GERRYMANDERED GOP BAD FOR PARTY AND NATION

The Problem with the GOP is gerrymandered districting.

GOP gerrymandered districts have made the Republican Party a minority party that can not compete or function nationally.

Today, after losing soundly to the Democrats in the last Presidential election the Grand Old Party is struggling with its looser image. Their recent efforts to “change” are more an effort to alter the packaging than the content of their agenda. What most of the Republican stalwarts are proposing would be akin to Kellogg's, ripping the "Corn Flakes" wrapper off boxes of its corn-based cereal and labeling them "Cheerios"-- an oat cereal that lowers cholesterol and sells better. It can be done, but besides being dishonest and irritating to the consumer, would they sell more corn? Or would the Republicans attract more voters with their similar form of dissembling? Would it help them win national elections? Not likely. As soon as the lie became apparent there would be a swift and violent blow back by a disgruntled electorate and the party would be back where they started. Furthermore, today’s modern technology (ubiquitous cell phones, coupled with wifi and Youtube) make it very difficult for even slick politicians to take one position with one element of his or her electorate and a totally different position with another. Thankfully as a nation we abhor liars. One need just recall the secret video tape made of candidate Mitt Romney spouting off about the 47% “moochers” at a private dinner party for his deep pocketed supporters and attempting to represent himself in a completely different light to the national audience.

The problem is that the GOP is not winning NATIONAL ELECTIONS, but IS winning congressional seats. They win many of them. In fact they win them handily and repeatedly in their highly gerrymandered Congressional Districts. In gerrymandered districts, which create non-typical voting blocks by carving out a selected electorate by following residences of these voters into closed communities, affluent sea-side or lake-side areas, and skipping working class and industrial areas and road and rail corridors. The result are congressional districts which are weird-shaped dragon-like monstrosities. The candidates have satisfied their personal needs for reelection and continued perks of power and office but they have also created a serious problem for themselves and the nation. They have painted themselves into the proverbial corner, in other words--into districts with virtually no minority or progressive voters. The Republican congressmen and women who are elected from these super-safe districts, as a result of their own efforts, now face a highly homogeneous electorate with a distinctly minority focused agenda. The districts which the state legislatures have carved out of many state populations are the wealthiest, whitest, most conservative, most Republican elements of a state and now each Congressperson must face only these atypical groups in their primaries and in the elections. How can such a legislator make a compromise or a "turn about" and dump some of this electorate’s most cherished positions ---on the Second Amendment, on abortion, on foreign policy, on immigration, on the deficit, on health care, etc., etc. The Republicans in these safe, walled-off districts are now stuck with the gerrymandered monster they created. And they will be for a long time to come, if the nation’s courts do not act to force them to redistrict. As a result of their own machinations in creating safe districts, the Republican Party is and will remain a representative of a very small national minority and may be relegated to the “wilderness” of second party status for some time to come.

And we as a nation are saddled (our English friends might describe this as “lumbered”) with a do-nothing, dysfunctional government that can not legislate a compromise solution to any of our major problems, domestic, foreign or economic. The nation’s political system is stymied, hidebound by the intransigence of the GOP “safe seat” holders who in turn are held captive by a highly conservative minority group that represent a smaller percentage of the voice of the nation’s electorate, but due to gerrymandering districts send a greater number of congressmen and women to Washington, than their actual numbers deserve. The GOP, and the Supreme Court, have created a monster that we all must suffer with for perhaps decades to come.
Get the picture?

rjk