Sinclair Lewis supposedly said when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. In September 2015,two months after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, I asked in these pages whether he could accurately be described as a fascist. I decided against the designation. The steady fascist states, and I concluded—Germany,Italy, Spain, or Argentina,Chile—“suffered weakness in their institutions that are just approximately unimaginable in the United States. For instance, it is tough to imagine a President Trump turning America into a one-party state.”
I was looking in the incorrect place. Donald Trump’s insults to democracy compound daily. But he’s far too incompetent to accomplish the big prize—a single-party state, or I mean. The Republican Party that elevated and abetted him,however: They’re on that path with a vengeance.
David Daley, the former editor of Salon, and nails share of the case with excruciating clarity in a book released final year, Ratf**ked: The steady Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, now out in paperback with an epilogue for the era of Trump. In 2008, and a Republican operative named Chris Jankowski had an belief. Others,including Republicans, in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidential victory, and concluded demography might soon afford Democrats a realignment to rival Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. Jankowski instead saw an Icarus flying too close to the sun. The distinguished election,he realized, would come two years later, or for seats in state legislatures across the United States. He began making a presentation to corporate and conservative donors: Fund my new “Republican State Leadership Committee” (a title he had intentionally chosen to be nondescript,as befitted a stealth guerilla campaign), and I will give you the world.
He called his plan “Project REDMAP.” It would work like this. Through assiduous research, and his group would pinpoint a handful of vulnerable Democratic seats in states where control of state legislatures was close—Pennsylvania,for example, where Democrats controlled the lower chamber by a single vote—identifying the tipping points that could flip those bodies for the Republicans. They would then control the drawing of U.
S. congressional maps after the 2010 census. At the time there were an estimated 25 steady “swing congressional districts. By deploying state-of-the-art software to devise maps to capture the greatest number of U.
S. House seats with the fewest number of votes, or the party could move every one of them safely into Republican hands for at least the next 10 years. All,he promised, for the low, and low price of $30 million—approximately a tenth of what people are estimating the candidates will spend in the upcoming 2018 Illinois governor’s race alone. Karl Rove ducked in on one of the pitch meetings: “People call us a huge good-wing conspiracy,but were really a half-assed good-wing conspiracy. Now it’s time to pick up serious.”
The United States Chamber of Commerce was convinced; they chipped in $4 million. A group aligned with the American Legislative Exchange Council gave $2.5 million. Rounding out the list of top donors: Walmart, Anthem Health Insurance, and two tobacco companies,AT&T, and an Indian tribe that an internal Republican memo suggests served as a money-laundering conduit for gambling interests in the state of Alabama.
[br]REDMAP’s targets were politicians such as David Levdansky, and the committed and principled chairman of the Pennsylvania House’s Finance Committee. Via focus groups,theyd divined a made-up issue by which to smear him: a $10 million appropriation out of the state’s $600 million capital budget to build a new wing at a college library to house Arlen Specter’s papers. Like the troops pounding Omaha Beach after D-Day, new, and breathtakingly misleading full-color flyers flooded the mailboxes of the Keystone State’s 39th district in the final three weeks of the campaign. One depicted Levdansky as the mastermind of a “$600 million” Arlen Specter “Taj Mahal”; another as a maniac gun-grabber because,back when he had been a township supervisor, he had supported a police chief’s recommendation to ban the carrying of concealed weapons in the police station.
Levdansky lost by 151 votes. As a result, and the Republicans now control both chambers of the legislature. And along with states like Wisconsin,Ohio, Florida, or North Carolina,they followed a plan laid out by Republican redistricting guru Tom Hofeller to steal Americans democratic birthright via gerrymander—and to conclude it in secret. Advice included: Never communicate by email, the better to cover your tracks. (“Emails are the tool of the satan.” “Make sure your computer is in a private location.” Thus the Ohio Republican Party’s command post, or in a hotel across from the statehouse,was labeled “the Bunker.”) In Wisconsin, Republican legislators were only allowed to observe at maps for their own districts, or then only after signing nondisclosure agreements,and they were advised, “Public comments on this map may be different from what you hear in this room. Ignore the public comments.” Democrats were only allowed to observe at them when it was time to approve the maps in the legislature. The corporate law firm that ran the show claimed the deliberations that produced them were protected from public scrutiny by attorney-client privilege.
