Thanks to Google News Alerts I still have active on a bunch of now-former congressmen, I was directed to SFist.com, a San Franscisco blog which today had a post up about a local election there and discussed Christine Pelosi (daughter…

Just being anti-Bush isn’t nearly enough. The party needs to realize that the old Roosevelt coalition is long dead and buried and that a loose alliance of political calculators just won’t carry the day anymore. Nor will a grab bag collection of poll-driven positions on various issues. We need a consistent, cohesive vision, a progressive ideology if you will, to offer a real alternative to the right wing’s warped “vision” of a selfish, social darwinist, corporate, and imperialist America.

I agree, too, with your comment about electoral reform. My mind is boggled by the notion that so many local governments seem willing to “privatize” the counting of our votes and the integrity of our voting system by turning the elections over to a black box with proprietary software.

A related issue that I’m increasingly concerned about is the various Republican redistricting plans that have been floated (successfully) in Texas and mostly unsuccessfully (so far) in California, Ohio and elsewhere.

As you may know, there have been recent revelations that Deptartment of Justice lawyers unanamously opined that the Texas redistricting violated the Voting Rights act because it diluted minority votes, but these lawyers were overruled by their political appointee superiors.

The Texas scheme is still in litigation, but so far is being upheld. It appears that redistricting that is accomplished with an eye to giving one party an advantage by “packing and stacking” the other party’s voters in fewer districts, is NOT illegal or unconstitutional, at least not unless it dilutes minority votes.

We can’t count of much help from the courts here. Alito has been revealed as someone who opposed Baker v Carr, the landmark “one man, one vote” case, and he and most other members of the Supreme Court would be very unlikely to expand this principle to partisan redistricting.

If we do nothing on this issue, the Republicans will try for a partisan redistricting scheme in every state where they have a majority in the state legislature, and if they succeed, Republican rule will become all but permanent throughout the country.

Imagine the effect on the US Congress if even half of the states did what they did in Texas - from a 16-16 split in the congressional delegation, they created a 21-11 Republican majority overnight through the magic of partisan redistricting. We could end up with a country where the clear majority of the voters are Democrats and yet Republicans continue to hold our government in an almost unbreakable stranglehold. I fear that would mark an end to America’s 230 year old experiment with democracy.

If we can’t count on the courts to rule this kind of redistricting unconstitutional, then I think we need to bring this issue to the forefront and propose federal legislation that would make partisan redistricting illegal. Let the Republicans vote it down - it’ll unmask their strategy to do this covertly, in the guise of political reform.

I hope Ms Pelosi will put some of the legal talent in the Democratic party on this issue ASAP. This has been going on for several years now, and I’ve yet to see an effective, principled response from the party.

I’m sorry I was unable to attend. Sounds like a great event. I echo Bob’s thanks for everybody who helped put it together and for everybody who spoke up about where the party needs to go.

1. I am deeply perplexed that the Democrats remain so inert on electoral reform. It seems to me that the most fundamental right of citizens in a democracy is to be able to vote with complete confidence that the vote will be counted accurately. We know that this did not happen in 2000 in Florida and again in several states in 2004, including Ohio, where I spent the last two weeks of the campaign. (A separate, but contributory matter, which I witnessed firsthand in Cleveland was electoral misfeasance, obstruction and even intimidation. Senator Obama has just introduced a bill, S 1986, to deal with some of these issues.) All told, I remain confident that Bush’s margin over Kerry in Ohio would have disappeared had everyone who intended to or did vote for Kerry had had that vote legitimately counted. That’s why I wanted John Conyers invited to the Democratic Party State convention last April. It is comprehensible to me that the Democrats have not shone a bright and relentless light on the continuing corruption of our election practices. Until we do, we remain patsies, ripe for manipulation and defeat. (It occurs to me that there is a striking parallel between John Kerry’s failure to fight back against the swiftboating during the campaign and his failure to stand up to electoral theft at its culmination. Observing these tendencies makes me cringe at the possibility that he still might seek the nomination in 2008.)
2. I want to respond to your comment about not booing the home team. I think it’s a good general rule, but ought not to be an absolute, and when it is, it can create precarious situations. If Barry Bond takes steroids, he ought to be booed off the field; if Gray Davis trades favors for contributions from the Prison Guards union, he deserves to be repudiated and run out of the state house (by us, not them). This goes very deep for me. My first vote in a Presidential election was in 1968 and I was looking forward to supporting Hubert Humphrey, who had been a hero of the Civil Rights movement. But in his campaign materials, there were photographs of him hugging Lester Maddox, the racist governor of Georgia, and Frank Rizzo, the thug mayor of my hometown of Philadelphia. I wrote Humphrey and said that if he could not dissociate himself from people like that, I could not vote for him. He responded that he believed in a Democratic tent big enough to include anyone who self-identified as a Democrat. I cast a melancholy vote that year for Eldridge Cleaver.

Similarly, today, if Lieberman keeps defending the war in Iraq or Feinstein does not oppose Alito, I think that Democrats need to object strenuously. I believe fervently that when the home team is fouling the nest, the home team fans need to hold them to the highest possible standard of rectification, and that includes discussion, but does not exclude discipline and dismissal.