John Nichols | The Nation

RNC chairman Reince Priebus speaking at the 2011 Western Republican Leadership Conference. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

On a day when most Americans were focused on the stirring second inaugural address of President Barack Obama—and on the broader majesty of the transference of an election result into a governing mandate—Republican state senators in Virginia hatched an elaborate scheme to rig the electoral system against democracy.

Prevented by an even 20-20 divide in the chamber from gerrymandering Senate districts to favor one party or the other, the Republicans knew that their only opening to draw lines that favored their candidates in this fall’s off-year elections would be if at least one Democrat were missing. Inauguration Day gave them an opening, as an African-American senator, a veteran of the civil rights movement, was in Washington to recognize the beginning of the new term of the nation’s first African-American president.

In a matter of minutes, the Republicans introduced and approved—on a 20-19 vote—a new map that is designed to concentrate African-American and liberal white votes in a handful of districts while virtually guaranteeing that Republicans will win a majority of the new districts and control of the legislature. And if a Republican wins the governorship this fall, the GOP will, thanks to a legislative coup and the electoral map it created, have complete control of a state that was easily won by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, that has two Democratic senators and that most observers believe is trending Democratic.

After doing the dirty deed, the Republican senators adjourned their Rev. Martin Luther King Day session not in honor of the civil rights icon but “in memory of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.”

Welcome to GOP Version2013.

Shaken by the overwhelming defeats of 2012—a 5 million popular-vote defeat in the presidential race, an Electoral College wipeout, the loss of two US Senate seats in a year where they had been expected to gain, a 1.4 million popular vote deficit in US House races nationwide and the loss of seven of eleven gubernatorial races that were in play—Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus has made it clear that he wants his partisan minions to use what power they retain to rig the electoral process.

The Virginia example is blatant.

But it is not isolated. It is part of a national strategy to allow Republicans to “win” even when they lose. And its primary focus will be on gerrymandering not just state legislatures and the US House but on rigging the Electoral College.

Last week, Priebus urged Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rules for distribution of Electoral College votes.

Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from “battleground” states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully controlled red [in the statehouse] ought to be considering,” Priebus says with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except those of Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined district plans) to the winner.

This is not just a theoretical discussion. Legislation to change how electoral votes are distributed is already being prepared in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Republicans in three other states where their party controls the governorship and the legislature—Florida, Ohio and Virginia—are openly discussing the Priebus plan. Those six states voted for President Obama in 2012 by comfortable margins. Yet, had the Priebus plan been in place just in those six states before the 2012 election, the president’s Electoral College margin would have collapsed from a 322-206 landslide to a 270-268 squeaker. A variation on the Priebus plan, which would give each state’s two statewide electoral votes to whoever won the most congressional districts, would have elected Republican Mitt Romney.

So President Obama would have won by 5 million votes, carried the majority of states and swept the battlegrounds. But Romney would have been inaugurated as the nation’s forty-fifth president.

That’s not democracy. But that is the point of the Priebus plan.

Priebus and his team have seen the demographic data. They know that their party’s crude appeals to the past—“in memory of General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson”—have less and less appeal to an American electorate that election results and polling data suggest has little taste for Tea Party fantasies schemes to redistribute wealth upward, American Legislative Exchange Council “Stand Your Ground” laws or attempts to divide the country along lines of race, gender or sexuality.

But Priebus and his allies—including key players such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who calls the scheme “an interesting concept…a plausible concept”—also know that a sly rewriting of the rules for the distribution of Electoral College votes could get them back in the presidential game for 2016.

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Priebus has a long history of seeking to game the political system—supporting restrictive “voter ID” laws, seeking to end same-day voter registration and aligning Republicans with groups that make little secret of their determination to intimidate likely Democratic voters. He also has made the RNC an aggressive player in developing and supporting strategies to gerrymander congressional and state legislative district lines (while at the same time isolating minority voters) in order to guarantee elections “wins” even when Republicans lose popular support.

In 2012, when Republicans did in fact lose popular support, the strategy paid off handsomely. Democrats won the national popular vote for congressional seats by a striking 1.4 million votes. Yet, Republicans retained control of the House and, with it, an ability to block agendas favored by the American people.

