Subj : Starting things off.
To   : Mike Powell
From : Lee Lofaso
Date : Tue Oct 04 2016 08:50 pm

Hello Mike,

 >> The Republican Party is self-destructing.  It has become the party
 >> of old ideas.  A party that clings to an ideology that has long been
 >> discredited and discarded, having a majority in the house only due
 >> to gerrymandering and a very slim majority in the senate that it has
 >> no hopes of retaining.

 MP> Ironically, in my state, the gerrymandering that flipped it from electing
 MP> mostly Democrats to mostly Republicans was done by Democrats hoping to get
 MP> rid of the 1 or 2 Republican Reps that kept getting elected.  The first
 MP> election year after they did that, every district but maybe one went
 MP> Republican, including at least one that had not done so in decades.
 MP> Although
 MP> they got one of those districts back, the one or two districts back before
 MP> that that were Republican have remainded so for the past 20 year since, as
 MP> have the others they lost.

 MP> Local Democrats get really, really angry when you use the word gerrymander
 MP> around them.  Really, really angry.

They all do it.  Democrats and Republicans alike.  It is the
nature of the game.  The first rule of politics is to get elected.
Or re-elected as the case may be.  A politician's duty is to
himself/herself first, everybody else last.  That is the way the
game is played.

State legislatures have the power to redistrict congressional
boundaries, not the Congress.  So what do members of Congress do?
They pressure their buddies back home to vote their way.  Quite
easy to do.  "You want the funds to build that bridge in your
town?  Then draw up those congressional lines the way I want."
Works every time.

Republicans control three quarters of the state legislatures,
along with governorships.  Democrats are the clear minority in
that area.  You think the people really have a voice in who
gets elected to Congress?

Democrats have the blue wall, and have learned how to win
the Presidency.  But Republicans own everything else.

--Lee

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