Cris Dush, ALEC & Sketchy Republican Math Exposed

Got Gerrymander? PA state legislator Cris Dush

Democrat Mike Revis' defeat of a Republican challenger in Tuesday's special election for Missouri's 97th district seat for the state legislature only adds to growing conservative anxiety over the increasing likelihood of significant gains for Democrats in this fall's 2018 midterm elections.

As Matt Ygliesias reported for Vox, Revis winning the seat by a 3-point margin in a district Trump won by 28 points isn't a good sign for the GOP.

Nowhere is Republican desperation any more visible than in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Republican state legislator Cris Dush has been thrust into the media spotlight lately after calling for the impeachment of five of Pennsylvania's seven state supreme court justices.

All five of those justices are Democrats, and all five recently ordered Pennsylvania's Republican-majority state legislature to redraw the state's congressional map because it's so unfairly biased against Democrats that it violates the state's constitution.

As journalist Tim Darragh reported in an article for The Morning Call on Thursday, "The groundbreaking Pennsylvania Supreme Court majority opinion declaring the state congressional map unconstitutionally partisan came down to six simple words in Article 1, Section 5: 'Elections Shall Be Free and Equal.'"

The 139-page ruling handed down by the court Wednesday night gave the Pennsylvania legislature until February 15th to redraw the state's congressional map in a manner that legislators and Democratic Governor Tom Wolf can agree on - or a special master appointed by the court will redraw it in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

Now undermining the basic principles of democracy by actively suppressing and manipulating the access to vote for those who tend to vote Democratic has become part and parcel of the Republican playbook.

The Republican congressional map drawn in 2012
when 50.5% of votes were were cast for Democrats 

So predictably, Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers freaked out when the state supreme court told them their intentionally-rigged congressional map had to be redrawn.

So just how biased is the current Pennsylvania congressional map as drawn by Republicans?

It's arguably one of the most politically-biased in the country - one intended to keep a Republican minority in control of a numerical Democratic majority.

According to the latest data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, there are 4,030,174 registered Democrats and 3,221,975 registered Republicans - so amongst those registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 808,199.

During the 2012 elections (when Obama won Pennsylvania), Democratic congressional candidates won 50.5% of all votes legally counted.

But back in 2011, Republicans redrew the congressional map of Pennsylvania's 18 congressional districts established after the 2010 U.S. Census - so because of that, Republicans won 72.22% of the congressional seats in 2012 even though they won 49.5% the total number of congressional votes.

Based on the numbers, that should've been more like a 50-50 split - so how does that math work?

As the majority of the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday, it doesn't.

Map showing the 68% of state legislatures currently
controlled by the Republican Party [Map NCSL]

Based on the state's population as determined by the U.S. Census, according to Wikipedia, there are currently 17 congressional representatives from Pennsylvania, 12 Republicans and 5 Democrats - one seat remains unfilled and is up for election, there should be 18.

How do Republican congressman outnumber democratic congressman by 12 - 5 when registered Democratic voters outnumber their Republican counterparts by over 800,000?

Cris Dush could probably tell you, but I doubt he would.

Especially in light of the fact that he's calling for sitting justices of the state supreme court to be impeached because they ruled that Pennsylvania Republican's rigged congressional map is illegal.

Republicans in general really don't want Americans knowing how it is that a party that is so out of touch with the mainstream controls both legislative branches of the federal government, the White House and, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) a remarkable 68 percent of state legislative chambers across the U.S. (See map above).

Normally, a conservative state legislator like Cris Dush wouldn't exactly register as a familiar household name on America's national political radar.

But the way that he and other Republican members of the Pennsylvania state legislature are digging in their heels and trying to oppose the court order to redraw the congressional map is only drawing more media attention to the length to which Republicans will go to hold on to their majority in congress.

Journalist & voting rights advocate Ari Berman

A redrawn (fair) congressional map in Pennsylvania could obviously have serious implications in the 2018 midterm elections in November.

