Winners and Losers and the Democratic Process

There’s a common saying among political geeks (of whom I am admittedly one): elections have consequences.

This is shorthand for the essential bargain of democratic systems. We The People agree not to wage war and/or insurrection, and instead to conduct contests at regular intervals, during which we try to convince a majority of those who will cast a vote to see things our way. Those contests–called elections–are supposed to be fair (we aren’t supposed to use trickery or intimidation to keep eligible citizens from the polls, for example), and when they are over and the votes are counted, the contenders are supposed to abide by the results.

Now, the losers don’t have to like the results. They don’t have to agree with the wisdom of the electorate. They can console each other by agreeing that the voters were stupid or venal or misled. But in our system–in any legitimate system–the losers’ recourse isn’t sabotage; it’s the next election.

Yesterday’s headlines made it glaringly clear that a substantial portion of the GOP, locally and nationally, is no longer willing to play by those rules.

In Indiana, voters elected Glenda Ritz by a very substantial margin–a margin exceeding that of Mike Pence, who was elected Governor. The Republicans (who hold all the other offices) aren’t happy that they lost this one. Fair enough. But they have proceeded to cheat, to use the offices to which they were elected to undermine the authority of the new Superintendent, and to strip the office of the powers it had when their guy occupied it. They weren’t–and aren’t–willing to work with her until the next election, when they can try to convince voters to elect their candidate. Instead, they are doing everything they can to thwart the will of a majority of Indiana voters and undermine the democratic process.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, we have a group of Representatives–a minority even within their own party–who don’t like a law that was duly passed in a prior legislative session. A majority of Representatives and Senators voted for that law, after many months of debate. It was signed by the President, and its constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court. The wisdom of that law was a central issue in the ensuing Presidential campaign–an election Obama won by more than five million votes, and an election in which a million more people voted for Congressional Democrats than for Congressional Republicans.

Poll after poll confirms that a majority of Americans either favors keeping the Affordable Care Act or wishes it had gone farther. But even if that weren’t the case–even if their hatred of this particular legislation wasn’t so irrational and disproportionate–that’s not the issue. In a constitutional republic, the Tea Party goons responsible for shutting down the government cannot justify circumventing democratic processes and holding the nation hostage.

I’m not a particular fan of Thomas Friedman, but his recent column was exactly right. This is a coup. It isn’t an attack on the Affordable Care Act. It is a frontal assault on the democratic process, on government legitimacy, and on the Constitution.

It’s a refusal to play by the rules, an effort to insure that–if they don’t like the outcome–elections won’t have consequences.

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Todd Rokita–Embarrassing Sentient Hoosiers Even More Than Mike Pence

Well, I see that Governor Pence just couldn’t help himself–despite the fact that he didn’t have to step into the controversy over the shutdown, despite the fact that anything he said about it was guaranteed to piss off one side or the other, he simply had to express his approval of an irresponsible and a-constitutional action that is damaging the American economy and hurting millions of innocent people.

Way to go, Mike.

For first class stupidity, though, you really have to turn to Representative Todd Rokita. And leave it to the Daily Show to expose how utterly clueless and embarrassing  Tea Party Todd can be.

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It’s Not a Game!

Or is it?

From Talking Points Memo:

The reason Congress is mired in repeated fiscal crises is that Republicans have thwarted budget conference negotiations since April, when the two chambers passed their own deeply divergent budget resolutions. Senate Democrats have requested conference negotiations 18 times and Republicans have denied their request each time.

“After blocking Senate Democrats’ attempts to start a budget conference 18 times over the past six months, Republicans are now scrambling to start a conference committee with mere minutes to go before a government shutdown,” said Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray (D-WA).

I am so tired of self-important bloviators engaging in PR and theatrics at the expense of governing. I’m furious with self-described “patriots” and “Christians” who pontificate about the Constitution and morality, and then proceed ignore both and to play games with the lives and health of ordinary Americans.

And I’m frustrated that the rest of us can’t seem to do anything about it.

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One Thing We Can Do

There isn’t much that rational Republicans and Democrats can do about today’s zealots. John Boehner has obviously lost control of both the “suicide caucus’ and his mind. But we can—and should—avoid repeats of this hostage situation created by extremists who owe their elections not to fair elections but to gerrymandering.

