I was reading a recent Washington Post report about the redoubtable Sth. Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s threat to ‘put a hold’ on the confirmation of nominees, Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel and CIA Chief, John Brennan. At first glance, I wondered… Are you a right-wing lunatic hiding beneath a relatively moderate Republican skin?… But then I remembered that the competition, these days, isn’t between Republicans and Democrats at elections but within the parties at Primaries; meaning that Graham was pitching to the rabid base to shore up his position against a primary attack. The new reality is, the enemy within is more dangerous than the foe across the aisle.

How has this anomaly of the democratic process arisen that has made compromise between parties, impossible and government, sclerotic?
In the 2012 elections, 85% of House seats and 60% of Senate races, were considered Safe (a winning margin of at least 10%). In the past, staking a claim to these prized pieces of Congressional real estate could give the holder a job for life. Many incumbents took the opportunity to grow fat and comfortable while many others took the relative safety of their position to carve out meaningful and illustrious legislative careers. Until the recent past, ‘lunatic fringe’ primary challenges were rarely successful but with the rise of the rabid right-wing Tea Party within the G.O.P., that all changed. The threat from this intractable faction has led previously rational Republican legislative negotiators to behave like cornered Rottweilers. That coupled with the ludicrous 60% Senate vote (close to that often required to change a national constitution elsewhere in the world) now needed to enact simple legislation; and national government, in any meaningful sense, has ceased to exist in the USA.

It is grievously frustrating to see the lurch from crisis to crisis of Congress’ own design. The members don’t seem chastened by the flirtation with recession, in last quarter 2012, said to be the result of uncertainty generated by Congressional brinkmanship over the ‘Fiscal Cliff’ or the sledgehammer surgery applied to the US economy by the ‘Sequester’ as a result of Congressional failure to act last month.

Republican House members and Senators seem only to be concerned, like Senator Graham, with potential Primary challenges from Tea Party fanatics. And why need they care how low the esteem of the G.O.P in Congress sinks in the eyes of electors, when the only threat to their Congressional survival lies within their own ranks.

Until the threat of a party losing a seat becomes greater than a Primary loss, this sorry state appears destined to continue. In Australia, seat (district) boundaries and redistricting is established by an independent Federal Commission rather than the incumbent majority party in each State. With the Republicans in the ascendancy in ‘State engineered redistricting’ in recent years, the electoral map greatly favours the G.O.P. I noted with interest that at the November election, Democrats won millions more votes than Republicans but 33 fewer seats; a product of majority party redistricting, the Texas Perry-mander etc.

I remember looking at gerrymandering in my political science classes at university and discussing it as a quaint relic of the 19th century ‘rotten borough’ era in England and 1812 Massachusetts (where the term originated). But then I became interested in modern USA politics… Such a glaring and catastrophic democratic flaw would be an amusing subject of harmless banter if the country in question was Chad but when manufactured crises in the Congress of the USA, such as the 2011 ‘Debt Ceiling’ and the recent ‘Fiscal Cliff’, and ‘Sequester’, can cause the US credit-rating to be downgraded and other financial ripples around the world then it becomes a worry for the rest of us.

I just watched Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a documentary about Jack Abramoff and the way he allegedly bought the Republican Party. It was horrifying.

Read New York Times Columnist, Sam Wang’s piece on the 2012 Election:
• The Great Gerrymander of 2012 by Sam Wang
(NYT, 3 Feb. 2013)

I can see China with its booming economy, looking on with envy at the remarkable excercise of democracy in the USA, with its sensible Senate rules that prevent anything getting done. Will any other American organisation adopt the requirment of a 60% vote in favour of any action or would they just laugh? Would any democratic institution anywhere in the world, outside the USA, ever adopt a 60% rule to get anything done? Will the Congressional gerrymander ever be exposed and fixed?

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