The Electoral College gambit now being advanced by Priebus builds on gerrymandering strategy, with an ambitious goal. Under the current rules, Barack Obama has twice won the presidency with more than 51 percent of the vote—the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to do so—and secured sweeping Electoral College victories.

But Republican statehouse wins in 2010 gave the party the ability to game the electoral process, not just for elected members of the US House but for electing the president. Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district pluralities would in almost every battleground state yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, as many as thirteen votes would have gone to Republican Mitt Romney.

FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy has run the numbers. They say the results would have been dramatically closer and might even have yielded that Romney win. Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district), Obama would have secured the narrowest possible victory: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including the one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.

“If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,” explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.

This is something Priebus, a bare-knuckles pol who promoted a variety of voter-disenfranchisement schemes in 2012, well understands.

Americans who are more respectful of democracy should also understand the stakes.

There are many reforms that are needed to expand democracy in the United States. But gaming the Electoral College is not one of them.

Indeed, as Richie says, the very fact that it is possible to rewrite the rules and use gerrymandered congressional district lines to thwart the will of the people regarding the election of the president of the United States “should give us all pause.”

“The election of the president should be a fair process where all American voters should have an equal ability to hold their president accountable,” says Richie. “It’s time for the nation to embrace one-person, one-vote elections and the ‘fair fight’ represented by a national popular vote. Let’s forever dismiss the potential of such electoral hooliganism and finally do what the overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently preferred: make every vote equal with a national popular vote for president.”

That’s the right standard for a modern nation that respects democracy, just the right standard for drawing district lines in the states would preclude a surprise gerrymandering session of the legislature on the day of President Obama’s inauguration and celebrations of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birth.

But just as Virginia Republicans were willing to abandon any pretense of fairness in order to game the system for statewide electoral advantage, there is every reason to believe that Republican legislators in states across the country will, with encouragement from the national chairman of their party, move to rig the Electoral College so that a losing Republican might again “win” the presidency—as popular-vote loser George W. Bush did in 2000, with an assist from a Republican-dominated US Supreme Court.

Americans who presume that there are limits to the willingness of Priebus and his Republican stalwarts to rig the rules in their favor have not been paying attention. The Virginia coup should serve as their wake-up call. Reince Priebus’ GOP Version2013 threatens not just Democratic victories but democracy itself.

For more on GOP shenanigans, read John Nichols’s primer on filibuster reform.

With his second inauguration, Barack Obama will become the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to renew his tenure after having won more than 51 percent of the vote in two consecutive elections.

More importantly, in a political sense, he will be the first Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have won mandates from the majority of the American people in two consecutive elections.

This is the perspective that Americans should bring to the inaugural festivities. We should expect a great deal from Barack Obama. Despite four years of battering by Fox News and Limbaugh and the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell, he has been re-elected with a higher percentage of the popular vote than John Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992 or 1996 or George Bush in 2000 or 2004.

Obama’s mandate extends beyond himself. His party has increased its Senate majority and Democrats earned 1.4 million more votes in House races than Republicans. Gerrymandering and money kept Republican control of the House, but that opposition party is in such disarray that the president really does have an opening to make something of his mandate.

Obama must seize that opportunity as an essential part of making the case for bold executive orders and a bold legislative agenda that will bring not just the hope but the change he promised in what now seems like a very distant 2008 campaign. The president has in the transition period since the 2012 election displayed a willingness to push harder, to go bigger, and it has yielded significant progress not just on gun-safety issues but in the long struggle against the Republican austerity agenda that makes a diety of deregulating away consumer and environmental protections, tearing the social safety net and cutting taxes for wealthy campaign donors.

To consolidate that progress, and to assure that his second term will be as visionary and activist as his 2012 campaign promised, Obama must, like FDR, use every opportunity to give voice to the agenda—not just in his inaugural address but in his February 12 (Lincoln’s Birthday) State of the Union address.

