Across the country, Republicans appear to have concluded that rigging the machinery of election, by means of gerrymandering, changing voter identification requirements, reducing voting hours, and making registration more time-consuming and difficult, is the only way to obtain what their political prescriptions can't get for them: Reelection.
Of course, these sorts of games have always been played by both sides. In heavily Democratic Maryland, Governor Martin O'Malley recently approved a redistricting plan that has been condemned by all objective analysts as pure and quite excessive gerrymandering. But it's Republicans who have seemed,of late to be far more enamored of such procedural games, to the point it appears they have completely given up competing on the basis of ideas. Thus, for example, about 90% of the many attempts by many state governments to alter voting regulations prior to the November 2012 elections, curiously, were Republicans.
The most recent example at hand is in my current home state of Virginia. This week, in our exactly evenly divided Assembly, Republicans took advantage of the absence of one Democratic state senator to approve an egregiously unfair electoral redistricting plan, whose effect would be to oust as many as four Democratic senators from their seats. As the Washington Post lead editorial today observes, this move can be considered "a new low for hyper-partisanship, dirty tricks and the unaccountable arrogance of power."
Governor Robert McDonnell professes to have been taken by surprise by the maneuver, and it's very possible that he was. As a Republican who's trying to appear moderate, he must be rather chagrined at this juvenile prank by GOP "leaders" in the assembly. The Post editorial urges him to announce he'll veto the new mapping plan if it's passed, pointing out that Democrats will likely seek revenge by opposing his proposals to deal with some of the state's real issues.
I see another reason -- one that may be even more decisive -- for McDonnell to block his GOP cohort's redistricting effort. McDonnell is clearly interested in national office and has attempted to position himself as a pragmatic, centrist Republican. For this kind of blatant election-rigging to happen on his watch could quickly destroy that image of him.
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