Republicans may be poised to beat themselves again. Maybe. Earlier this week, I wrote about a Republican effort to put a measure on the ballot to split California's electoral votes by congressional district-a move that could put twenty or more votes in the "R" column that otherwise would likely belong to the Democrat in the race. Well, thanks to GOP in-fighting, it looks as though California will remain a 'winner takes all' state in next year's fight for electoral votes. That's very good news for Democrats. (Thanks, Tom, for the tip.)
We may not be out of the woods, though. Efforts to suppress likely Democratic votes continue. Consider these examples:
Ohio and Florida, which provided the decisive electoral votes for President Bush's two razor-thin national election triumphs, have enacted laws that election experts say will help Republicans impede voting by Democratic-leaning minorities in 2008," McClatchy reports.The new Ohio law aimed at reducing voter fraud allows for "caging" -- "used in the past to target poor minorities in heavily Democratic precincts, entails sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges." While Republican groups paid for caging efforts in the past, the new law makes the government pay for it. In Florida, the new law "stripped the state's 10.5 million registered voters of the right to contest challenges at the polls. Now a challenger need only swear to a "good faith belief" that a voter is ineligible to force the voter to file a provisional ballot."
Heading toward next year's general election, we'd all better remember the classic GOP mantra: if you can't win, cheat. The big corporate interests that fueled the neo-conservative rise to power stand to lose a great deal if Democrats take control of government, and they do not intend to go quietly. Let me be clear: I am not talking about rank and file republican voters here. I am talking about the big corporate interests and their lawyers who actually run the party and fund the campaigns. For them, this effort has never been about furthering democracy; it is about keeping great wealth in the pockets of a few. Period. It's really not more complicated than that. The rest of us better understand that this is a street fight, and they will respect no rules. They will throw a hand full of sand in our eyes and then start punching.
According the The New York Times and MyDD, they have already started gathering those first few fist-fulls of sand. The Times reports today about the possibility that California will move to split it's electoral votes, awarding them based on who wins a particular congressional district rather than the winner of the state taking all. The group that is leading this fight is headed by some of the same Republican trial lawyers who helped successfully litigate Bush v. Gore. They are gathering the signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot in June of 2008, and they are readying for the inevitable constitutional challenge should the measure pass. Why? Because if California splits it's electoral votes, then an estimated 20 electoral votes could be awarded to the GOP nominee, even if the Democrat wins the state. That is the equivalent of Ohio, and will be very hard for Democrats to overcome. Here's the story, In 2008, Bush v. Gore Redux?
MyDD points to an article, Tracking Political Prosecutions, by Scott Horton published today in Harper's Magazine. According the article, the Bush administration used the Department of Justice to target key potential funders of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. The DOJ investigations focused on lawyers and included raids of their offices and threats of criminal prosecution. The purpose was to dry up a key source of funds for these likely presidential candidates. Here's an excerpt:
In the last two weeks, two sources, one of them inside of the Justice Department, have told me that a scheme was hatched in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration shortly after it took office in 2001 or early in 2002. The project identified John Edwards and Hilary Clinton as likely Democratic challengers to President Bush, and identified prominent trial lawyers around the United States as the likely financial vehicle for Edward’s rise. It directed that their campaign finance records be fly-specked, and that offenses not be treated as administrative matters but rather as serious criminal offenses.
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