Democracy in America, 2003

...and, in the aftermath of the Republican landslide, Clinton was reduced to claiming that the White House was "still relevant" to American politics...

...Redistricting in Colorado and Texas, 2003: In both Colorado and Texas, Republican-dominated state legislatures, unsatisfied with the congressional redistricting approved in light of the 2000 Census, managed to bulldoze through second partisan redistricting plans far more favorable to the Republican Party...

...Clinton had won again...

...The idea of relatively permanent, stable districts could vanish...

...In his latest book, The Great Unraveling, Krugman charges that the current Republican regime is not "conservative" or even normal within the customary boundaries of American politics: it is controlled by abnormal radicals, who will stop at nothing to impose their right-wing ideology on the country...

...The most outrageous campaign was run against Senator Max Cleland in Georgia...

...More important, the administration knowingly provided this false and tendentious intelligence information to Congress in order to obtain support for the resolution approving the American intervention...

...A more leisurely occasion would permit a longer historical look at the rise of this modern antidemocratic impulse, stretching back at least to the McCarthy era.' Let us go back just as far as the mid-1990s and the stalled Gingrich revolution...

...If Colorado and Texas are allowed to stand, I don't see what's to stop the process from continuing every election throughout a decade...

...manufactured perfect political storm...

...Yet House Republicans continued their impeachment drive anyway, hoping to remove the supposedly illegitimate Clinton from office with political pressure—and finally impeached him thanks to what Sidney Blumenthal, in his book The Clinton Wars, documents as a full-scale effort by the House leadership to intimidate wavering members...

...But isn't this just the result of the Republicans' superior political skills—playing the rules of the game to the utmost, always keeping their eyes on their prizes...

...In Washington, Majority Leader De Lay organized something he called STOMP, the Strategic Taskforce for the Organization and Mobilization of People...

...The current Republican Party has no need for secessionism (although its pandering to racist Confederate sensibilities in the South has long been one of its key political weapons...

...At the time, White House political guru Karl Rove was quoted as expressing his delight that Bush family friend Arnold Schwarzenegger might wind up winning the governor's mansion in Sacramento in 2002...

...Some Republicans went so far as to say that Clinton was not their president...

...After major 36 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 events such as the government shutdown and small displays of (as it happened, fabricated) pique over seating arrangements on Air Force One, Gingrich crashed and burned...

...Governor Davis, a lackluster personality but competent governor, took the blame...

...But never before has an administration attempted such a sustained and grandiose deception of Congress over taking the decision to go to war...

...What it shares with the fire-eaters is an implacable will to dominate and a combination of cynicism and contempt for our democratic constitutional procedures...

...Before the election, Davis took a combination of steps that reduced the state's deficit from $38 billion to about $9 billion—a figure in the same ballpark with the shortfalls of other major states, thanks to the depressed economy and the Bush tax cuts...

...Majority Leader DeLay, from Sugarland, played a major role in plotting and executing the Texas redistricting...

...And it portends a crisis in our politics as great as any since the era of Reconstruction...

...The Republicans' occasional failures—notably, in the fights over a few high-profile federal judiciary appointments, including that of Miguel Estrada—suggest that democracy still works well enough, that Madisonian checks and balances are still checking and balancing...

...Although in the minority, Republican California legislators were thereby able to block any budget agreement...

...But then the Gingrich Revolution failed, chiefly because of Clinton's political adroitness...

...Constitution...

...Those failures even suggest that grassroots opposition organizing can still have some impact in national politics...

...Those like economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who disagree, and who see something more dangerous unfolding, are branded as wild radicals, or paranoids, or both—and, as Krugman has mordantly observed, they receive the wild hate mail and e-mails that prove it...

...It would take Ann Coulter until 2003 to bring Gingrich's strategy to its logical conclusion by writing a best-selling screed that indicted all liberals as traitors and rehabilitated both the smears and the reputation of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy...

...Much of the suppression was aimed at black voters...

