I’ve been noticing more articles warning that the Dems aren’t a lock to take the House, too.
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Told ya. This is the 4th or 5th article on how DemoKKKrats
“might not” take the House.
— Larry Schweikart (@LarrySchweikart)
Here’s How Russia May Have Already Hacked the 2018 Midterm Elections
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The irony is that the more election technology advances, the more reliant we’ll be on paper ballots to keep Russian and other hands off the levers of our democracy. That leaves us facing the hard fact that in one of the most potentially significant elections this country has ever faced, the machines in Bucks County and hundreds of other counties like it—the machines that are the most likely to make all the difference in who governs America—won’t have a single piece of paper between them. For the lack of that paper, we’ll probably never know for sure how the elections really turn out.
Absolutely terrifying view into the mind of a progressive who sees little worthwhile in a constitutional government that would not give power to their progressive positions.
The rigging of American politics
Political systems depend on legitimacy. In America, that legitimacy is failing.
By Ezra Klein
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American politics is edging into an era of crisis. A constitutional system built to calm the tensions of America’s founding era is distorting the political competition between parties, making the country both less democratic and less Democratic.
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This Court will rule on the constitutionality of gerrymandering, voter ID laws, union dues, campaign finance, Obamacare, and more; that is to say, they will rule on cases that will shape who holds, and who can effectively wield, political power in the future.
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If these dynamics were at least split — if the geography of the House boosted Democrats while the Electoral College leaned toward Republicans — perhaps the dissatisfaction would be diffused, or the dueling interests of the parties would permit a compromise.
But that’s not the case. America’s growing zones of anti-democracy buoy Republicans, who, in turn, gain more political power to write the rules in their favor. As the left realizes it’s playing a rigged game, it’s becoming determined to rewrite those rules itself. If they succeed, the right will see those rewritten rules as norm-defying power grabs that need to be reversed, matched, or exceeded. It is difficult to imagine, from here, the construction of a political system both sides believe to be fair.
“At some point, people will get so angry that they will either talk about secession or start engaging in more direct measures, whether it takes the form of rioting or violence,” says Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas Law School.
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But another way of thinking about our founding compromises is to think about the fears that led to them. The threat to the United States of America has always been disunity. At the time of the founding, the strongest and most politically important identities were state identities, and the central tension was between those who feared the (white, male) public and those who trusted it, and so we built a system meant to calm those divisions.
Today, the strongest and most politically important identities are partisan identities. We don’t talk about big states and small states, but about red states and blue states.
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It is not difficult to imagine an America where Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more votes than the Democrats, where their dominance of the Supreme Court is unquestioned, and where all this power is used to buttress a system of partisan gerrymandering and pro-corporate campaign finance laws and strict voter ID requirements and anti-union legislation that further weakens Democrats’ electoral performance.
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Faris goes on to recommend a slew of ways Democrats can “fight dirty,” by which he means rewrite the rules of American politics so Democrats have an even chance, or better than that.
He recommends statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, as well as breaking up California into seven states, each with two senators; packing the Supreme Court with more justices so liberals can crack its conservative majority; replacing winner-take-all elections in the House with ranked-choice voting and expanding the size of the body to 870 members; passing a raft of voting rights reforms; and more.
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This is where we are now. Imagine where we’ll be if four of the next five presidential elections are won by a Republican who lost the popular vote, if geography and gerrymandering locks Democrats out of anything but fleeting House majorities for the next 20 years and persistent Republican dominance in the Senate leads to a 7-2 conservative Supreme Court that tosses out Democratic laws and buttresses the GOP’s electoral advantages.
On the other hand, if Democrats take power and run some version of the Faris/Avenatti playbook in 2020 or 2024, there will be an equal and opposite reaction among Republicans; they will see their Supreme Court majority ripped from their grasp, their chances in House elections fall, Democratic Senate majorities as far as the eye can see. What will they do in response?
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