsylvania was not alone. According to the Election Consortium analysis, gerrymandering helped Republicans secure 13 seats in just six states – including Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina – that, under normal rules of engagement, Democrats would have won.

[blkmusclmachine]

1. Republicans lie, cheat, and steal. And the Democrats only want to "look forward."

That's DC "bi-partisanship."

[TheKentuckian]

4. That is the real problem along with either no referees on the field or ones also in the con.

I'm at the point where I have little choice but to believe that everybody is in on it because I just can't buy the excuses for the dynamics at work.

I'm not a "there is no such thing as an accident" sort of person but a string of only so many unfortunate events that happen to ever concentrate power and wealth with by and large the same faces mentored by the previous generation of the same faces that can fall within the realm of the plausible in my eyes.

Humans are top tier predators, it does not follow that any group as large and diverse as our party would so uniformly and consistently be so mealy mouthed, spineless, and naive over such a long period of time and further almost always oppose any in their own ranks that push back.

The media is clearly beyond complicit and more than any few of our people are too because otherwise it wouldn't even be in the cards.

The money is a corrupting influence, our leaders and representation is not really of us, and I increasingly believe the population and vastness of geography makes it impossible to act as representatives with the puny number of legislators alone. The size alone leads to authoritarian tendencies and we have very little in the way of checks on such tendencies and none if the two major parties agree on something nasty.

[Gothmog]

2. This is a great article

I enjoyed it but I was aware of most of the facts discussed

[Stuart G]

3. K and R thanks for posting nt