To do this, the forty-fourth president would be wise to note his electoral connection to the thirty-second, as a Democrat who after a difficult first term has earned as second term with a mandate to govern. Yes, times and circumstances are different. Obama does not have the “New Deal” Congress that Roosevelt did, but neither does he face quite the economic challenge that FDR did.

But Obama’s responsibility in 2013 is the same as Roosevelt’s in 1937: the president must turn America’s attention toward its democratic vistas. He must tell the people that not just he but they have accomplished something. And that they can accomplish much, much more in the next four years.

Roosevelt did this when he used his second inaugural address to deliver an argument for government that was, at once, bold and well-reasoned.

FDR portrayed his first term as a time of struggle “to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day.” But he envisioned a second term in which government could become a force not merely for tempering the worst excesses of Wall Street but for making real the promise of new age.

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“Instinctively we recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men,” Roosevelt explained.

“We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.”

“In this,” FDR concluded, “we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.”

Roosevelt’s genius was the linking of democracy and self-governance, the reminding of Americans that through elections and government they have the master economic and political forces that would otherwise dominate them. After a 2012 election campaign that his Republican foes portrayed as a referendum on the role of government, Obama has a mandate to make government work again for the American people. His inaugural address should claim that mandate with all the passion and all the determination that FDR brought to the mission seventy-six years ago.

Immigration reform is high on Obama's second-term agenda. But, Aura Bogado asks, how much attention is the president really giving it?

America has always had media critics—from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in 1775 to the folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Media Matters for America today. And they have played a vital role in exposing the mistakes and misdeeds first of subservient newspapers and more recently of broadcast and digital news outlets.

But the media reform movement that steps from complaining about irresponsible and malicious broadcasters to actually holding them to account is a more recent phenomenon. And it is entirely reasonable to suggest that the man who initiated what we today understand as a national media reform movement is Dr. Everett C. Parker, the amazing activist who successfully challenged media complicity with the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.

Dr. Parker wrote a new chapter in American history with the fight he led, as founding director of the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, to deny the license renewal of a powerful Southern television station that refused to cover the civil rights movement.

“Every movement has thousands of individuals, whose names we never know, forming its backbone,” recalls the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “The civil rights movement, for instance, was the product of countless individuals standing and working together throughout the South and across the country. But there are always those individuals who emerge to give a face to a movement—provide leadership, vision and moral authority. In the area of media reform, it was Rev. Dr. Everett C. Parker.”

Dr. Parker, who turns 100 on January 17, has spent the better part of a lifetime “irritating and worrying the broadcast establishment”—to quote a review of his activism published some years ago by Broadcasting magazine.

But it was a request from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that set Parker on the course that would make him “the conscience of the broadcast industry and the Federal Communications Commission.” With other religious leaders, Parker met with Dr. King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King complained that one of great challenges facing the emerging civil rights movement was the failure of Southern media outlets to cover it. Major television and radio stations, and most newspapers, were not just dismissive of or critical of the movement. They literally refused to cover it—going to far as to blur television screens and announce they were having “technical difficulties” when images of King and other civil rights campaigners appeared on the national NBC news.

One of the worst offenders was WLBT-TV, a station broadcasting out of Jackson, Mississippi.

When WLBT’s broadcast license came up for renewal, Parker and the UCC’s Office of Communications organized a challenge, arguing that WLBT was not meeting its responsibility to broadcast in the public interest on airwaves that belonged to all the people—not just white Southern segregationists. The Federal Communications Commission had the power to pull the license. But the politically appointed and politically connected commissioners bowed to pressure from still-powerful Southern interests—and a broadcast industry that was determined to fight the application of basic standards. “Talk about obstacles being thrown in the path!” recalls former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, a student of the regulatory process who has long celebrated Parker’s work. “At WLBT, many of its friends from other broadcast stations, and high-paid industry lawyers and lobbyists all swarmed the FCC and argued that ordinary people without a property interest in a station had no standing to appeal a license. And the FCC, to its shame, agreed.”

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Undaunted, Parker and his office went to great expense to collect proof of WLBT’s misdeeds—including evidence of how WLBT and other Southern stations systematically refused to cover not just the civil rights movement but any positive news regarding African-Americans—and then took the issue to court. It was a conservative jurist on the DC Circuit Court, Judge Warren Berger (later the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), who initially granted standing to Parker and his fellow petitioners and then determined that “the broadcast industry does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty.”

