No, no, nothing about the eugenics program....
"Turning the political map into a partisan weapon; The GOP’s national effort to control redistricting has cemented its grip on the House but also intensified gridlock" by Tracy Jan | Globe Staff, June 23, 2013
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains, protests and rallies erupt in this city’s downtown square on any given night. Aging hippies and veterans gather at the foot of a granite obelisk known as the monument to tolerance and wave cardboard signs asking motorists to honk against drone warfare and in support of universal health care.
Any given night? In America? No kidding? First I've seen of it in my newspaper.
Several Asheville preachers openly advocate for gay marriage, a rarity in the South; it is enough to move one GOP state lawmaker to label the entire community a “cesspool of sin.”
Asheville has long carried the distinction of being an island of Democratic blue in a sea of Republican red.
I am tired of being divided along race, gender, false political paradigms, religion, or whatever. 99% want the same things.
For six years, the largest city in western North Carolina was represented in the US House by a moderate Democrat who embodied the party’s playbook for the conservative region: a former NFL quarterback named Heath Shuler.
But Shuler decided against seeking reelection last year after the playing field shifted beneath him.
A state Legislature controlled by Republicans redrew his district — splitting liberal Asheville in two and diluting the city’s voting power. Shuler stood little chance of winning another term under the redrawn map.
With his decision to retire, another moderate had been purged from the ranks of Congress. Shuler’s successor is a freshman Tea Party Republican who, during a campaign rally last summer, advocated sending President Obama “home to Kenya or wherever it is.”
Redrawing congressional districts bore fruit for Republicans in other regions of North Carolina, as well as across the rest of the country. It was part of a concerted nationwide strategy engineered by GOP leaders in Washington that has had a profound impact, securing Republican House victories and rolling back Democratic inroads in red states, while increasing polarization and gridlock inside the beltway.
Despite winning 51 percent of the votes in the 2012 House races, North Carolina Democrats only won four of the state’s 13 House seats, compared with seven before redistricting. Nationally, Democratic contenders for the House won 1.4 million more votes in 2012, but Republicans retained control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin – a historic aberration that some experts say could have only occurred as a result of redistricting. It was only the second time since World War II that one party won more votes while the opposing party won more seats.
Wow. The House of Representatives is rigged. Democrats have no chance of control for at least eight more years.
Redistricting, which occurs every 10 years after the national census, contributed to the election of many more conservative Republicans and also some liberal Democrats, political scientists say — resulting in fewer competitive seats, wiping out moderates from both parties, and making dealmaking on issues such as the budget, gun control, and even the farm bill all but impossible.
See: Eating Anger For Lunch
Well, the military component made it through. In fact, patching up and boosting the Pentagon budget and cutting more tax breaks disguised as increases seems to indicate plenty of bipartisanship down there, as well as on spying and anything Israel wants.
The trend seems likely to escalate. An army of consultants and mapmakers are paid handsomely to mine mountains of personal data in order to create districts almost certain to favor one party over the other....
Another advantage to the intelligence collection efforts by telecoms and the rest.
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It was 2009 when the strategists of the Republican party sat down in a conference room in an Alexandria office park to hatch a secret plan that would be known as REDMAP — the Redistricting Majority Project — to take over the legislatures in key states across the country.
The group belonged to the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national organization established in 2002 to help GOP candidates win state offices, including seats in state legislatures, which draw congressional district maps. The 2010 census and subsequent redistricting presented the first opportunity for the committee to test its power.
After months of research to narrow its targets, the committee rolled out REDMAP in the spring of 2010 with one clear goal.....
The committee held a series of meetings in Washington, followed by a flurry of phone calls and briefings around the country, with business leaders and other donors, who contributed more than $20 million to the project, including $1.2 million to flip the state Legislature in North Carolina.
The US Chamber of Commerce, which contributed $3.9 million, was the committee’s top donor in the 2010 election cycle. Other major contributors spanned the insurance, telecommunications, retail, and pharmaceutical industries.
I'm $ure they are ju$t looking out for your be$t intere$t$, readers.
The committee also invested in Republicans running for office in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan — among the states most certain to lose a congressional seat as a result of the census — and Georgia and Texas, which gained seats....
The practice of drawing district lines to gain partisan advantage has existed since before 1812, when the term “gerrymandering” was coined after a salamander-shaped district drawn up in Massachusetts during the governorship of Elbridge Gerry.
Ah, another gift bestowed upon the people of the nation from the fine state of Massachusetts.
Today states have boundaries nicknamed “earmuff district” and “flat cat road kill district” for their irregular shapes, but never before has one party mounted such a nationally coordinated effort to use the drawing of district lines to win the balance of power in the House of Representatives.
