GOP in a nutshell: Boehner Says Election Losses Won’t Affect Budget Stance

[spanone]

if you're a republican, elections have no consequences. so there is no majority rule.

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WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner suggested Thursday that candidates and personalities – not Republican proposals on Medicare and spending cuts – contributed to Republican losses in November, as he vowed to press forward with a House budget plan that renews the push to shrink the government.

In short, Mr. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in an interview, the election losses would not deter his party from pressing its vision of reducing the size of government and turning government health care programs largely over to the private sector.

“There are a lot of things that decide an election, especially the two candidates that you have, the personalities that they have, positions they have taken,” he said.
“There are a lot of factors that went into that election,” he added. “I don’t know that that’s the issue. Eighty percent of the American people think that Washington has a spending problem.”

The release this week of a Republican budget that employs spending cuts and an overhaul of benefit programs to balance the budget in 10 years has led some to question why Republicans are sticking with that approach after losing the presidency as well as seats in the House and the Senate last November.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/us/politics/boehner-says-election-losses-wont-deter-push-for-smaller-government.html?pagewanted=print

[badtoworse]

1. Did anyone seriously expect them to just cave?

[Cali_Democrat]

2. Then there's only one thing Obama should do...

Tell them to take a fucking hike.

[spanone]

3. they will oppose him no matter what he does on anything. period.

yet i can't remember when the media's used the word 'obstructionists'... and it's so far beyond obstructing.

[essaynnc]

4. So..... serious question.

Is there any way to get these....representatives.... to see that the vast majority of people don't want what they want???? Is it just that they live in a bubble or that they just choose to ignore reality? Personally, I think that it's they choose to... but, I could be wrong !!!!!

[badtoworse]

5. Congresspeople don't answer to the vast majority

They answer to the people in their district. It can be frustrating, but that is how our system is laid out.

[spanone]

6. a good reason to outlaw gerrymandering.

[badtoworse]

7. I believe it is already illegal

Proving it happened is the hard part.

[spanone]

8. It’s Appalling that Gerrymandering Is Legal

And if the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, it’s going to get a lot worse.

Posted Friday, Nov. 9, 2012

The maps are amazing: Ohio and Pennsylvania, states that went blue for Barack Obama, have congressional delegations that are heavily red. As David Weigel pointed out Wednesday, the maps show how gerrymandering saved the Republican majority in the House. (Even though Obama won Pennsylvania by 5 points, Republicans took 13 of 18 House districts. In Ohio, Obama won by two and the GOP kept 12 of 16 House seats.*) It’s outrageous. It’s also perfectly legal, and Democrats do it too, when given the chance—just ask the Republicans in Illinois. Gerrymandering is an American game both parties play because the courts allow it and the voters don’t punish them for it.

On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, the only real bulwark against gerrymandering still standing. With the election over, it was inevitable that such a case would move onto the court’s docket. That doesn’t make it good news.

As Robert Draper pointed out in a big piece for the Atlantic in October, the first gerrymander lover was Patrick Henry in 1788. Fast forward to 1962, when the Supreme Court addressed a related but different problem: The lopsided size of the congressional districts in states like Texas, which allowed one legislator to represent 200,000 people while his colleague next door represented 900,000. The court said no to this kind of line drawing, enshrining the principle of “one person, one vote.” Then in 1986, the court also ruled in Davis v. Bandemer that drawing lines for the sake of partisan advantage was unconstitutional. The opponents of a political map would have to show “continued frustration of the will of a majority of voters or effective denial of a minority of voters of a fair chance to influence the political process.”

That sounds lovely but went nowhere. As Columbia law professor Nathaniel Persily pointed out when I called him, ever since that 1986 decision “claims of partisan gerrymandering have always been brought up but they never win.” Not in federal elections, anyway. In a fractured 2004 decision, the Supreme Court upheld a gerrymander in Pennsylvania by Republicans that looks a lot like the one that produced this year’s crazy map. Four conservatives on the court said that gerrymander claims weren’t the concern of the courts at all. The fifth, Justice Anthony Kennedy, said that in theory somebody somewhere could come up with a legitimate theory for challenging partisan gerrymandering, but so far, he couldn’t see it. Two years later, the court let Texas keep a statewide gerrymandered map, too. As Persily says, “if the facts in those two cases weren’t egregious enough, it’s hard to see a set of facts” that would be, from the court’s point of view.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/11/the_supreme_court_may_gut_the_voting_rights_act_and_make_gerrymandering.html