Sam Wang Quotes

This seeming abnormality was the result of most of the House of Representatives Congressional Districts being heavily weighted to one party or the other, some the result of demographics and most the result of intentional gerrymandering by the politicians in the State Legislatures. The Republicans at that time were much better at this than the Democrats and very few of the districts were competitive between the parties. Many Democratic urban districts had small democratic areas of the suburbs added to them giving them a larger majority than they needed to win while taking them out of the suburban districts making them easier to win for the Republicans. The original Constitutional concept that the House represented the people proportionately was then undermined as the Republicans could easily win the vast majority of the congressional seats and at the some tome garner millions of votes less nationally than the Democrats,

Al Gore had substantially won the popular vote but needed Florida to win the electoral vote. There had been a series of vote counting irregularities with many people being denied the right to vote to the point that no one was sure who had won Florida. The election moved from the ballot box to the courts and the Florida Supreme Court ruled that there should be some recounts in areas where Bush had supposedly won. The Bush forces and the Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court where the judges all reversed their traditional positions to support the party who had nominated them. Liberals who usually voted to have the Federal government override the states, voted for Florida to be upheld. Conservatives who usually supported the right of the States to decide such things without Federal Interference, voted to overturn the State Supreme Court. There were 5 Republicans and 6 Democrats and George W. Bush won the election by one judge’s vote.

The main source of Republican votes was Anglo White males. However, the demographics of the nation had been changing for a few decades where the non-Whites are the fastest growing demographic subgroup. The projection was clearly that Anglo Whites would cease to be the majority in the coming years and each year they became slightly smaller. This caused many of the Republican politicians to redouble their efforts to appeal (sometimes pander) to non-Anglo White males in order to gain a majority. However, many of the positions that appealed to White Males—like immigration control and deportation of "illegals"—often offended many of the new growing demographic groups who voted in larger numbers against the Republicans. The money and manpower that was needed to try and produce a slim majority gave fewer and fewer resources to those Republicans who wanted to campaign heavily with the current minorities and to be majorities in order to get an even higher percentage to non-Anglo White Males. So each year Republicans were losing more and more ground with the very groups that were becoming a larger and larger voting bloc. Hence the "Death Spiral".

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.