The Democrats also had a plan to take over state houses that would control redistricting, said Michael Sargeant, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. But it met with considerably less success.
Theirs always do!
Democrats were contending with a backlash in many states against President Obama’s health care law, the stimulus bill, and the bad economy, which gave Republicans an advantage.
Related: Filling Out the Obamacare Forms
Say goodbye to the Senate come 2014, Democraps.
“Unfortunately, Democrats were the victims of a very difficult national election landscape in 2010,” Sargeant said.
They always are.
The 2010 local legislative results helped lay the foundation for a GOP firewall: the party would control redistricting for 210 congressional seats in 18 states, compared with just 44 seats in six states for Democrats.
National Republicans also capitalized on those local victories by providing map-drawing expertise to state lawmakers.
“We had a team of consultants and lawyers who would assist states in the process,” said Chris Jankowski, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee.
The point man for the strategy was Thomas Hofeller, who would not speak with the Globe on the record, citing ongoing lawsuits in multiple states in which he has been called to testify, including in North Carolina.
Hofeller, a redistricting consultant to the Republican National Committee, has been hired by state legislators across the country to gain maximum political advantage without running afoul of the law, including the Voting Rights Act designed to ensure that African-Americans are not disenfranchised.
In Asheville, Hofeller simply became known as The Mapmaker.
In a North Carolina court earlier this month, Hofeller testified that he just did what he has always done: use data from presidential election returns to move precincts or split them based on political party. “The whole plan was a political plan,” he said.
Hofeller’s been doing this work since 1965, before computer mapping existed and mapmakers used markers to draw out their district lines on acetate film laid over giant maps spread across the floor. Nowadays, Hofeller is armed with sophisticated redistricting software called Maptitude, the geographic information system used by both political parties in a majority of states.
The software, developed by the Newton-based Caliper Corp., allows mapmakers to take into account the trove of voter information available, including partisan registration, past election results, and racial demographics, and move a district line to capture more voters — or, in some cases, dilute their influence by spreading them among multiple districts — and see the results in minutes.
One of the key targets for Republicans in Washington was North Carolina. And in Asheville, Republicans in the state house saw a prime opportunity to pick off one of the few remaining moderate Democrats, who are known as Blue Dogs.
From NFL to Capitol Hill
Heath Shuler grew up in the Smoky Mountains town of Bryson City, N.C., near the Tennessee border and about 65 miles west of Asheville. Central-casting handsome, athletic and personable, he twice quarterbacked his high school football team to the North Carolina championship, became one of the nation’s most widely recruited prospects, starred at the University of Tennessee, came in second for collegiate football’s Heisman Trophy, and was a first-round draft pick of the Washington Redskins.
But Shuler’s path to stardom, seemingly scripted to perfection, turned into a career of injuries and shaky statistics. Widely declared one of the biggest busts in the history of the NFL, he was out of the league after a few years.
Then a different type of recruiter showed up. His name was Rahm Emanuel, then a member of the US House and currently the mayor of Chicago. Emanuel figured Shuler was just the kind of person the Democrats needed to win in the congressional district that included Asheville.
That was back in 2006 when I believe antiwar Democrats were going to check Bush. Instead they surged and gave him more spying power.
An evangelical Christian who spoke openly about his faith, Shuler opposed abortion rights. He opposed gun control.
I know some Democrats who say that is what is not needed. Just a DINO.
And he was swayed by Emanuel’s pitch — that the good folks of western North Carolina needed a conservative Democrat to reflect their views in Washington.
Shuler won by a 54 to 46 margin, and in the following six years made a convincing case that he was among the most conservative Democrats, voting against President Obama’s health reform law and even challenging Nancy Pelosi for the post of minority leader. He won reelection twice. As one of the few remaining Southern white Democrats in Congress, he built bridges with Republicans, consistently ranking as one of the House’s least partisan members.
Shuler had failed with the football team in Washington but — with considerably less fanfare and financial remuneration — he had shown it was possible to reinvent himself and rise to power in the other blood sport of the nation’s capital.
But Republican leadership saw him as a threat in Washington’s winner-take-all culture, and wanted to deny the Democrats a toehold in the South....
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Republicans’ redistricting effort here grafted downtown Asheville onto a GOP stronghold in the Piedmont region. It also left the most populous city in western North Carolina without a congressional office. The city’s new representative’s nearest office is 16 miles away in Black Mountain.
“They literally divided the city. Because of redistricting, it didn’t matter that a huge majority statewide voted for Democrats. It feels like we’re living in Mississippi,” said Cheryl Orengo, a 60-year-old birthing coach who hosts a monthly dinner for local liberals at Firestorm Cafe, a worker-owned bookstore and vegan restaurant in downtown Asheville.
