Republican Fears - Part 1

AlterNet on July 31, 2012 had a post that summed up the Republicans. As the 2012 presidential campaign takes a breather, we need to consider why today’s Republicans are no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt or Richard Nixon but instead a truly toxic aberration. As James Fallows noted a year ago in the Atlantic, the modern GOP’s biggest sin is discarding “political norms” that everyone once understood would hurt the country such as attacking labor unions by not paying 74,000 federal air traffic controllers and construction workers last August. Since then the GOP’s bad behavior has only worsened. In the introduction of the book It’s Even Worse Than It Appears it says “However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the 2 major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Anyone who has been around a child throwing a temper tantrum would recognize today’s congressional Republican leadership: threats and bullying, finger-pointing and running to his room and slamming the door. Republicans are afraid of losing power and influence in American politics and culture. Today’s Republicans cannot compete fairly and win. And when it comes to political tactics, there are 3 things today’s GOP fears more than almost anything:

Fear #1: Majority Rule in the Senate - On July 25 the Senate held 2 tax cut votes that were not blocked by Republicans. The first vote (45-54) rejected a GOP plan to extend all of the Bush-era income tax breaks. The second vote (51-48) approved the Democrats’ tax plan, which would extend the Bush-era tax cuts to the first $250,000 Americans earn in a year (including that of billionaires). Senate Republican leaders said they allowed the vote (did not filibuster) because it would have no effect as tax policy must originate in the House and that the GOP controlled chamber would certainly reject it (it did with a 170-257 vote). In most legislative bodies, simple majorities - 50% + 1 is all that is needed to pass legislation. In the Senate arcane rules allow endless debate or filibusters to continue unless there are 60 votes to end debate. Both times, simple majorities voted to reinstate higher federal income tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. In any other economic downturn this outcome would be common sense. In today’s anti-tax GOP the tax vote showed the ideas championed by Republicans are destined for defeat when they cannot hide behind parliamentary tricks and obscure super-majority votes. Republicans know they must game the Senate rules to win and have increasingly relied on that rule to block all kinds of Democratic proposals and relied on “holds” to block nominations to federal posts, particularly judges. Even the mainstream media has called the GOP’s abuse of the Senate filibuster rules a “road to gridlock.” (This has been done by both parties in the past; it’s unfair to yell about it now but as this is an ongoing problem perhaps we should consider trying a 55 vote for resolution.)

Fear #2: Open Elections - Like political cancer, in state after state since 2010, Republican-controlled legislatures have gone to great lengths to complicate many aspects of the voting process, from registration to ballot-access rules. The goal, as a Wisconsin Republican legislator bragged, is to suppress perceived Democratic voting blocks, particularly people of color, the poor and students. Instead of satisfying age, residency and citizenship status—and showing that one is mentally fit and has no felony record (as in most states)—these new laws say you cannot get a ballot unless you also have a specific kind of state government photo ID. Not everybody has that ID or the documents needed to obtain it. In states like Wisconsin, it has closed offices where people must go to obtain the required photo IDs—creating further barriers to voting. In Texas, it has limited the kind of ID that can be presented at polls, barring university IDs, to suppress student voting, but allowing gun permits. The right to vote has never been based on plastic. Yet, 30 states have laws in place that require voters to show an ID before voting in November, up from 24 states 4 years ago. This anti-democratic trend is larger than just photo ID laws. Florida passed laws imposing draconian fines and filing deadlines on voter registration groups, which, despite being blocked by a court recently, stopped groups like the League of Women Voters from registering people for months. In the latest twist, Tea Party officials who oversee elections from Florida’s governor to the secretaries of state in Colorado and Michigan have been claiming that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are on official voter rolls that must be purged before November. “It just shows confusion” said Ion Sancho, Leon County Florida election supervisor and a lawyer who oversaw Florida’s 2000 presidential recount until halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. These harmful tactics only show that today’s white-dominated, wealth-worshiping GOP knows it cannot hold onto power in an increasingly multicultural America unless it keeps communities of color, young people and women from voting.

You would think today’s Republicans would be more confident in their ideas, stand by them and trust the voters to decide. But that is not the case, a point that is underscored by the third thing the GOP fears: revealing who is bankrolling their electioneering (this will be tomorrow’s blog).