towards one-party rule

I've been fairly strident in castigating the GOP on this blog - and equally strident about making it clear I hold no beef with conservatives per se. My goal is to highlight the abuses by a political party. The general subtext of my posts about teh GOP has always been about the (in my view) inexorable drift towards single-party rule, with the Democratic party becoming marginalized and ultimately as irrelevant as the Labor party has become in Israel. As demonstrated with Likud in Israel and with the PRI in Mexico, the GOP is striving towards and achieving dominance of our political system like never before in the history of this country.

I had a long argument via cell phone with Jason (whose neglected blog remains bereft of posts despite my best efforts at persuasion. Hey Tacitus, Jason would be ideal for your SuperConservaBlog project, want me to give you his email?) in response to his comment on my post below, and I explained my purpose was not to portray Republicans and Democrats in stark Manichean terms. My goal is to document the steps by which we are slipping towards one-party rule and the constant denial of this empirically-validated fact by the people who we most need to convince of its truth - not the leftists at Indymedia, but conservatives like Jason and Tacitus themselves.

Imagine, then, my surprise this morning to find over at TAP an entire article on the emerging one-party state! It's a very impressive piece that makes the case with far more rigor than I can achieve in my scattershot postings. Robert Kuffner introduces the article:

We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election.

Taken together, these several forces could well enable the Republicans to become the permanent party of autocratic government for at least a generation. Am I exaggerating? Take a close look at the particulars.

The article then delves into each of the three areas in detail. I'll be highlighting those sections in subsequent posts, to try and compartmentalize the discussion (if any).