“In my mind, that’s a coup d’Γ©tat,” said Steven Norris, a 70-year-old Boston transplant who teaches peace studies and environmental justice at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, during the dinner. “I feel so disempowered not having any sort of voice in Congress.”
Democratic voters in other parts of the state claimed to suffer in a different way. Instead of being dispersed among solidly red districts, they were stuffed into a small number of super majority Democratic districts. That left some more liberal residents feeling their vote had lost some potential sway.
Nearly half of the state’s black population was funneled into the three remaining solidly blue districts, a move critics call a manipulation of the Voting Rights Act as a pretext for isolating Democrats and minority voters....
Five formerly purple districts — those that swung between Republicans and Democrats, including Shuler’s — turned solidly red.
Two Democrats who had represented these swing districts found their homes now located in districts represented by other Democratic incumbents.
Districts whose boundaries used to follow roads, rivers and railways now zigzag every which way to snag voters of the desired ideological stripe. In Asheville, the dividing line can fall in the middle of a road, so that houses on one side land in one district while their neighbors across the street are in another.
“It’s gerrymandering on steroids,” said Charles Carter, a Democratic political consultant and former North Carolina state representative from Asheville.
But Republicans in North Carolina, in full control of the General Assembly for the first time since Reconstruction, say redistricting simply righted the order of things.
“It’s the Southeast. There are a bunch of conservatives down here,” said Nathan West, 36, secretary of the Buncombe County Young Republicans. “It really wouldn’t matter where Asheville was put.”
Sam Wang, a Princeton neuroscience professor and founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, said the GOP’s North Carolina strategy was evident across the country.
“What’s really striking is it’s happened across multiple states all at once, flipping a dozen seats that would otherwise not have been flipped,” Wang said.
Other states where more people voted for Democrats but Republicans won the majority of congressional seats were: Pennsylvania, where Democrats won 5 of 18 seats; Michigan, where they won 5 of 14 seats; and Wisconsin, where they captured just 3 of 8 seats.
Wow, shades of the 2000 presidential election.
In Illinois, Democrats redrew boundaries to their advantage and won 11 of the 17 seats being contested last November.
Oh, both sides do it?
And in Maryland, where they also controlled redistricting, Democrats won 7 of 8 seats.
The job of mapmakers has become easier because more voters are choosing to live in homogeneous communities where neighbors tend to hold similar political views, said David Wasserman, house editor at Cook Political Report....
The new North Carolina map is being challenged in a state Superior Court, just one of 93 lawsuits related to congressional redistricting in 32 states. The North Carolina case went to trial earlier this month, and a decision is expected soon.
The plaintiffs, including the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, alleged that Republicans unconstitutionally segregated black voters into gerrymandered districts to boost the chances of GOP candidates in other districts.
The court has already dismissed claims by voters in Asheville that they were disenfranchised, saying it had no standard by which to judge those allegations, which were not based on race.
“Since it seems like the courts won’t wade into partisan gerrymandering disputes, people are pushing the boundaries even more than they have in the past,” said Allison Riggs, staff attorney for the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which is representing the plaintiffs.
Conservatives win
Residents in Shuler’s former district are now represented by two of the most conservative members of Congress: Mark Meadows, the Tea Party freshman and former real estate developer who handedly beat Shuler’s former chief of staff by campaigning on his “moral obligation to stop Barack Obama’s assault on our values,” and Patrick McHenry, a fifth-term incumbent who had accused John McCain of being too liberal during his 2008 presidential campaign.
In his short time in Congress, Meadows has already accumulated a track record that toes the Republican party line, voting to repeal Obama’s signature health care law, to ban abortion after 20 weeks, and against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
McHenry, whose staunchly Republican district has now absorbed the liberal core of downtown Asheville, has held up as a role model the late Senator Jesse Helms, the strident North Carolina conservative who was nicknamed “Senator No” for obstructing legislation including those pertaining to the rights of minorities, women, and gays.
While Shuler had angered many left-leaning Democrats for his conservative stance on social issues, he had assembled a staff with diverse views on gay rights and gun rights and listened to everyone’s concerns, many Asheville Democrats said.
He was also able to gain the support of moderate Republicans in the more rural communities of western North Carolina.
“Before redistricting, we had a situation where a liberal could never be elected, but someone had to reach out to liberals to get into office,” said Erica Palmer, 27, during a meeting of the Buncombe County Young Democrats at a downtown cafe. “Now Republicans have such an easy margin of victory they don’t have to communicate with us at all.”
