Six-PAC's national launch and 2005 endorsements announcement party last Saturday in DC was a hit.
Tonight, it's NYC, as we hit the big city with a party at West in the West Village. Go here for details, then go West to be a part of the first-ever Six-PAC event held on the shores of the Hudson River.
(And don't forget -- Six-PAC goes bi-coastal next Thursday, 9/22, with the San Francisco launch. Tell your neighbors, tell your friends, tell your kinfolk and your casual acquaintances.)
There's been an interesting discussion the last few days at TAPPED, the blog of The American Prospect, about political accountability. It all started with Jonathan Chait's piece in the LA Times, arguing that Bush and co. keep chugging right along -- despite all of their incompetence in Iraq, with the budget, and after Katrina -- because they face no electoral consequences for their many missteps and misdeeds.
As the TAPPED post notes, Chait also says that it's also exceedingly hard to hold the majority party in Congress accountable for anything:
ONE REMEDY ought to be the prospect that voters could throw congressional Republicans out of power. Yet that is extraordinarily difficult to do. Republican states, which tend to be more sparsely populated, are disproportionately represented in the Senate. Bush won less than 52% of the vote in 2004, yet 62% of senators represent states that backed him.
The House is even tougher to flip. Not only did 59% of the districts vote for Bush in 2004, the seats are so gerrymandered that less than a tenth are even vaguely competitive. Political scientist Michael P. McDonald estimated that the Democrats would need about 57% of the total House vote to win control of the chamber.
So what are Democrats to do -- apart from going ahead and winning 57% of the vote in 2006? Well, there are no quick fixes, but one thing that we must do is take back the state legislatures that re-draw Congressional District lines after the census comes out every ten years (or, in the case of Texas, that re-draw district lines whenever Tom DeLay damn well pleases).
Six-PAC is focused on helping candidates for state and local offices, concentrating on the people running for these crucial but often over-looked jobs. The numbers show that all of the various state legislatures pass 75 pieces of legislation for every 1 that Congress passes, so state reps and state senators have a tremendous direct impact on our laws and our lives.
Just as important in the big picture is redistricting. I'd never advocate for gerrymandering or incumbent protection plans, and Republicans love the "I know you are, but what am I?" defense when it comes to the gerrymandering charge. Whatever the sins of the past may be, however, the right-wing faction of the Republican Party that runs the White House, the House of Representatives, and too many state houses has shown a great willingness to dilute Democratic votes and voting rights in general in an all-out push to entrench themselves.
One of the best ways to fight back is to take back state legislatures in places like, oh, I don't know, Virginia, and to hold onto them through 2011 (when the next round of redistricting starts).
