Our Era Of Greed And Hypocrisy

As the historian Jon Meacham said recently, “Such a low bar for conduct and a high bar for impeachment cannot benefit us.” We are mired in a no-win situation where White House aides, playing to the president’s debilitating narcissism, seek to hide the USS John McCain, for fear that seeing it in port in Japan will spur a presidential tantrum, just like that two-year old seated in front of you on the red eye from LAX to ATL. Good luck sleeping through either.

We are watching the Republican Senate pack the Federal Courts with ideologues at an unprecedented pace. Fundamental to the rise of the right are two organizations they hope you’ve never heard of: the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which is the tip of the Republican partisan redistricting spear, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which influences state-based legislative processes.

Years ago, ALEC realized that demographics are destiny, and that the Republican’s destiny was to be overwhelmed by youth, women, and people of color—none of whom are big fans. Seeing that it was already too late to act at the federal level, they moved to takeover statehouses and governor’s mansions.

ALEC has enabled the most selfish, cynical, and greedy among us to dominate state and national politics by putting party over country.

My suspicion is that they may be behind the deeply troubling “heartbeat” bills (scientifically, there is no heartbeat at six-weeks, this, from the Guardian: “Arbitrary gestational age bans on abortion at six weeks that use the term ‘heartbeat’ to define the gestational development being targeted do not reflect medical accuracy or clinical understanding,” said Dr Ted Anderson, president of the American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians (ACOG). The organization represents 58,000 physicians across the US.

“Pregnancy and fetal development are a continuum. What is interpreted as a heartbeat in these bills is actually electrically induced flickering of a portion of the fetal tissue that will become the heart as the embryo develops,” Anderson said.)

Notably, one of their great skills is to create the nomenclature and enforce a particularly effective messaging discipline to keep all their soldiers using their terminology, e.g. "anti-abortion” becomes the sunnier, "pro-life.”

If you’ve wondered how the Republicans came to control so many historically Democratic state legislatures in the first place, wonder no more. The answer lies in controlling the redistricting process, and for that, they turned to the RSLC.

The RSLC began by providing the methodology by which state legislatures could creatively re-draw districts so that opposition voters were corralled into a few, non-contiguous districts, ensuring they would have no power, even if the state was generally Democratic. It is referred to as “packing and cracking” districts. Once in control, ALEC was able provide the legislative language, state-by-state to undo as much progressive policy as possible. Pick any reactionary legislation that you find in multiple states, and you’ll be amazed at the consistency of language. ALEC wrote the bills. The raw power of modern computers and software gave RSLC the ability to gerrymander statehouses first, and once those were secured, they packed and cracked Congressional districts, handing them the House of Representatives under most of the Bush II, Obama, and Trump administrations. To be sure, Democrats are guilty of political gerrymandering—look at Maryland—and should also be stopped, but comparisons must end there as Republicans, via RSLC, have raised it to a fine art.

Again, the Guardian: “Republicans recognized the opportunity. Democrats snoozed. Nine years later, they’re still paying the price, particularly in swing state legislatures. A little-known group called the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) launched a devastatingly effective strategy called Redmap – short for the Redistricting Majority Project. It dropped $30m of dark money into sleepy local races, flipped legislative chambers blue to red, and gave the Republicans control over drawing the vast majority of local legislative and US House seats – and with it, the power to remake the political playing field for the next decade.

Republicans took such advantage that they have controlled state legislative supermajorities in otherwise competitive states even when voters prefer Democratic candidates by hundreds of thousands of votes. This nullifies elections and insulates lawmakers from a majority that seeks to vote them out of office.

Despite lacking any mandate for an extreme agenda in a closely divided nation, Republican lawmakers have pushed through new voting restrictions, anti-labor laws, the emergency manager bill that led to poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, and now, these strict abortion bans. Electorally, there’s little that Democrats can do to stop it.”

Taken together, these groups led us to the present moment of unspeakable hypocrisy where the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), unabashedly brags that he’d gladly seat a new Supreme Court justice in the coming election year, defying his own logic in denying President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing on the basis of its being an election year. You can thank RSLC and ALEC for Mitch McConnell’s invulnerability. He knows the score. He knows the gerrymandered districts that RSLC delivered means an unfettered conveyor belt of ALEC-written legislation is chugging along in the majority of statehouses. It’s given him a sense of impunity unmatched in recent history. How else could he deny a legitimately elected president his constitutional right to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, and then brag about this incredibly anti-democratic maneuver as the achievement he is most proud of?

Using these two secretive entities, Republicans, recognizing they cannot win and govern on the merits, put two thumbs on the scales and undermined the concepts of fair play and majority rules.