The GOP Plan to Steal Elections

In an earlier post today I made reference to the Republican Party effort to steal elections even where the GOP candidate(s) receive significantly fewer votes than their Democrat opponents.  Having successfully gerrymandered congressional districts to guaranty a GOP majority in the House of Representatives, the GOP now wants to trash the Electoral College as it has operated for many decades.  Under the GOP plan, Mitt Romney would have won the 2012 election even though he failed to receive a majority of votes while Obama DID win a majority of the vote.  It is nothing short of an attempt to mount a coup d'état and it illustrates just how extreme, dangerous and anti-democracy the GOP has become.   Fortunately, here in Virginia it appears that the GOP attempt may fail due to opposition from two GOP state senators and Governor Bob McDonnell who likely sees passage of the bill as a nail in his political future's coffin.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this disturbing effort which makes one wonder when the GOP brown-shirts are going to begin appearing and attacking liberals and anyone who opposes the GOP's increasingly fascist agenda.  Here are column highlights:

When the subject is today’s GOP and the conservative movement, things can always get worse. Having attempted virtually every dishonest and cynical trick in the book under existing rules, they have decided now that the problem is not their dishonesty or cynicism, but the existing rules, so the new task is to change them.

You’re familiar by now with the broad contours of how the GOP wants to change the Electoral College. OK, in case you’re not: They seek in six states to apportion the electoral vote according to congressional districts won instead of to the presidential candidate who won the state overall. For example, Pennsylvania has 18 congressional districts. Mitt Romney won 12 of them, and Barack Obama six. So even though Obama won the state overall by around five points, Romney would “carry” Pennsylvania, 12 electoral votes (EVs) to six (actually, 12 to eight—every state has two more EVs representing its two Senate seats, and Obama, as the overall winner, would get those; so nice of them!).

The six states, as you might guess, are not Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Alaska, and the Dakotas. They are the aforementioned Keystone State along with Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia. The Virginia plan adds the clever wrinkle of giving those extra EVs not to the overall winner, but to the candidate who won the most congressional districts.

[T]his is just vote-rigging. Open cheating. It is astonishing, I mean absolutely jaw-dropping, that a major party chairman should openly endorse such an openly crooked scheme, as Reince Priebus has. It’s so Third World 1950s, like something Sukarno might have done, probably did do, in Indonesia to make sure the competing ethnic group didn’t win elections. He sure better be asked, the next time he goes on a Sunday show, how he purports to defend a plan that would have made someone president while receiving 5 million fewer votes than the other guy.

Rule-changing, as Donovan Leitch might have put it, is bound to be the very next phase, and not just on this front. The nullification craziness, mostly talk during the first Obama term, is inching toward codification. State legislators in Mississippi are pushing a bill to establish a (get this name) Joint Committee on the Neutralization of Federal Law to review federal statutes for their “constitutionality.” We don’t know how far this effort will get. But it is Mississippi, so who knows? But if not Ole Miss, then South Carolina or some other state will almost surely attempt to nullify some federal law in the next four years.

We could toss all this information onto the ever-growing “Oh, those crazy Republicans” slag heap, have a laugh, and let it go. But this is concerted and serious. Rules, laws, customs, and norms that we have all abided by for centuries (the Electoral College and the primacy of federal law) or decades (recess appointments) have simply been producing too many outcomes conservatives don’t like. Most people, and movements, would try to change themselves so that they could maybe win under the long-agreed-upon rules. But conservatives have a cleverer way. Just make new rules. You better believe things can get worse.

 Sentient Americans who care about the rule of law need to be afraid - very afraid, in fact - and strike back by voting against every GOP candidate  every opportunity that they get, starting with the Virginia 2013 elections in November.