In 1969, the US Supreme Court vacated WLBT’s license on the grounds that it had violated the public trust and breached the duty that went with a broadcast license.

The decision changed the way in which Southern stations, and many Northern stations, covered news of civil rights and liberation movements. It also forced the FCC to begin taking seriously challenges to broadcast licenses. Eventually, Parker and the UCC Office of Communication would convince the FCC to accept equal opportunity provisions that began to address hiring barriers at broadcast outlets—as well as barriers to the ownership of broadcast outlets by women and people of color. It was all part of a whole for Parker, who would go on to champion the cause of the Wilmington 10, a group of young North Carolina activists who were wrongly convicted in a notorious civil rights–era prosecution. Parker would live to see outgoing North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue issue pardons of innocence in December 2012 for the nine African-American men and one white woman who received prison sentences totaling nearly 300 years as a result of trumped-up prosecutions in the 1971 case.

As Jackson and others have well recognized, Parkerʼs campaigns have never been about “abstract legal principles.” They have always been about “core principles of justice, equality and fairness.”

And when it came to broadcasting, as Jackson notes, “Dr. Parkerʼs core idea was so simple: The airwaves belong to the people, so the people should have considerable say about how theyʼre used and managed.”

That is the essential premise of the modern media-reform movement.

And Dr. Everett Parker, now 100, is a living testament to the resilience and the determination of the movement he brought into being.

John Nichols is the co-founder of Free Press, the nation’s media reform network. Read his tribute to another civil rights activist, Gerda Lerner, here.

Reince Priebus speaks at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Fresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was “a great campaign—a great nine-month campaign" that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might “win.”

Specifically, Priebus is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.

Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district wins would yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Democrat Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, it would have been eight for Republican Mitt Romney, twelve for Barack Obama.

Nationwide, Obama won a sweeping popular-vote victory—with an almost 5-million ballot margin that made him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to take more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections. That translated to a very comfortable 322-206 win in the Electoral College.

How would the 2012 results have changed if a Priebus plan had been in place? According to an analysis by Fair Vote-The Center for Voting and Democracy, the results would have been a dramatically closer and might even have yielded a Romney win.

Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district) Obama would have secured the narrowest possible win: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.

“If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,” explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.

This is something Priebus, a bare-knuckles pol who promoted a variety of voter-disenfranchisement schemes in 2012, well understands.

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The RNC chair is encouraging Republican governors and legislators—who, thanks to the “Republican wave” election of 2010, still control many battleground states that backed Obama and the Democrats in 2012—to game the system.

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully controlled red [in the statehouse] ought to be considering,” Priebus says with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined district plans) to the winner.

Already, there are moves afoot in a number of battleground states to “fix” the rules to favor the Republicans in 2016, just as they have already fixed the district lines for electing members of the House. Thanks to gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic votes, Republicans were able to lose the overall nationwide vote for US House seats by 1.4 million votes and still take control of the chamber—thus giving the United States the divided government that voters have rejected.

There are many reforms that are needed to expand democracy in the United States. But gaming the Electoral College is not one of them.

Indeed, as Richie says, the very fact that it is possible to rewrite the rules and use gerrymandered congressional district lines to thwart the will of the people regarding the election of the president of the United States the very fact “should give us all pause.”

“The Election of the president should be a fair process where all American voters should have an equal ability to hold their president accountable,” says Richie. “It’s time for the nation to embrace one-person, one-vote elections and the ‘fair fight’ represented by a national popular vote. Let’s forever dismiss the potential of such electoral hooliganism and finally do what the overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently preferred: make every vote equal with a national popular vote for president.”

That’s the right standard for a modern nation that respects democracy.

And Reince Priebus, who was wrong about the Republicans running a “great” campaign in 2012, is even more wrong when he proposes rule changes that would allow a losing Republican candidate to “win” the presidency.

For a glimpse of more hopeful post-election GOP policy, read our latest dispatch from Voting Rights Watch.