...And so, in 1996, did the Republican presidential campaign, as the hapless Bob Dole, who seemed to have no reason for running other than that it was his turn on the Republican go-round, went down to defeat—with no big Perot vote to blame anymore...

...It was not a single vast conspiracy...

...But Schwarzenegger did not run...

...The stage was already set for Davis's overthrow...

...But no court could head off a telemarketing scheme (one of many that the Republicans mounted around the nation in 2002) that instructed Florida's disproportionately black Democratic voters to cast their absentee ballots after election day—at which point they would no longer be counted...

...Into the breach stepped a new crop of radicals, concentrated on Capitol Hill but with powerful allies in the media (including the new Fox News), on K Street, and in corporate suites and law offices all around the country...

...squad conducted what Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal referred to gleefully as a "bourgeois riot" and shut down the recounting of votes in Miami-Dade County, a turning point in the drama...

...In Florida's Miami-Dade county, site of the 2000 mob violence, a shadowy G.O.P...

...Subsequently, the Rehnquist Court, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, halted all vote recounting, overrode the Florida Supreme Court's rulings on its own state constitution, and, in a bitterly divided five to four decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively handed the Republicans the election...

...If only the Democrats would consistently get their act together (so the argument goes), if only they could take advantage of the fact that the public supports their positions on leading issues, if only they could field a candidate with forceful credentials on foreign policy and the military (hence, the instant initial boom for General Wesley Clark), then the political scene would look very different...

...master plan...

...The American Prospect, vol...

...Such misinformation mongering was not unprecedented...

...In Texas, Democratic lawmakers fled the state to avoid permitting a quorum when the bill came before special sessions called by G.O.P...

...The Senate acquitted Clinton by a wide conDEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 2003 stitutional margin—but by impeaching a president on matters that fell well below the constitutional bar of "high crimes and misdemeanors," the Republican effort did as-yet untold damage to the U.S...

...group backing Governor Jeb Bush tried to pack the polling places with hundreds of its own intimidating overseers...

...The Colorado and Texas partisan assaults, by finding a loophole in state laws, defied that practice and have opened up the strong possibility of neverending redistricting wars at the state level— provided, of course, that the Republicans do not simply establish one-party power in the states, which is their plain intention...

...THE 1994 mid-term elections were supposed to mark the great return to Republican partisan normalcy...

...It is radical and abnormal...

...As things stand, the existing senatorial and Electoral College systems already give the Republicans an enormous artificial advantage in national politics, by inflating the power of small conservative states in the Deep South and the Mountain West...

...And their attacks would get a lot worse...

...Once the requisite numbers of signatures were gained, Republican hopefuls—including Issa, Bill Riordan, and Peter Ueberroth —mysteriously dropped out of the race...

...One G.O.P...

...The recall process—originally implemented to oust governors guilty of gross corruption in office— had become the vehicle for a right-wing hit jobof the first magnitude...

...2002 Elections: In the most blatant efforts at voter suppression since the Jim Crow era, Republicans attempted to expand on their "scrubbing" efforts in Florida of two years earlier...

...21, September 24, 2000 - October 2, 2000...

...Perhaps the Republicans, understanding that current demographic trends work heavily against them, are trying to shore up as much as they can politically before it is too late.' Or, more likely, they are trying to alter the basic rules of politics to offset those trends...

...Instead, the Bush administration chose a go-it-(virtually)-alone strategy based on cooked intelligence reports...

...2 In addition, Republican campaigns stooped to levels even lower than the oft-criticized "Willie Horton" ad campaign on behalf of George H.W...

...President James K. Polk was disingenuous about the events that triggered the war with Mexico, as was Lyndon Johnson about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin...

...Its successes have already done great damage to our institutions...

...The Iraq War and Disinformation, 20022003: In arguing the case for going to war against Iraq, the Bush administration made numerous false claims to the Congress, the American people, and the world about Saddam Hussein's imminent threat against the United States...

...11, no...

...After Starr and his office spent ten months in further investigation (at a cost to the taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars more), the public remained unmoved, and the Democrats actually picked up seats in the off-year elections...

