Monster Moves

Well, waddaya know? Rick Hertzberg, writing in the NYer:

Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union.

Color me shocked ... not. They know they can't win under the prevailing rules, hence the "vote fraud" obsession of the last fifty years. Now they've figured out a way to harness California's "direct Democracy" system to subvert the will of the people. Oh, and color me shocked again. Look who's involved:

Nominally, the sponsor of No. 07-0032 is Californians for Equal Representation. But that’s just a letterhead—there’s no such organization. Its address is the office suite of Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, the law firm for the California Republican Party, and its covering letter is signed by Thomas W. Hiltachk, the firm’s managing partner and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal lawyer for election matters. Hiltachk and his firm have been involved in many well-financed ballot initiatives before, including the recall that put Arnold in Sacramento.

Please go read the NYer piece. It's short. Because these people are never ever going to stop. Not during our lifetime, anyway. The "thumpin'" they received in 2006 hasn't phased them a bit. They obviously don't think it has anything to do with being rightly perceived as nasty, criminal, lying, cheating, stealing, cutthroat, scorched earth, underminers of Democracy, because if they did, they be out trying to cleaning up their collective acts rather than pulling shit like this. Look how easily they ran a democratically elected governor out of California. This initiative sounds incredibly sensible on its face. Think it can't pass? Ask Gray Davis for his opinion on that subject.

No. Republicans are like monsters or murderers in bad Hollywood movies. You can stab them, shoot them, bludgeon them, and drown them and they just keep coming back for more. And don't take comfort in the fact that the old farts are drying up. There's always a newer, dumber, more mendacious generation of them waiting in the wings and we'll have to figure out ways to deal with them.