Your Vote Please

A few months ago I fell for the Republican line about their “reaching out” for the African American and other minority votes and wrote a serious letter debunking their plan. In retrospect the whole thing was an act. I don’t think even Republicans have that kind of chutzpah. A major political party works openly to create obstacles to voting, financial and otherwise, that diminish the participation of the less affluent who tend to be people of color who vote for the opposing party. They then approach the very people they’ve been trying to disenfranchise and say, in effect, “If you are able to, please vote for us so we can make it harder for you to vote the next time.”

I started this effort as an attempt at humor, but this is as far as I can go in that direction because after all, we’re dealing with preserving a semblance of representative government, sometimes known as democracy. The game as played under our current rules is in the process of marginalizing and possibly eliminating the Republican Party as it now stands because the national complexion is growing steadily darker. That party’s only hope for survival is to change the rules, in the long run drastically.

Selective voter suppression is only one of several ways of doing this. It would be perfectly legal and not without precedent for Republican state legislators in swing states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin to apportion their delegates to the Electoral College by Congressional Districts as is now done in Maine and Nebraska. Conducted nationally this system would have elected Mitt Romney president, given the gerrymandering following the 2010 elections. There was open talk by some Republican Governors recently of doing just this which was quickly put to rest when cooler heads realized it could only work as a surprise if kept secret until after the 2014 mid-term state elections. Don’t expect to hear more about it till then unless Democrats treat the next mid-terms more seriously than they did the last.

This country cannot survive as anything resembling a democracy if these people, as they are now constituted, produce the kind of government their long term survival demands. There’s no trusting the morals of this Republican Party’s Wall Street establishment or the sanity of its Tea Party base.