GOP Gains Modest in 2010, Say Political Insiders

A desperate Republican Party base that wants it country back from the black man elected president won't get much good news from next year's election.

The 2010 off-year elections, generally presenting a loss for the Party in power, will feature tiny gains for the GOP at most, a majority of political insiders in the National Journal say in a new poll.

The poll was conducted by James A. Barnes and Peter Bell.

All U.S. Representatives and one third of U.S. Senators are up for election every two years.

As the worst recession since the Great Depression perhaps subsides next year, the Democratic Party is seen by most as suffering minimal losses.

Ninety-nine percent of Democratic insiders and 94 percent of GOP insiders polled see no chance to a moderate chance of the GOP taking control of the House of Representatives.

Eighty-six percent of Democratic insiders and 55 percent of GOP insiders polled see either a net Democratic gain or a GOP pick-up of only one to two seats in the Democratically controlled U.S. Senate.

As a political brand, the Republican Party remains damaged.

It is seen as shrill, paranoid and out-of-touch as more scholarly conservatives scramble "to disassociate themselves from Birthers, WorldNetDaily, and other objectively crazy people," in the words of Ed Kilgore.

GOP Can't Win Without Suppressing Votes

Writes Eliza Newlin Carney in The National Journal:

Judging by the tone of oral arguments in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder last week, the Supreme Court appears poised to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

It couldn't come at a worse time.

Several justices gave the impression during questioning on April 29 that they regard discriminatory election practices as ancient history. In fact, a wave of restrictive voter ID and citizenship requirements, both pending and enacted at the state level, threaten to erect a new generation of barriers to minority voters.

Polls show that a majority of voters favor voter ID laws, but it's not the mainstream majority of voters who are at risk.

Controversial voter ID laws have been taken up in nine states this year, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas -- all states covered by the section of the Voting Rights Act now facing constitutional challenge. Some state legislatures are also considering laws requiring voters to show proof of citizenship before registering and/or voting. ...

State legislators pushing for the restrictive ID and citizenship requirements -- all of them Republicans -- ostensibly want to fight voter fraud. But research shows that in-person voter impersonation -- the only type of fraud that voter ID laws could possibly block -- is virtually nonexistent. The real reason that GOP-controlled legislatures want to throw up new barriers to voting, say civil rights lawyers, is to depress turnout in Democrat-friendly voting blocs.

'I think Republicans understand that it was the increased registration and turnout in 2008 that seriously damaged them in the polls,' said Laughlin McDonald, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project. 'And this is a way to try and reverse that.'

For the Republican Party that for the last 50 years has been the enemy of civil rights and voting rights efforts, their continued obstruction of minorities' voting is to be expected.

The GOP sees the 2008 electoral data on the wall and it spells trouble for its overwhelmingly white, xenophobic base.

See the Pew Research Center data in the Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History report.

For the good of the Party, the wrong-voting population must be obstructed, and real Americans ought to decide elections, the GOP believes.

The opposite of this voter suppression initiative is central to democracies of course.

And people voting to decide the future of their country ought to be a central message of the Obama administration reflected in virtually every visual impression received from the presidency.

By the way, don't be surprised if in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, we get a decision that congressional authority reigns in this instance. But no one knows, Kennedy has already proven himself a corrupt jurist (in Bush v. Gore) who will do what the Party needs.

See Edward B. Foley's Out from the Shadows of Bush v. Gore, a discussion of the Minnesota Senate race that the GOP is trying to steal in the federal courts after their anticipated loss in the state supreme court in June [Kennedy was the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore]:

If all the evidence and arguments for the Contestant and Contestee in Coleman v. Franken were the same and only the parties were reversed—so that Franken were the Contestant and Coleman the Contestee—there is virtually no doubt whatsoever that the same three-judge panel [that favored Franken] would have decided the case in exactly the same way. This strong confidence in the impartiality of the panel is the highest accolade one can bestow on a tribunal tasked with adjudicating a dispute in a major statewide election, particularly one involving significance to the two national political parties of this U.S. Senate seat.

It is, regrettably, not a judgment that one confidently could make about the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. The queasiness that many observers have about that case, even still more than eight years later, is that the Court majority would have rejected the Equal Protection claim there had Gore been the candidate making it. Thus, whatever else one says about the relationship of Coleman v. Franken and Bush v. Gore, the three-judge panel’s ruling is distinguishable for the simple reason of its evident impartiality. ...

In a memorandum accompanying its final order, the three-judge court has written considerably—and conscientiously—about Bush v. Gore and its relevance to Coleman v. Franken. Much scholarly commentary undoubtedly will be devoted to the court’s analysis (Rick Hasen has already offered a thoughtful summary), and I plan to return to it myself after contemplating it more. But even in the first few hours after the release of this decision, it seems fair to say that the court’s rejection of Coleman’s Equal Protection claim—in addition to being impartial in the critical sense that the result would have been the same even had Franken been making the claim—cannot be characterized as an obvious misunderstanding of Bush v. Gore. Indeed, it might well be the correct understanding, the one that any other impartial tribunal would reach on the same facts.