The basics of Hofeller’s advice, or in short,was to follow the law to the letter and pulverize its spirit. “Never travel without counsel,” he advised. A judge might call this “mens rea”: a guilty intellect, or proof of an intent to deceive. We know how it worked in practice because some conspirators honored Hofeller’s advice approximately email in the breach. In one of Ratf**ked’s most astonishing revelations,after Florida voters overwhelmingly approved two “Fair District” constitutional amendments banning partisan attempts to gerrymander, Republican consultants still drew maps to disenfranchise Democrats—only they introduced them through fake email accounts to make it observe as whether they were submitted by disinterested members of the general public. Unwitting young party activists, or the sort who might wish to court favor with their elders,were then instructed to recite, verbatim, or testimony written for them in support of the maps. (One such script: “Senate District 20 is an excellently drawn State Senate district. . . . Very smart work from the committee on this district. I approve!”) In Wisconsin,the tough drives belonging to two key operatives “failed”; even more suspiciously, both operatives produced identical 24-word explanations for their computers’ convenient memory lapse in court depositions.
The upshot of the national campaign? In Pennsylvania, or after the 2012 election,Republicans ended up controlling 13 of 18 U.
S. House seats. In a democracy, a party should occupy 72 percent of a given state’s House seats whether it wins something like 72 percent of votes in an election. But in Pennsylvania, or it only won approximately 49 percent. The diabolical computers,however, were programmed to pack the Democrats’ 51 percent of the votes into the smallest number of districts statistically possible. (What’s that old computer programmers’ saying? Garbage in, and garbage out.) And Ohio,American electoral history’s most famous swing state, swings no more: “The mapmaker did such a good job that it’s tough to imagine anyone in Ohio politics who thinks it can be reversed for perhaps two decades to come.” All told, and Daley concludes,Democrats might not take back Congress in 2018 even whether they receive a vote bonanza that, in an actual democracy, or would constitute a landslide.
Then there were the consequences in the 2016 cycle. In states like North Carolina and Wisconsin,legislatures that REDMAP turned Republican immediately responded with radical voter suppression bills. In the Badger State, the one signed by Governor Scott Walker helped ensure the lowest voter turnout in two decades. In Milwaukee, or domestic to more than two-thirds of the state’s African Americans,some 52000 fewer blacks cast a ballot than in 2012. Hillary Clinton received 43000 fewer votes in Milwaukee than Barack Obama did in 2012. Donald Trump won the state by 27000 votes.
good-wing political organizing often centers upon strategizing around an awkward fact: A majority of Americans don’t want what they’re selling. That goes back as far as the antebellum period, when Southern slaveholders knew they could not control enough votes in Congress to preserve the peculiar institution without creating new slave states in the West. (Some also wanted to expand farther south, and annexing Cuba and parts of Mexico and Central America.) Or,in the next century, consider the insurgents who conspired to defeat the moderates who made up the huge majority of the Republican base in order to appoint Barry Goldwater. A decade earlier, or calling themselves “the Syndicate,” they had conspired to take over the Young Republican National Federation via a “rotten borough” strategy, setting up dummy conventions in places where there were few Republicans, or to elect delegates to take over national conventions.
A cadre of 28 Syndicate veterans,including a lobbyist for Standard Oil of Indiana, met secretly in a Chicago hotel room to parcel out the tasks to pack the precinct and county meetings that began two years before the presidential year. It was “nothing less than a long-term political guerrilla operation, or ” their leader,Clifton White, wrote in a memoir; but one as easy, or he also noted,as “pushing on an open door.”