...The origins of that abnormality long predate the younger Bush presidency or even the struggle over Florida in 2000...

...There were strong reasons to justify a war on Hussein, especially if undertaken in cooperation with the United Nations and America's European allies...

...The vast majority of the Washington press corps—including many pundits critical of the Bush administration—is inclined to see what has happened (and is happening) as basically hard-knuckled politics as usual...

...It has already degraded American democracy...

...The chief malefactor was the Enron Corporation, whose CEO, Kenneth Lay, is a close friend and large political contributor to George W. Bush...

...By that quirk alone, Republicans regarded Clinton, with his 42 percent of the popular vote, not just as unfortunate but as illegitimate...

...This is not hardknuckled politics as usual...

...Such is certainly the case today, especially in Washington, where a virtually unanimous Republican Party—the House Republicans whipped into shape by Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Senate Republicans only slightly less unified, both houses well coordinated with the adamantine Bush White House, and the Rehnquist Court standing by as the final forum—makes the Democratic minority look like a chorus of scorched cats...

...Other voter suppression efforts turned up in New Hampshire, Maryland, Louisiana, Texas, and Michigan...

...The highlights (or lowlights) have included the following: • The Clinton Impeachment, 1998-1999: After spending millions of dollars and failing to come up with evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons, the partisan Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr sprung a perjury trap that gave him a pretext to investigate the president's sex life...

...Some of this is plausible, some of this is true, but all of it misses that something truly worrisome is happening here—a clear and present danger to democracy, posed by the leadership of the Republican Party...

...After the landslide elections of Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, it became an article of faith in some Republican circles that the White House would forever belong to the G.O.P.—and that it was only a matter of time before Congress would as well...

...In 1856, the antidemocratic secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett bellowed that "a complete revolution" had turned the federal government into "a sheer despotism," which could only be overcome by denying the national will by any means necessary—including disunion...

...The fights may sound harsher, the media blare may be much louder, the reigning politics may be more conservative than anyone expected—but the basic institutions of American democracy are, supposedly, secure...

...First, in 2001, electricity shortages caused by the efforts of giant energy companies to manipulate the market led to a brownout crisis in California...

...Recall in California, 2003: The California recall was the result of a G.O.P...

...Normally, legislatures permit themselves to draw new district lines once a decade...

...By California law, a two-thirds majority in the state legislature is required to pass a state budget...

...There is, of course, always a danger of paranoia setting in at a time of intense polarization, when one political party controls all three branches of the federal government—all the more so when that party in charge looks less like the usual coalition of internally contending forces than a disciplined army...

...By forcing the Central Intelligence Agency to provide false and tendentious reports, the administration (especially Vice President Dick Cheney) undermined the essential independence required of executive agencies if they are to provide objective information to the White House...

...Unless the White House is called to account, irreparable damage will have been done to the already weakened eleventh clause of Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, giving the Congress the sole power to declare war...

...SEAN WILENTZ is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton, 1. I have tried to write a small piece of this history with respect to one aspect of modern antidemocratic politics—the invention and development of the pseudo-scandal—in "Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election...

...Amid the battle, it was revealed that Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, a Sarasota Republican, had systematically removed eligible black voters from the polling lists—a procedure called "scrubbing" that was plainly a ploy to suppress the Democratic vote...

...THERE IS A desperate quality to these partisan attacks on and manipulations of democratic processes...

...So they cooked up a fresh political crisis...

...Florida, 2000: With the 2000 presidential election turning on the tight race in Florida, the Republicans mobilized flying squads of official congressional aides (including some from De Lay's office) to intimidate voting officials...

...Yet by 38 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 carefully massaging the story, the Bush White House managed to deflect criticism and blame away from its political cronies and toward California's Democratic governor, Gray Davis...

...The Clinton administration had bungled its health care initiative...

...governor Rick Perry—and Republican officials called on the new federal Department of Homeland Security for assistance in rounding up the dissenters...

...Gingrich's slash-and-burn politics bespoke a larger crisis for the country—and for the Republican Party...

...The damage to American democracy was severe...