National Journal: GOP Scores with Uneducated

Analytical post-election piece in the National Journal by David Wasserman confirming what most believed would happen in the 2008 presidential election.

"John McCain swept 83 of the 100 large counties at the low end of the education spectrum," reads the teaser in Wasserman's Bottom Of Education Ladder Is GOP-Friendly.

Shambles

Update: From the National Journal's Congressional Insiders' Poll of 40 Democrats (by Richard E. Cohen and Peter Bell): "Roughly how much longer do you expect the recession to continue?"

6 months or less - 3 percent
7 to 12 months - 15 percent
13 to 23 months - 63 percent
24 months or longer - 20 percent
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The results of Bush's industrial policy, wars and crony capitalism, are plain to see in this morning's news.

"The United States economy shrank at its fastest pace in a quarter century from October through December, the government reported on Friday, in the broadest accounting yet of the toll of the credit crisis. Consumer spending and business investment all but disappeared, and economists said the painful contraction was likely to continue at an alarming pace well into the summer," reads the lede in the New York Times.

Other economists are much more pessimistic, and those shorting the Dow and watching for the moment when it drops below 6,000 are making the best out of what author Dave Lindorff explains is an economy that will not endure:

Over the last 20 years, America has degenerated into a nation of consumers, with 72 percent of Gross Domestic Product (sic) now being accounted for by consumer spending--most of it going for things that are produced overseas and shipped here.

That is not an economic model that is sustainable, and it is a model that has just suffered what is certainly a mortal blow.

Bottom line: Nothing Obama proposes is too much in his stimulus package to clean up this mess. And Republicans complaining about any spending on any earmark resemble someone yelling about a piece of litter left in the yard as a tornado approaches.

NJ Insiders Poll: Obama and Obama

National Journal Washington Insiders Poll

Republicans (71 votes)
Q. Who will win the presidential election?
John McCain 18%
Barack Obama 82%

Democrats (74 votes)
Q. Who will win the presidential election?
John McCain 0%
Barack Obama 100%

Democracy Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

The National Journal is a political junkie's fix. And the Journal has broken much new ground the last few years in exposing the Bush administration's corruption.

But its cover story this week, State Of Disorder, by James Kitfield, reveals again the imperialistic mindset of the establishment American political culture on foreign policy as it relates to the desired social arrangement citizens of other countries have about their own societies.

Kitfield is imbued with a staggering inability to conceive that democratic results that create administrations in South America dedicated to directing their natural resources to their own people is not our problem. It is not our problem when the Sandinistas did it in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and it not our problem that President Hugo Chavez in now doing it in Venezuela.

But Kitfield frets that "new crises erupt with frightening regularity" around the world, and notes "a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America."

To Kitfield, it is axiomatic that this state of affairs, this state of disorder, must be dealt with, though he bemoans the fact that Bush is leaving the problem to the next American president to solve.

"Anti-Americanism everywhere you look," notes Kitfield, equating the mild redistribution of South American wealth to South American human beings with "devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists," "violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan," among other American challenges.

Kitfield (and Bush and Condi Rice) and the American foreign policy establishment apparently do not contemplate that the establishment of social arrangement through democratic processes that increase the material wealth of a given country's citizens is not destabilizing.

This dynamic is the achievement of "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

And that's a good thing.

See also PARAG KHANNA's Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

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The Guard's Turn to Surge

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., has a front-page piece in the National Journal on the increasing reliance, in the face of a harshly strained military, on state National Guard units to fight Bush's illegal war.

Many in the Guard participate for financial incentives, just trying to make enough to carve out subsistence for a family.

The National Journal's e-mail summary of Freedberg's piece:

While the military as a whole is ramping down its presence in Iraq, its most politically sensitive component -- the citizen-soldiers of the Army National Guard -- is ramping up. Some 55,000 Guard troops are expected to be called to active duty next year, up from 46,000 today. Military commanders say they're worried about the impact of the call-ups on families, and fear that military service and married life are increasingly incompatible. One sign of the strain is that the percentage of veterans signing up for Guard duty has dropped dramatically.
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GOP Senate Disaster in 2008

The Republicans Are Going to Lose
[A recurring feature pointing to evidence and analyses of the Republicans’ pending defeat in 2008.]

Prospects are so bleak for the Republicans that Democrats can count as a possibility that the 2008 election will bring in a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.

From Jennifer E. Duffy in the National Journal:

In each Senate election cycle, the political parties must play the hands they're dealt. Opportunities to reshuffle the deck or trade in cards are virtually nonexistent. But, usually, each party finds it holds both high and low cards -- as well as the possibility of a winning hand.

For 2008, though, Senate Democrats have been dealt the political equivalent of a royal flush, while Republicans received nothing but low cards.

The GOP must defend 22 seats, compared with just 12 for the Democrats. Republicans are stuck with at least five open seats; no Democratic incumbent is retiring. Democrats also hold a substantial fundraising advantage. And, finally, Republicans must play their lousy hand in a national political environment hostile to their party. ...

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