Repugs Don't Need to Win the White House to Take Over the Country

In case you were feeling hopeful about the presidential election.

 

Jonathan Schell at The Nation:

But there is more in the GOP playbook than electioneering.

For at least a generation, the party has also pursued power by extra-electoral means. The procedure has been to use and abuse power acquired in one institution to acquire more power in other institutions. As is well known, the framers of the Constitution established a separation of powers: each branch of government was designed to monitor and correct any abuses perpetrated by the others. The Republicans have thrown this system into reverse. They use each branch as a stronghold from which to mount attacks on the others and usurp their powers, all in pursuit of increasing and consolidating their own party’s power. Thus, in the name of protecting the Constitution—so often praised at the Republican convention—they have stood the Constitution on its head.

Court powers are used to intervene in the executive power, as the Supreme Court did so outrageously in 2000, when it overrode the decision of voters in Florida and put George W. Bush in the White House. Legislative powers are used to curtail the power of citizens, as GOP legislatures have done throughout the country to suppress Democratic-leaning poor and minority voters by raising onerous obstacles to voting, such as requiring government-issued photo IDs. Legislative powers are also used to reach into the executive, as the GOP-controlled House did when it impeached Bill Clinton in 1998 for minor offenses, mostly of a personal nature. Executive power is used to spy on and punish opposition figures, as Nixon did in the Watergate crisis, or to corrupt due process, as the Bush White House did when it fired nine United States attorneys for failing to fall into line with its voter-suppression schemes.

More than government institutions are involved. The pattern extends to trade unions, the news media and, above all, corporations. Legislative and judicial power is used to attack unions, which tend to support the Democrats, as when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker eviscerated the bargaining rights of public employee unions. Judicial power is used to increase the power of corporations, as when the Supreme Court removed limits on their ability to financially intervene in elections with its Citizens United ruling. (This decision may be to the election of 2012 what Bush v. Gore was to 2000.) Legislative power is used to generate more legislative power, as when Tom DeLay used money raised in Washington to manipulate redistricting in Texas (though, in that instance, he was convicted of money-laundering for his pains). Paralleling these moves is the transformation of the GOP itself into an organization that renegade Republican operative Mike Lofgren has characterized as “less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and…more like…one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.” In the background is the biggest institutional shift of all: the steady transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the rich and corporations.

With all of this afoot, the GOP doesn’t need to abandon its dream of permanent domination. The long, slow power grab of the institutional structure reconciles its long-term and short-term ambitions. But if it succeeds along this path, then it—and the rest of us—would have to give up the dream of a fair electoral system that expresses the will of the people. The Republicans would have to suspend the Republic—in the name, of course, of saving it.

It's a never-ending fight with multiple fronts.  Democrats - and democracy - lose when we ignore even one of those multiple fronts, or relax our determination for a single election cycle.

Permanent victory is impossible, but long-term defeat is unthinkable.