In Indiana, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause have launched “Rethinking Redistricting: Drawing a Line for Democracy,” a project designed to ensure that “voters choose their legislators instead of legislators choosing their voters.” They hope to generate a popular movement to amend the Indiana Constitution and require an independent redistricting commission.

A small but important step on the long road back to sanity.

Reform will be difficult. Both parties are invested in the current system. The only way change will occur is in response to a true grass-roots movement, and in order to generate that movement, ordinary citizens will need to understand how the practice of partisan redistricting undermines democratic accountability.

In order to increase public understanding of the problems, “Rethinking Redistricting” plans to conduct a broad educational campaign via “conversation circles,” a time-honored approach to retail politics. Attendees will discuss the most harmful effects of our current system, which virtually ensures that few districts will actually be competitive. (In 2012, only two of Indiana’s Congressional districts were considered competitive.)

When a result is predetermined—when a citizen’s vote is unlikely to affect the outcome—citizens don’t vote. And in Indiana, they don’t. The 2011 Civic Health Index ranked Indiana 48th in the nation for voter turnout.

Worse, with lack of competition comes polarization. Republicans don’t fear Democratic opposition, they fear primary challenges from the Right; Democrats don’t worry about Republicans; they worry about attacks from the Left. The current system thus destroys incentives to work across the aisle, to be reasonable, to negotiate and find acceptable compromises.

The current system has given us the Tea Party debacle we are currently seeing. Thanks to gerrymandering, despite the fact that Democratic candidates for Congress got a million more votes than Republicans in the last election, Republicans retained control of the House. The cost was high: election of 80 Representatives from deep Red districts, drawn to be impervious to competition and thoroughly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, that comprise what has been dubbed “the suicide caucus.”

Even within today’s radical GOP, they represent a minority view.

According to the Cook Political Report, Representatives in the suicide caucus were elected with fourteen and a half million votes, or twelve percent of the votes cast in the 2012 elections. They represent fifty-eight million constituents—eighteen percent of the population. Seventy-six of them are male, seventy-nine white.

None of them represent the sane American middle.

Call your local League of Women Voters rep, or Julia Vaughn at Common Cause. Host a conversation, call your State Senator and Representative. Let’s do something really radical, and let Indiana voters choose their representatives rather than the other way around.

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Feeding the Wolves

One of the columns in yesterday’s New York Times referenced the old tale–variously attributed to Native Americans, village leaders of old or saintly religious folks– about the young woman who comes to a wise elder to ask what she should do about a recurring nightmare in which two wolves are ferociously fighting. She asks what it means, and is told that the wolves represent two sides of her own nature: the good and bad.

When she then asks which will win, the wise man tells her “The one you feed.”

This, in a nutshell, is why  wise people refuse to negotiate with terrorists. Negotiation and compromise are important in many areas of life: between spouses, in legislative chambers, even at times between parents and children. But like all tools, it is important to know when–and when not–to deploy them.

The Tea Party radicals currently holding the nation hostage to their demands are terrorists. Unable to marshal the votes to defeat the Affordable Care Act , unable to defeat a President who ran on a record that prominently featured that Act, they have resorted to the sort of blackmail characteristic of terrorists: give us what we want or I’ll kill or maim the hostage.

The American economy is the hostage.

Even people who are adamantly opposed to the ACA should condemn these tactics, for the same reason that kids on a playground should refuse to give in to the bully who says “Play by my rules or I’ll take my ball and bat and go home.” It’s the same reason we don’t negotiate with rogue states that capture and hold innocent civilians hostage. Giving in to their demands encourages the behavior we deplore. It sets a dangerous precedent for the future–a future in which spoiled brat minorities who don’t get their way through legitimate means can circumvent democratic processes and actually be rewarded for the damage they cause.

Ironically, if these tactics work for Tea Party fanatics today, you can be sure they’ll be deployed by folks with very different agendas tomorrow. As a friend of mine likes to say, poison gas is a great weapon– until the wind shifts.

Giving in to these tactics feeds the wrong wolf.

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