The Republican Quest for One Party Rule

I have often stated here that everything Republican politicians and pundits do serves one of two purposes: to transfer wealth from the poor and middle classes to millionaires, billionaires and criminal corporations, or to establish a regime of one party rule.  A new OSC report documents the latter purpose by exposing repeated Republican violations of the the Hatch Act.  And this dose not even touch on even more devious Republican crimes.

Every White House since the days of President Jimmy Carter has had a political affairs office to assess the effects of policy on voters and make sure that presidents are aware of the nation’s political temperature. The office has grown in power alarmingly with each presidency, but the most recent Bush administration became so consumed with Republican politics that it crossed a legal red line, according to a new federal investigative report.

The report, by the federal Office of Special Counsel, found that the Bush White House routinely violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits most federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity. It depicts the Bush Office of Political Affairs, run by Karl Rove, as virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party. And it makes a strong case that the office — shut down by the Obama administration last week just before the report came out — can no longer co-exist with the law.

Under Mr. Rove, scores of executive branch employees, including cabinet secretaries, were put to work helping Republican Congressional candidates. The report cites several memos to high-ranking cabinet department officials ordering them to attend meetings about the 2006 midterm elections. At the meetings, government officials were told to think of ways to shape federal policies to help Republican candidates and were strongly urged to volunteer on individual races. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services were ordered to show up at a political meeting with “your pompoms on.”

There were scores of these briefings, most during the workday and attended by employees on taxpayer-financed salaries. “In light of the content of the PowerPoint slides and the testimony of many witnesses, these briefings created an environment aimed at assisting Republican candidates, constituting political activity within the meaning of the Hatch Act,” the report says.

The White House even tracked the personal time of high-ranking appointees to see who was volunteering for campaign work and how much. Overt political travel was often classified by the White House as government business and paid for by the Treasury.

The Office of Special Counsel does not have the power to discipline former government employees, and it is not clear that any law enforcement agency will look into prosecution. But the message of the report is clear to this administration and those in the future.

The Office of Political Affairs should be abolished, as a House committee recommended in 2008… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

Of course, these violations don’t even hold a candle to such heinous Republican crimes as politicizing the DOJ, ordering US Attorneys to file bogus eleventh hour complaints against Democratic candidates and firing those who refused to pervert the law or repeated Republican attempts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters.

Abolishing the Office of Political Affairs will not fix the problem.  To do that we musr vote every Republican out of office.