Republicans to struggle with crisis they created

Date

October 4, 2013

Waleed Aly

The US cash coma has its origins in the Republicans’ recent success in creating gerrymanders. The Obamacare crisis was waiting to happen.

A US federal employee protests against the government shutdown in Washington. Photo: Reuters

Contrary to obvious appearances, the Republicans in Congress who this week forced the US government into a coma are not insane. That doesn’t mean this wasn’t an insane result. It was, on almost every level. That includes the level of pure politics, with polling showing predictably that the American people see no need for this mess, and even Republicans acknowledging that the electorate will blame them, not President Obama.

They know this because that’s what happened the last time they tried this in the mid-’90s, handing Bill Clinton a political gift he took all the way to a landslide victory in 1996. The Republicans are not merely holding a gun to the nation’s head; they’re holding one to their own.

It doesn’t get much more radical than trying to bring the government down.

But that doesn’t make individual Republicans ”lemmings with suicide vests”, as one of their own described them. It’s not that simple. As individuals, Republican politicians are embracing this insanity for perfectly sane reasons. And that’s the problem. The political system is now such that Republicans keep their jobs by making the party as a whole increasingly unelectable.

Illustration: Simon Letch.

This week’s farce has its roots in 2010 when Republicans swept their way to majorities in both houses of Congress. It was a stunning return from exile, after Democrats had banished them from every limb of the government in 2008. But then Republicans tried to entrench their position through a colossal gerrymander. Several Republican-controlled states proceeded to redraw their electoral boundaries to make Democrat success nigh on impossible. And it worked. By 2012, results in the House of Representatives were so skewed that the Republicans comfortably maintained their majority despite Democrat candidates receiving more than a million more votes.

Take Pennsylvania, where Democrats won nearly 51 per cent of the vote, but Republicans won 13 seats to five. Or Michigan where the Democrat vote was nearly 53 per cent while Republicans took almost twice as many seats. North Carolina: 51-49 to the Democrats but nine Republican seats to a paltry four. And on it goes. That sort of result landed in at least 10 states – only one of which was rigged to favour the Democrats. To get a sense of the scale of it, consider that in the seven states redrawn by Republicans, near parity voting (16.7 million votes to 16.4 million) delivered 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats.

That’s a clear perversion of democracy and it’s no accident. Indeed the Republican State Leadership Committee made it explicit. They ran a $30 million project called Redmap, aimed at winning key seats at the state level, which would give them the power to draw electoral boundaries. What’s more, they planned to do this in a census year so they could draw with precision – 2010 was exactly such a year.

So the plan worked. They played the system. But now the system is playing them. Sure, Republicans look set to control the House well into the future. But in the American system, the political contest doesn’t simply vanish. It shifts to the primaries. Now if you’re a Republican House member, your greatest threat comes not from Democrats, but from other Republican challengers hungry for your seat. The result is that Republicans are talking more and more to their own base, and less and less to everyone else. It’s the rational thing for a politician to do. Even if that base is becoming increasingly irrational.

Old-school Republicans might shake their heads at the rising rabidity of their Tea Party colleagues, but the truth is they’re currently no match for them. The last thing aspiring congressional Republicans need is a well-funded lobby group running campaigns lacerating them as closet socialists. Freed from the need to defeat any meaningful Democrat challenge, Republican politics is now such that everyone’s racing to outbid each other for the mantle of true believer. It’s a classic case of a closed system encouraging ever more radical posturing.

It doesn’t get much more radical than trying to bring the government down. And that’s the real concern here: what if this isn’t really about Obamacare at all? What if the government shutdown itself is the goal? Truth be told, Republican candidates have been talking about doing this since 2010. Back then it was just as likely about budget cuts – ”a down payment on fiscal sanity” is that well-worn Republican phrase. Either way the subtext has always been the same: that shutting down the government would be a good thing; it would not usher in the kind of dysfunction that, say, in a country like ours happens once in 100 years and causes a government to be dismissed.

America’s problem is even more serious than it now appears. America is now two artificially created countries, operating in parallel. There’s the country that chooses presidents and the one that can only rail righteously against them. The country where funding the government is a matter of sensible routine and the country where shutting down the government is a badge of pride, a slogan you can sell.

The Republican Party is going to have to figure out which country it wants to rule because these countries cannot be reconciled. They won’t be until every state hands over the power to draw electoral boundaries to an independent, non-political body. In the meantime, the Republican Party is trapped in a bubble largely of its own making.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist. He hosts Drive on ABC Radio National and is a lecturer in politics at Monash University.