...Davis, a poor campaigner, was further hampered by a feud with his lieutenDEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 2003 ant governor, Cruz Bustamente, who entered the lists of replacement gubernatorial candidates...

...Seizing upon once democratic but now archaic recall laws, Republicans, led by the multimillionaire right-wing congressman Darrell Issa, funded a massive petition campaign to force Davis's removal from office...

...Democrats were "anti-flag," "antifamily," "decadent," "sick"—not adversaries, but hateful enemies...

...The last bigname Republican standing was—yes—Karl Rove's favorite, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bothered only by a pesky Republican to his right, state legislator Tom McClintock...

...Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat DISSENT / Winter 2004 • 37 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 2003 in Vietnam, was portrayed as soft on national security, and placed in ads that also featured Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein—this despite the fact that Cleland was one of the original sponsors in the Senate of homeland security legislation, at a time when the Bush White House opposed it...

...2. See my essay, "Jim Crow, Republican Style: Voter Suppression in 2002," in Andrew Cuomo, ed., Crossroads: The Future of American Politics (Random House, 2003...

...De Lay and his aides' possible involvement in voter suppression efforts in districts across the country went uninvestigated...

...it was a congeries of operatives, muckrakers, and ideologues with a common allegiance to the Republican Party—and to making sure that normalcy would be restored, forever and ever, amen, by any means necessary...

...Yet the Republicans, with the help of a credulous media, kept repeating the $38 billion figure right up to recall election day...

...In 1994, amid the Republican recouping of Congress, speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich inspired his troops with instructions to demonize the Democrats in no uncerDISSENT / Winter 2004 • 3 5 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 2003 tain terms...

...Some astonished Republicans blamed the reversal on the oddball candidacy of Ross Perot (although, in fact, polling at the time showed that Perot cost Clinton and Bush about the same...

...Whatever the motivation, the Republicans' partisan assault on democracy displays a will to power unlike any seen in our country since the fire-eater secessionist movement of the 1850s that led to the creation of the southern Confederacy...

...Although the decision was crafted in ways that precluded its use as a precedent, it marked the most outrageous political intervention by the Court since the Dred Scott decision in 1857...

...The effort was explicitly racial, and was blocked only at the last minute by a local judge...

...Add to that Clinton's background—a sixties antiwar student, at once Arkansas "white trash" and an Oxford-Yale elitist, a white Southerner who felt perfectly at home with black people, a husband with an ambitious, professional wife—and he loomed as a kind of anti-Christ of what Republican leader Representative Henry Hyde would years later call "this culture war we're involved in...

...Then, in 1992, something terrible happened: Bill Clinton defeated Bush...

...But seeing the demographic writing on the wall— especially in Texas and Florida, crucial states where trends favor the Democrats—the Republicans may simply have decided to change the rules some more in their favor, without having to go through the arduous process of obtaining new constitutional amendments...

...Schwarzenegger, saying as little as possible about the issues, won handily, although with considerably less than a popular majority...

...The right-wing novice Bill Simon (with backhand aid from the Davis forces) won the Republican primary, and the Democrat Davis was reelected...

...3. On these trends, see John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner, 2002...

...The G.O.P...

...Thereafter began the radical and continuing Republican assault, not simply on Democrats and liberals but on the political system itself—using whatever political and constitutional tools are at hand and twisting them to ensure what Tom DeLay and his colleagues foresee as a millennium of one-party rule...

...But Newt was there first...

...REPUBLICANS IN California and Washington were nearly as outraged at Davis's victory as they had been at Bill Clinton's...

...vision of normalcy suddenly vanished...

...Bush in 1988, masterminded by Lee Atwater...

...Issa originally hoped to become Davis's replacement, but that was not in the G.O.P...

...One bite of the redistricting apple has been the norm for a century, and only if the courts demand revisions do you go back to the drawing board," Thomas Mann of the centrist Brookings Institution said of the redistricting gambits...

...the Gingrich forces took full advantage of Democratic divisions by firing up their troops (fueled by huge infusions of special interest money...