“If Partisanship replaces non-Partisanship in America, every communist in America, Russia and China will rejoice at the success of their infiltration tactics.”
– Senator Wayne L. Morse, Oregon, Partisanship, February 26, 1950
“Daddy! Johnny hit me!”
“He hit me first!”
“Both of you go to your rooms! And don’t come out until you can get along with each other!”
How many parents have had that conversation with their children? The recent dust up between the Dems and the GOP regarding gerrymandering state voting districts is the adult version of “He hit me first!”
And just as children seem to alternate between who starts the fight, so do Political Parties. (read: The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens; 1904; 224 pgs.
It’s time “Dad” (the American voter) sent both “children” (Political Parties) to their rooms.
The Causes:
“Gerrymandering is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries to give advantage to a Party, group, or socioeconomic class within a constituency. This manipulation may involve “cracking” (diluting the voting power of the opposing Party’s supporters across many districts) or “packing” (concentrating the opposing Party’s voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents.
Wayne Dawkins, professor at Morgan State University, describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.
The term gerrymandering is a portmanteau of the words salamander and Elbridge Gerry, a Founding Father “Democratic-Republican” (ironically) and former Vice President of the United States who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
Gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process.”
Gerrymandering’s primary goals are to maximize the effect of supporters’ votes and minimize the effect of opponents votes. A Party’s gerrymander main purpose is to influence not only the districting statute, but also the entire corpus of legislative decisions…
Any Party that endeavors to make a district more favorable to voting for it based on a physical boundary is gerrymandering.” (Wikipedia)
Every American voter should be outraged at any corruption of the electoral process. Although gerrymandering of voting districts has a long and sordid history in American politics, toleration of it has only emboldened both Parties to commit more egregious forms of corruption in a variety of forms – the latest being the Dems (with GOP acquiescence – “faint protests”) Open Border policy.
Both Dems and Republicans allowing a million legal aliens to immigrate to the United States each year for the last thirty years – contrary to the majority will of the American people – is just further evidence of the UniParty. Both Parties are selling out our historical narrative and unique culture to the political and economic interests of the Entrenched Powers. (read: Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster by Peter Brimelow, 1996, 384 pages)
- The Dem-led Open Border Policy allowing tens of millions of illegal aliens entry into the United States has been stopped or slowed to a trickle – for the time being.
- If the GOP is serious about stemming illegal aliens’ entry into the United States they will instruct the Secretary of Homeland Security to order the Port Directors of the more than 300 Ports of Entry to enforce the law as written – not as they interpret it to the benefit of their ethnic cousins across the line.
- “Service” oriented Port Directors ruling their domains as their own fiefdoms should be reassigned to desk jobs at District Headquarters or forced to retire. “Enforcement” minded supervisors – preferably ones not working at the same Ports of Entry as their home towns – and subordinates with supervisory / command experience in the military should replace them.
This will cut off the supply of illegal aliens becoming illegal voters – a practice dating back to Orange County, California Republican “B1” Bob Dornan being voted out of Congress by illegal aliens in 1996.
But the critical node – the heart – of the electoral corruption problem has to do with Political Parties themselves.
It is oxymoronic on its’ surface that the word “American” and “Party” are conjoined when electing our lawmakers. Citizens of the freest nation on earth – citizens who pride themselves on being the most independent-minded of any citizen of any nation in the world – should recoil in horror at surrendering their most basic freedom to office-seeking, money-grubbing power brokers as intermediaries between us and our elected representatives.
Why does an electorate that prides itself on – indeed fights for – their unique freedoms under the Bill of Rights capitulate the control of how those Rights are interpreted and enforced to Political Parties who have repeatedly and consistently not only ignored the will of the common citizen but acted against their best interests? As de Tocqueville observed it wasn’t twenty years after the ratification of the Constitution of the United States that politicians discovered they could vote themselves great privileges to the detriment of their electorate; and it was the apathy of the electorate that these Parties depended upon to retain their abusive seats of power.
It is easier to align oneself to a powerful Political Party that espouses agreeable doctrine and let them do the heavy thinking. But surrendering independent effort of thought is what brought us to the brink of bankruptcy for ourselves and our children’s children. It has brought us socialistic “bail-outs” for corporations “too big to fail,” the “nanny state,” and a “Big, Beautiful Bill” that grows our national debt by 5 trillion more dollars – hoodwinking the voter with distracting donatives while earmarking trillions of dollars in special interest pork, i.e. $1,000,000,000.00 (billion) for the “expansion and acceleration of qualification activities and technical data management to enhance competition in the defense industrial base.” – paragraph (27) of the National Defense budget.
What do our Founding Fathers say about Political Parties?
- “We are not always sure that those who advocate [for us] are motivated by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, Party opposition, and many other motives are apt to operate as well. …
Complaints that our government is too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of Rival Parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minority, but by superior force of [special] interests and an overbearing majority. However we may wish these complaints had no foundation, the evidence will not permit us to deny that they are true. …
By a faction (Party), is meant a number of citizens who are united and motivated by some common impulse of passion or interest adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the population.” – James Madison, The Federalist Papers, 1788; Annals of America Volume 3, p. 213 - “All combinations (Parties) and associations with the design to direct, control, or counteract the regular deliberation and actions of the constituted authorities are destructive. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to replace the delegated will of the nation with the will of the Party,
However combinations (Parties) may now and then answer popular demands, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be able to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
The alternating domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to Party dissension is itself a frightful despotism. The disorders and miseries which result incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and, sooner or later, the chief of some faction (Party) turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.
[Parties] …agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one Party against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption which facilitates access to the government itself through the channels of Party.
The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” – President George Washington’s Farewell Address, September 1796 with the assistance of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
- “Political Parties are old, arbitrary hierarchies represented by puppet symbols.” – William Faulkner, On Privacy; Annals of America, Vol. 17, p. 30
- “Political associations often injure free action by a very plain and obvious operation: They accumulate power in a few hands. A few men rule, a few do everything; and a few are able to excite in the masses strong and bitter passions, and by these obtain an immense [control]. Through such Party association, a few leaders can, by menace and appeals to Party loyalty, silence opposition.
In this country an influence is growing up through widely spread societies (Parties), which will gradually but surely encroach on freedom of thought, of speech, and of the press. It is very striking to observe how, by such combinations (Parties), the very means of encouraging a free action of men’s minds may be turned against it.
All [Parties] aiming to establish [control] by numbers ought to be opposed. They create tyrants as effectively as standing armies. Let them be withstood from the beginning!” – William Ellery Channing, Political Associations and Individual Action, 1830; Annals Vol. 5, p. 416
- “It is an error to believe that the world began when any particular Party or politician got into office.” – Winston Churchill
- “There are many men of principle of both Parties in America, but there is no Party of principle.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
- “Of what value is the will of the majority, if that will is dictated by a committee of demagogues, and law and right are in fact at the mercy of a victorious faction (Party)? – Fisher Ames, The Passions and Tyranny of the Many, 1805; Annals Vol. 4, p. 201
- “Today in America there is only one political Party – the Bankers’ Party.” – Charles E. Coughlin, Money Changers in the Temple, June 19, 1936; Annals.
The Cures:
What good does it do to quote our wise and learned Founding Fathers if we don’t follow their counsel by acting upon it? Their counsel wasn’t just for the attending public but for the generations to come – warning us of the pitfalls of Political Parties.
The only cure for gerrymandering by both bickering and corrupt Parties – and a host of other political ills – is to take back our true political and economic independence.
Register as an Unaffiliated or Independent voter.
“Never doubt the power of One!” – Iris Chang
