Winner Take All: The modern GOP has become a partisan warfare machine

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:


Winner Take All
Submitted by Digby on September 5, 2007 - 1:31pm.


One of the hallmarks of the modern GOP, the party of Nixon, is that it consistently pushes the ethical envelope with a drive to win by any means necessary. This has been well documented over the years, but seems to have accelerated in the last decade to the point where it is now a sort of ritualistic compulsion. I suppose it's reflective of the "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" characteristic of American culture, but it's become so fetishized among professional Republicans that they aren't even pretending to follow the rules anymore.

A good case in point is this move on the part of certain people associated with the Swift Boat smear operation of 2004 to put an initiative on the ballot to apportion California's electoral college votes according to the percentages won by the candidates in the state. Two small states already do this, but all 48 of the others grant the electoral college on a winner take all basis. Theoretically, it's perfectly defensible to believe that the votes should be apportioned according to who won, but in practice unless all the states do it at the same time, Democratic California will effectively be giving the Republicans 20 or more votes they would not get otherwise, and it could very well determine the next presidential election.

The people who are backing this scheme are all Republicans and they are even associated with previous election shenannigans. They aren't even trying to hide their partisan intent. They are simply doing it and don't seem to honestly care if anyone thinks this might be a shady way to win an election.

But it isn't unprecedented. It naturally follows a long line of GOP actions in recent years that challenge the many traditions and unspoken agreements and understandings that make up our political system. These things do not rely on legalisms, but rather on a certain underlying set of beliefs about what comprises the social contract. Assumptions, to be sure, but so widely held as to normally go unquestioned. In this case, the idea that is being challenged is the fundamental spirit of democracy. I think most people in America agree that elections aren't truly legitimate if they don't accurately reflect the will of the electorate and if the rules are rigged in favor of one candidate or another they think it is wrong, even if it might be strictly legal.

But over the course of the last decade we have seen several rather dramatic assaults on those assumptions. They all operated (loosely) within the law, but violated the spirit of democracy and the rules under which we had all operated. There was the partisan impeachment of 1998, the Florida recount of 2000, the Texas gerrymandering and the California recall of 2002, just to name four. (I would add the US Attorney scandals and the vote suppression efforts of both 2000 and 2004, but they are of a slightly different character which I will discuss in another post.) .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/winner_take_all?tx=3

[indepat]

1. 'Tis warfare indeed, upon the Constitution, the environment, fiscal and tax responsibility and

sanity, our founding principles, much of the rest of the world, and we the people.

[tom_paine]

4. Unquestionably, the Bushie War Against the American People is proceeding apace

It is indeed everything of which you speak and perhaps worse.

[EVDebs]

2. They read Washington's Farewell Address to the Nation to Congress

every friggin' year to every Congress just in hopes that the message against partisanship will sink in. Thick GOP skulls ...

[Supersedeas]

3. - spot on - recommended and kicked