Barry J. Schlozman Quotes
My tentative plan is to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section and replace them with right-thinking Americans..
The Inspector General of the Justice Department and a Congressional committee found his actions illegal. Schlozman, a Republican Assistant Attorney General, had violated the Civil Service Reform Act by hiring attorneys on the basis of their political affiliation and later made false statements in his sworn testimony to Congress about his hiring decisions. He wanted people who he could count on to follow his lead and not prevent Southern States from changing their election laws and thus be able to discriminate against Blacks in voting, as was required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This quotation is often cited by Civil Service supporters to show what can happen when a political appointee can fire government employees and replace them with people who will agree with him on matters of political ideology.
Barry J. Schlozman, Assistant United States Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division (Republican), E-Mail sharing his plan to get rid of the liberals of the Section that reviewed the Southern State's plans to change any of their voting laws or procedures, Quoted in Jim Rutenberg, "Overcome", The New York Times Magazine, August 2, 2015
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The irony of this quotation is that most people think that if there is any area of politics that should be nonpartisan or bipartisan, it is governing the voting and election process of our democracy. Yet, many who actually do the redistricting, are extremely partisan in the process.
The Democrats had Gerrymandered Illinois very much the way the Republicans did it in Texas in 2000, thus enabling Stephen A Douglas to defeat Abraham Lincoln for Illinois Senator. However, when Lincoln realizing that he, a relative minor political figure, had come so close despite the gerrymandering, he was emboldened to run for the Presidency.
The legislators control redistricting and with the aid of modern computers, choose the demographics of the voters that they want in their districts even if they have to distort and Gerrymander the election district.
The stranglehold that the Southern Democrats had held on civil rights legislation had been broken in 1968 by Lyndon Johnson and the other Democrats with key support from some liberal Republicans like Lindsay. However, the South felt politically betrayed. The Republican leadership, in what was one of the most brilliant political strategies in American history, played to the disaffected racist Southerners and welcomed into their party. Within the next 30 years virtually the entire South had gone Republican, and the Republican captured both houses of Congress and the Presidency with the South solidly Republican. At the time, Lindsay and some Republican leaders criticized bitterly about the party pandering to the worst racist elements of the nation. The “Party of Lincoln” had become the party of the segregationists, the racists, the hate groups of the country.
This was the result of Gerrymandering over the last decade where the Republicans outmaneuvered the Democrats in enough states so that they could control the House even of the Democrats had a large majority of the votes for congress members. See {632784} for an explanation of Gerrymandering technique.
Actually, there have been “paranoid” fear of opposition political viewpoints in America very often. In the early days of the Republic, the Federalists main concern was not England or other foreign enemies, but Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans. And those Jeffersonians were absolutely convinced that the greatest danger to America was the Federalists who would bring back a monarchy if they could. The Jacksonians triggered a similar polarization. The Civil War stemmed from this extreme. Even America’s most popular President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected to 4 successive terms, was perceived as the major “enemy” of America along with his wife Eleanor and the other New Dealers.
Most political analysts agree that all of these were factors that produced the hyperpolarization of the time. There were others such as the Republican Southern Strategy which triggered a shift of Democratic conservatives to the Republican party. This made the Republicans more conservative and the Democrats more liberal. Then those strong ideological parties drove many of their moderates out, and the Tea Party ran even more conservative candidates knocking out less conservatives in the primaries. Another factor, the relatively even split of voters nationally causing most candidates to appeal to their bases which became more extreme. However, especially in the House of Representatives, the redistricting created so few competitive districts that there was no need for candidates with safe seats to even be concerned with moderate and undecided voters.