So the Keystone state has become a focal point for national media attention on Republican gerrymandering in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Or North Carolina, where the Supreme Court denied Republican efforts to disenfranchise black voters last May.

Journalist Ari Berman's article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, "How The GOP Rigs Elections",
offers some intriguing insight into the Republican Party's rampant, overt and calculated interference with congressional districts, voting rolls and the use of legislative power to put up obstacles making it harder for people who tend to vote Democratic to cast votes.

In his article, Berman takes a particularly close look at the Republican's gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts in Wisconsin - the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Rather than reflect the inflated rhetoric extolling the ideals of freedom and democracy so often bandied about by Republicans like Ryan, the sketchy political rigging in Wisconsin reeks of the same kind of repressive authoritarianism Americans so often attribute to countries like North Korea, Russia and China.

During a politically-tumultuous year marked by a chaotic White House, when 33 different seats in the U.S. Senate and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election on November 6th, the repercussions of the 2018 midterm elections could have a profound impact on American society and the Trump presidency.

Bill Murray escapes with Punxsutawney Phil in
a scene from the 1993 film Groundhog Day 

So it's understandable why Cris Dush has suddenly achieved national recognition.

The married Pine Creek Township resident represents the 98% white, solidly "red" Republican 66th district in rural western Pennsylvania which includes all of Jefferson County and parts of Indiana County.

Fans of the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day might be more familiar with Jefferson County as the home of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania where actor Bill Murray played a depressed weatherman trapped in a time loop.

Punxsutawney is the town where each year a groggy groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil is hoisted aloft to great fanfare to check if he sees his shadow to herald six more weeks of winter.

Now when I think of the film Groundhog Day, I think of two things: the song "The Pennsylvania Polka" and the horror of being stuck in a time loop living the same day over and over again.

In recent days, Cris Dush's actions have reminded me of both.

Remember back in 2016 when the Republican-majority of the radically right-wing conservative Kansas state legislature tried to pass Senate Bill 439?

Republican legislator Mitch Holmes authored the overreaching legislation that proposed authorizing the legislature to be able to impeach State Supreme Court justices after the court ruled that ruinous cuts to the Kansas public school budget violated the state's constitution.

Kansas Republican legislator Mitch Holmes 

That kind of unprecedented expansion of legislative power, using oversight authority over state supreme court justices meant to be used to impeach judges who commit "high crimes and misdemeanors" to block judges from ruling on legislation that violates state law reeks of the creepy fascination with authoritarianism that Republican politicians now seem to covet.

It also reeks of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive organization funded by corporations and wealthy donors that drafts "model legislation" templates for state legislators and even members of Congress to use to propose laws that make it easier for corporations to profit by undercutting or eliminating environmental laws, or dismantling unions through "right to work" laws.

Or, as in the case of Cris Dush in Pennsylvania, suppressing Democratic and progressive votes by shielding sketchy Republican math that undercuts free and fair elections from the oversight of the judiciary as mandated by the state constitution.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has thus far refused to overrule lower court decisions in North Carolina in 2017, and last Monday in Pennsylvania, where Republicans have sought to usurp the court's authority to crack down on laws that violate "free and equal" elections.

And as Tim Darragh shrewdly observed in his article for The Morning Call on Thursday, Pennsylvania Republican legislator's efforts to impeach state supreme court justices could backfire - and pave the way for other state courts to begin to dismantle the complex trickery of unfairly-drawn political maps intended to subvert the will of the American people.

Between Cris Dush calling for the impeachment of judges he disagrees with, and the High-Chair President's absurd call to spend millions on a military parade to appease his narcissism and soothe his massive personal insecurities, reasonable mainstream Republicans really have to ask themselves two questions:

When did they allow their political party to become defined by an overtly authoritarian sense of control - and whether their embrace of a "power-at-any-cost" philosophy is helpful to American democracy.

Or a means to intentionally undermine it.