A government with a one-party rule is dangerous no matter what political party it is. And sadly, there is a clear plan at work today to creating a one-party rule in the US.
If only one party has a chance of winning, it is the selection of that party’s candidates that determines who will win any pretense of a popular vote. Only those candidates that most support the wishes of their party’s power brokers have any chance of being selected, so the government officials become more and more beholden to fewer and fewer people until the welfare of the governed is a trivial consideration.
With one party facing no viable opposition, laws, regulations, spending, and taxation can be harmful to the public interest, but will still pass any legislative process if it is in the interest of the party’s elite. Anyone outside of the elite whose well-being relies upon the government’s good graces is forced to toe the line. Even the criminal justice system becomes skewed.
These effects are easy to see when discussing countries like North Korea, where no opposition is permitted and the decisions of government officials do not take into account the good of the populace. But when discussing events in our own country, it’s much harder to convince ourselves that there is anything to worry about.
Here in the United States, states like California have been ruined by one-party rule, where corrupt officials and abuses of power are never checked and the people suffer.
Yet even in basket case states like California, there is not quite just yet permanent one-party rule.
But in our national government, there is a plan to create not only a majority party, but a permanent majority – one that never has to worry about the opposition and can pass whatever laws, regulations, spending, and taxation it wishes.
The first step is already in the works — eliminate the filibuster in Congress. Technically, it’s called “cloture”, and permits a slim minority to prevent congressional action by refusing to let debate end. With the filibuster gone, anything that the majority party wants to railroad through Congress can pass with a party-line vote. Anything.
Anything including the addition of as many as five more Supreme Court justices. With a simple majority required, there is absolutely no reason that these justices can’t be chosen specifically because they are publicly committed to supporting the decisions of the majority party.
So far, it may be tempting to say that both of these steps are outlandish, but a simple internet search will show vocal support from elected officials and advocacy groups for both of these and the rest of the steps in this plan.
The first two steps must happen in that order, but with the ability to pass whatever legislation they wish and be assured that any Supreme Court challenges will be fruitless, there is nothing to prevent the completion of the remaining steps.
Expanding the voter rolls with as many supportive voters as possible will be readily achieved by granting citizenship (and voting rights) to as many non-citizens as possible.
At a minimum, people who were brought to the US by their parents illegally as children are viewed with sympathy by the public at large, so granting immediate citizenship to the 826,000 DACA “Dreamers” will be simple.
That will be expanded to the full 1.3 million people who are believed to be eligible for the program, and there will be a push to include as many of the current 14.5 million foreign citizens currently living illegally in the US.
This change in the immigration laws can happen without concern of opposition in Congress once the filibuster is gone. After a signature by the President, it will withstand any Supreme Court challenge because of a packed Supreme Court.
Expect even broader efforts to expand the voter rolls by permitting 16-year-olds to vote as proposed recently in a bill in the many state legislatures.
Restoring voting rights to felons will be yet another way to get more voters who support the permanent majority party.
National voting rules are already being pushed through Congress that will eliminate the chain of custody and any pretense of voter identification. Detractors to this plan claim that it will enable widespread fraud, while supporters are upfront in saying that it will maximize voting by people who have marginal participation and are most dependent upon government – therefore people predisposed to vote for the party that makes it easy for them to vote and also happens to control their access to the necessities of life.
Expanding the voter rolls this way will pad the majority in the House of Representatives and might turn a Senate seat or two, but there is a way to increase the number of Senate seats practically guaranteed to be permanently in favor of the majority party – add new states.
Adding Puerto Rico as the 51st can be done with the simple step of having a vote in Puerto Rico to elect Senators and then having the Senate vote (party line of course) to admit those new senators.
Adding the District of Columbia as a state may face a Supreme Court challenge, but with a packed court, there is little chance that there won’t be two new senators devoted to the party from our 52nd state.
With these steps, there is little reason for the new permanent majority to do more to stay in power forever, but they have been using yet another tool that has worked well for them for almost a century, so it’s doubtful that they will abandon it.
Ever since the 1930s, they have been pushing government dependency on the US citizenry. With people’s individual welfare tied directly to maintaining officials who support their dependency, they have a guaranteed voter block.
Because of the Civil Rights movement, they lost voter suppression as a tool for controlling the minority votes, so they shifted their efforts in controlling the minority communities from suppression to dependency.
With such a powerful tool, they are likely to continue its use with handouts, bailouts, and ongoing direct payments disguised as emergency relief.
Every single one of these steps to a permanent one-party rule is being done in the open. They are positioned as being fair or a response to some crisis or necessary for the defense of our rights, so there is little objection to them.
Individually, they are just little things. But together, they will lock in one-party rule and an unstoppable decline into elitism and corruption.
We need to fight every one of these steps, especially the initial steps of eliminating the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court that the other steps depend upon. But to find the will to fight them, we need to see that this is indeed more than just one or two little things, it is a chain of events organized to guarantee a permanent one-party rule.
Why should we care? What does a one-party government do? Anything it wants to.