McHenry and Meadows urge their liberal constituents in Asheville not to dismiss them....
The Rev. Joe Hoffman, pastor of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, a liberal church on the edge of downtown, said he would like Democrats and Republicans to talk and listen to each other.
He pointed out that ministers from various North Carolina denominations already are making such efforts, meeting for breakfast every couple of months to discuss their diverse views and increase understanding....
********************************
In 2008, there were 55 Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. Now, there are only 14 left. Moderate Republicans face the same dramatic pace of extinction. That leaves the left-leaning denizens of Asheville with little hope for change....
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Related:
"Lawmaker finds new realities in return to Congress; Minnesota’s Rick Nolan, back after 32 years, decries disunity, focus on money" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, May 28, 2013
WASHINGTON — Rick Nolan fondly recalls his first days in Congress. He played basketball with teammates Al Gore and Dan Quayle, joined scrimmages against the Russian embassy staff, and signed up for a baseball team called the “Knee-Jerk Liberals.’’
Back then, in the 1970s, Nolan brought his wife and four young children from Minnesota to live with him in Washington. He and his family even spent weekends with congressional colleagues camping, hiking, and attending bipartisan barbecues. After three terms, Nolan left Congress in 1981, retiring and going back to farming.
Flash ahead three decades: Nolan, who party leaders saw as having the best shot at unseating a Tea Party-backed Republican incumbent, soon found himself back in Congress. He now holds the record of the longest gap between two terms in congressional history. The Democratic representative jokes that it is as if he took a 32-year nap. His staff calls him “Rick van Winkle.”
And just as in the tale, he no longer recognizes the world he has found himself in.
Washington has become an increasingly dysfunctional place. There may be no better way to see the shift than through the eyes of Nolan.
Unle$$ you are those $pecial intere$ts I keep mentioning.
He sees a Congress that does not meet as often, where few members linger on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers jet in and out of the city’s airport on a dizzying weekly schedule. Representatives pass in hallways but do not know each other’s names. Raising campaign money requires more time than actual legislating — which, anyway, is mostly limited to naming bridges, approving post offices, and participating in the occasionally sharply divided votes on a bill that is doomed to fail in a partisan black hole....
Related: Aborted Post
Emblematic is a small change that has become one of Nolan’s pet peeves: The House dining room, where he fondly remembers sitting at all hours of the day with his congressional colleagues, now closes in the early afternoon. Lost is an opportunity to make the personal connections that today’s Congress so sorely lacks....
Almost immediately after new members got into office, Nolan says, the DCCC began coaching them on fund-raising. A schedule from that session showed that they should spend four hours each day asking for money – more time than any other activity and more than twice the amount of time they should be spending debating issues on the House floor or hammering out legislation in committees.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Congre$$ Calling
Nolan says he understood the impulse — the candidate with the most amount of money typically wins — but he was taken aback. He says he’s been reprimanded by Democratic leadership for not raising enough money. He says he has not set foot in a call center that the DCCC set up near Congress, where cubicles are lined up so that congressmen can come in and dial their donors without using congressional resources.
“It helps dictate the ultimate decisions around here. We have a saying out in the country, ‘Who pays the fiddler gets to pick the tune,’ ” Nolan says....
That has never been more true for Congre$$.
*************************
As the world around him has shifted, Nolan acts as if nothing has changed, even though he knows everything has.
Well, not everything.
He wants everyone to be his friend. He wants bipartisan deal-making to be encouraged. He is eager for open and messy debate on the House floor.
But he keeps bumping into a new reality every day: a constant stream of cable news, often with partisan viewpoints that attract like-minded viewers and harden positions.
You call that reality?
Politician after politician come forward to appear before the cameras on their favorite networks. Consultants and political operatives try to win the moment on Twitter. Ubiquitous, low-cost campaign ads sprout online.
It all feeds a toxic atmosphere that makes it hard to get anything done.
One recent analysis of congressional voting records found that the last Congress was more polarized than ever — at levels higher than before, during, or after the Civil War. The analysis uses voting records of members of each party, determining how often they vote strictly with their party.
“They’re the most dysfunctional group of political leaders the United States has had since the 1850s,” says Keith Poole, a professor at the University of Georgia who helped develop the system to measure polarization in Congress. “All I can say is the country is in really deep trouble. Much deeper than people realize.”
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Also see:
Sunday Globe Special: Senate a Downer For Dole
Seeing Through the Kansas Haze
Sunday Globe Special: Courting the Senate
GOP Eases Up on Obama's EPA Nominee
Sunday Globe Special: AmeriKan Media Mimics Politics
Why wouldn't they? They are nothing more than a mouthpiece.