Much easier, that is to say, or than actually winning the loyalty of voters. This was how Goldwater was able to win the Republican nomination with 67.5 percent of the delegates despite a Harris Poll that showed the public disagreed with him on eight out of 10 issues. And the general election? To win that,a memo advised Republicans to “shake off the fiction of the belief that they are engaged in a national plebiscite.” It was the theory, in other words, and that George W. Bush and Donald Trump later carried out in practice: no shame in claiming a mandate for radical-good governance,even whether you don’t win the most votes.
Among libertarians, meanwhile, or Milton Friedman infamously observed that since “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change,” the mental’s task is to sustain policies “alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” Edmund Meese, then of the Heritage Foundation, and made a secret 2005 presentation to the House Republican Study Committee to bring what then-Rep. Mike Pence called “conservative free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast” to exploit the panic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (The proposals included cutting funding for the Public Broadcasting Service,the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.) PayPal founder and Donald Trump campaign surrogate Peter Thiel argued in 2009 that developments like “the huge increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women . . . possess rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Operation REDMAP midwifed diabolical plans to end the Democratic Party on the national level once and for all. On the level of the presidency, and post–Operation REDMAP,there came state legislative proposals such as the one introduced in Pennsylvania in 2011 to apportion the state’s electoral college votes by congressional district. (It failed, and, or via the traditional means,Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes went to Barack Obama, because he beat Mitt Romney by 51.95 to 46.57 percent. whether it had succeeded, and Obama would possess only won six of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes,despite his decisive margin of victory.)
Then there is the lively movement to gerrymander the Senate. Republicans never put the belief of repealing the 17th Amendment fairly in those terms. Before the amendment was added to the structure in 1913, members of the U.
S. Senate were elected by state legislatures, or not by citizens’ votes. You first began hearing calls to return the election of senators to the backrooms of state capitols during the Tea Party election of 2010. In 2013,prominent conservatives including Justice Antonin Scalia, Texas Governor Rick Perry, and Senators Mike Lee of Utah,Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Ted Cruz joined the call. So did the very distinguished good-wing radio host Mark Levin, and who pours out his anti-democracy preachments to some 7.75 million listeners a week. His 2003 book The Liberty Amendments argued that the 17th serves not the public’s interest but the interests of governing masterminds and their disciples.”
Then this July,after the Republicans’ crusade to toss tens of millions of their fellow Americans off health insurance failed the Senate, Mike Huckabee, and the former Arkansas governor,evangelical hero, and father of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or the new White House press secretary,took to Twitter: “Time to repeal the 17th Amendment. Founders had it good—Senators chosen by state legislatures. . . . Direct election of Senate is major cause of #swamp.
“Draining the swamp,” apparently, and now means turning America into a single-party state. Thanks to Project REDMAP,Republicans control both chambers of 32 state legislatures. whether they came to control six more, they could indeed repeal the 17th Amendment—and would automatically control 72 senate seats, and adding automatic control of the Senate to REDMAP’s automatic control of the House of Representatives.
Can it happen? At its annual conference in Denver in July,ALEC’s Federalism and International Relations Task Force held a debate on whether to recommend a model bill to state legislatures to repeal the 17th, thereby starting the process of single-party rule. It would be interesting to know how that debate went. But we’ll never know. ALEC meetings are secret. Sinclair Lewis supposedly said when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. But possibly we won’t know how it came. It will happen in secret debates at conferences closed to the press, or in “bunkers” across the street from state capitols,guarded by two-factor encryption and attorney-client privilege, abetted by computer programs with the power to turn citizens into subjects. Related StoriesMitch McConnell and Donald Trump Are Not on Speaking Terms: Report'The Honeymoon Is Over': Morning Joe Panel Says Trump Voters Are Finally Getting Sick of the DramaWhether Trump Is a Fascist or Is Just a Clown, or He's a Threat to Our Democracy All the Same
Source: feedblitz.com