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Another in a series of posts which I basically wrote and finished except for putting them in WordPress or actually, y’know, posting them, and then forgot about as weeks became months. In this instance, I look at efforts to protect the universal franchise from GOP-backed voter ID requirements, and conclude that this is probably a worthy cause, and probably also a hopeless one.

I read an item another item about voter ID requirements recently; I don’t have the link but it basically followed the form of most such stories. Republicans want more-demanding identification requirements for voting, Democrats object that this will disenfranchise low-income and minority voters, Republicans claim “fraud” and Democrats claim “voter suppression.” And reading through the comments on this latest story basically reinforced a belief I’ve had for a while, so I might as well get on record with it here: fighting against ID requirements for voting is a losing battle, fellow liberals/progressives/Ds.

Sorry, but it is. I appreciate all of the arguments about why such requirements amount to voter suppression, and I’m skeptical of how much a threat repeat-voting really represents (as well as skeptical of Republicans’ real commitment to one-person one-vote equality), but the fact is that arguing that voters shouldn’t need ID will and does look like a defense of voter fraud to most people. The existence of Americans without driver’s licenses, bank accounts, etc., is just not real to the great majority of the country, and while logically this just underscores the importance of protecting these marginalized people’s voting rights, logic is a losing notion, here. As is the case with many issues, “gut” instinct holds sway; most people don’t know and can’t imagine anyone without a driver’s license, therefore they will not believe that such people exist.

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Okay, it’s here. Or, at least, the election which is the one genuine substantive event at the end of more than a year of posturing and jockeying and godawful TV ads is, at last, now less than one calendar year out. Indeed, a mere ten more months of this horse-race horse-shit and we’ll be home free, probably pining away for all the fun and excitement.

At least, if we happen to be political “journalists” who apparently genuinely do savor this grotesque farce known otherwise as the American presidential campaign.

For everyone else, how about one post to take stock of the prospects, as realistically as possible this far in advance. And then, ideally, just tuning it all out (again, as much as possible) for several more months.

First of all, the Republican nominee for president will be Mitt Romney. I don’t think this even really qualifies as a “prediction” at this point, so much as an observation. Romney will be the nominee, obviously, and all the chatter about other “possibilities” can be ignored. Who is actually a credible threat to defeat Romney at this point? How can anyone else in the race be taken remotely seriously when, even setting aside their own inherent clownishness, we’ve now been through months of one rival candidate after another popping in the polls, reigning as a nine-day-wonder, and then sinking back to irrelevancy. Bachmann, then Perry, then Cain who was such a complete cartoon by himself as should have put an end to anyone taking these wannabes seriously… and in any event, by that point the pattern was so obvious that people could (and did) make a ridiculous suggestion like “Newt Gingrich will probably be next,” and be proven right.

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So apparently it’s all over. I actually missed it, last week, thanks to various distractions and a relatively cryptic headline, and was still planning to go look for a petition to sign this week until I checked out the party web site and saw this.

I suppose I’ll start with the good news, because there isn’t much of it: it’s probable that this broad-daylight heist of congressional representation will at least be a catalyst for major reforms to the redistricting process here, simply because the stink has probably gotten too awful to ignore.

Which leads directly to the bad news, of course, the foremost item being that this outcome still really, really stinks.

That's about the reality of it

As an appropriately bitter and disgusted Thomas Suddes writes, “Substitute House Bill 369, Ohio’s new congressional map, tilts so far in favor of Republicans that the Leaning Tower of Pisa appears perpendicular.”

If the number crunchers have it right, Substitute House Bill 369 — the new Ohio congressional map — probably will award 12 of the 16 districts (or 75 percent) to Republicans. Yet even in 2010, a very good anti-Obama year for Ohio Republicans, who regained some of their 2008 congressional losses, the GOP captured 56 percent of the statewide congressional vote — not the 75 percent the new Ohio congressional district map implies.

And 75 percent isn’t politics as usual. That’s larceny.

And it’s now the law, locked in for the next five congressional elections; if this leads to reforms that may arguably be worth it in the long run, though it’s certainly a high price to pay. What happened?

Party Chairman Chris Redfern’s only official comment is a mealy-mouthed declaration of “victory” in the form of compromise progress, but the fact is that John Boehner basically got his way; nothing substantive appears to have been given up by the GOP in this “compromise” map. As I’ve said before, a pile of cow shit with a cherry on top is still a pile of shit.

In examining what happened to Democrat resistance efforts, the Plain Dealer‘s item offers these suggestions:

For one, Republicans were ready to force Democrats to vote on the primary unification bill without the map as part of the deal–essentially daring them to be the roadblock to eliminating $15 million in costs from two primaries.

But House Democratic members were also unsure whether Ohio Democratic Party chief Chris Redfern could gather the signatures needed to force the first map to the November 2012 ballot, which helped make the decision to fold their hand easier, one lawmaker said.

“It’s to bail the Republicans out of having two primaries and to bail Chris Redfern out,” said one Democratic House member who asked to remain anonymous. “That’s what is going on today.”

So, in a lot of ways, what happened here is what usually seems to happen: Republicans played hardball, tied Nell to the railroad tracks, and cackled away when Dudley Democrat ended up signing away the farm after all, rather than bear the responsibility for Snidely’s hostage being run over by a train. Never mind the fact that accommodating terrorist* demands simply encourages further terrorist activity.

And yet, as familiar and reliable as this story seems by now, I don’t think it’s quite enough by itself in this context. After all, fact is that Democrats seemed to be on a roll in Ohio. Union-busting was body-slammed last month, and voter suppression was successfully forced onto a referendum. Then, suddenly, we just ran out of gas.

Or, from what it sounds like, we ran out of cash; cold and holiday distractions have probably played some role, as has general fatigue, but the lack of funds to hire professional signature gatherers for a third referendum drive seems like it was critical. Which was basically what I feared, though it’s still as crushingly disappointing to me as it must be heartening to the reactionary fiends; for Boehner, Kasich et al. this has to feel very close to answering “check” with “checkmate.”

Meanwhile, I have to ask: where did all our allies go? The successful campaign against Issue 2 was supposed to have re-energized unions as a political force, here in Ohio, and rebuilt their alliance with the state Democratic party into an efficient machine which would be a major advantage for Obama in 2012. Given that whatever assistance union organizations may have offered on redistricting proved woefully inadequate and from my vantage point basically invisible, however, I have the feeling that it’s really dopey to count on any kind of momentum from Issue 2. I always thought that was overly optimistic, and this seems to prove it. It looks rather more like the grand alliance was simply a temporary marriage of convenience.

Whereas the GOP’s pile-on strategy of slamming opponents with one atrocious power-grab after another after another seems, if not a complete success, still effective enough that they’re hardly going to have a change of heart and abandon it for genuinely-positive reforms any time soon.

Bottom line, Ohio may be a “purple” state, but the red seems to have effectively tied the blue up inside of a sack.

* Oh, is using the term “terrorist” to describe domestic political opponents inflammatory and wrong, regardless of whether they are employing terrorist methods? Gee, gosh, “my bad.” So sorry. Darn old reality-based thinking.