Republicans set to take Senate - and democracy pays the price

The Republicans will capture the Senate in today’s midterm elections in America, according to Nate Silver, the polling maestro who established his credentials with his spot-on prediction of President Obama’s re-election victory in 2012.

But how much impact will the re-branding of the Senate from Democrat to Republican actually have?

Silver predicts that the Republicans will take over with 52 seats of the 100. That’s a majority, but a simple majority does not mean a lot in an institution which demands 60 votes to override a filibuster, the tactic which has brought Washington to its gridlocked knees.

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The gridlock can’t get worse. It might even ease up; there is a prediction floating around the blogosphere that Republican control of both houses of Congress may actually help the President because, with both houses against him, Obama may be forced to compromise.

Equally, the Republicans may feel able to compromise with Obama and so demonstrate to their constituents that they can, after all, act like grown-ups.

But against this is the argument that while the Republicans may feel like throwing Obama a bone, his own Democrats will not.

Senator Harry Reid, who leads the Senate Democrats, will refuse any compromise because he will be hell-bent on winning back his lost seats in 2016, and so be interested only in denying Republicans any “wins” on the legislative floor.

That just about sums up the state of Washington: the ballot box is increasingly impotent.

But there has been a backbeat to these midterm elections which may prove significant. It has never been clearer where the power lies, and how it is being used.

A series of court cases going all the way to the Supreme Court has revealed how the Republicans are planning to win elections at a time when their natural base – the white ‘country club’ middle class – is being eroded by the drift of wealth to the very top 10, and as America changes demographically from majority white to majority ‘brown’.

They are working not on how to better life for all, and so gain support, but instead to sabotage the Democrat vote. The idea is to stop the poor who are the Democrat ‘base’, overwhelmingly made up of black Americans and brown immigrants, from voting at all.

Since Obama took the White House back for the Democrats in 2008, Republicans and their corporate backers have fielded an army of lawyers to draft laws designed to disenfranchise Democrat voters in at least a dozen states, many of them in the Old Confederacy.

The window-dressing is a campaign against ‘voter fraud’. The plan is to allow only those with ‘approved’ forms of picture ID to enter the polling booths.

Guess who are the least likely Americans to have ‘approved’ ID, such as a driving licence or – in Texas – a licence to carry a pistol? They are black people who cannot afford cars, and newly minted Mexican citizens taking the bus to menial jobs.

There are other tricks, too: a ban on the ‘early opening’ of polls on Sundays. Why? Because in the South, the civil rights warriors of the 1960s worked out that they could best get the victims of Jim Crow to the ballot box by Church bus, and that is still the case among the old and in poor rural counties.

When I first came across news of this, I thought I was reading left-wing doggerel. I was not. Three weeks ago, the New York Times ran a thundering editorial:

“Election Day is three weeks off, and Republican officials and legislators around the country are battling down to the wire to preserve strict and discriminatory new voting laws that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans.

“Voter ID laws, as their supporters know, do only one thing very well: they keep otherwise eligible voters away from the polls. In most cases, this means voters who are poor, often minorities, and who don’t have the necessary documents or the money or time to get photo IDs.”

The editorial noted that a Texas judge had done the right thing by striking down the new law there. There had been two known cases of voter fraud among the last 20 million votes cast in Texas, while immigration is turning Texas from a white to an increasingly ‘brown’ state, and the judge found the truth self-evident.

But the relief was short-lived. A week later, the Times reported that the US Supreme Court, the ‘Roberts Court’ appointed by Texas’s own President ‘Dubya’ Bush, had out-ruled the local judge, and re-instated the stringent laws.

There is another dark aspect to the ‘voter fraud’ campaign. The Nation magazine revealed that the lawyers ingeniously drafting laws to deny Democrats their votes have been paid by an organisation called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

“ALEC drafted mock photo ID legislation after the 2008 election,” the Nation reported, “and in five states that passed ID laws in the past year — Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — the measures were sponsored by legislators who are members of ALEC.”

And where does ALEC get substantial funding, asked the Nation. Answer: from the Koch brothers.

Charles and David Koch, billionaire owners of the oil and coal conglomerate Koch Industries, were almost unknown beyond the Forbes 400 list a few years ago. Now they are infamous as the principal funders of the American right in general, and the Republican party in particular.

They created the Tea Party as a useful mob, and pay scientists to deny climate change. They have come to represent the politics of the wealthy who buy the government to suit their own ends of the accumulation of enormous wealth, the American Oligarchy.

The grubby campaigns of the midterms of 2014 have done much to expose the corruption behind America’s political and economic culture. That may prove to have been a wake-up call more meaningful that a few swapped seats on Capitol Hill.