Rancor becomes top D.C. export GOP leads charge in ideological war

WASHINGTON - When President Bush gave his first formal campaign speech as a candidate for re-election last week, he cited his efforts to curtail partisan rancor and "change the tone in Washington."

But the nasty redistricting fights in Texas and Colorado are an indication, analysts from both political parties say, that the partisan divide is as sharp as ever in America, and that acrimony exported from Washington is increasingly infecting state and local governance.

The al-Qaeda threat requires U.S. political leaders to assume a certain patriotic decorum in the nation's capital. But opportunists of both parties seek any edge, and have come to view the nation's statehouses, traditionally known as more pragmatic forums, as arenas for ideological combat.

"We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship," said Grover Norquist, a leading Republican strategist, who heads a group called Americans for Tax Reform.

"Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," Norquist, a onetime adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said, citing an axiom of House conservatives.

Indeed, conservative Republicans have been the most successful combatants in the war for the statehouses.

Last fall's election marked a tectonic and largely unheralded shift in the American political landscape. For the past half-century, Democrats dominated the state legislatures - in the mid-1970s by 2-to-1 ratios in the number of overall legislative seats. But when the dust settled after the 2002 elections, Republicans had emerged on top.

"For 50 years there were more Democratic legislators than Republicans. It wasn't until 2002 that the Republicans caught and passed them," said Tim Storey, an expert on redistricting for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "In every mid-term presidential election (in that time period), the party in the White House had lost seats, but last year the Republicans had a net gain of 175."

Many of the gains came in the South, where moderate Democrats with roots in their communities had for years defied political trends by taking more conservative positions than their party's national candidates. But as those down-home Democrats grew old or retired, moved on because of term limits, or lost their seats due to redistricting, the Republicans were poised to attack.

As recently as 1990, Storey said, "there were no legislative chambers controlled by Republicans in the South. Now half of them are controlled" by the GOP.

"You also see it here in the West," said Karl Kurtz, a political scientist at NCSL headquarters in Denver. "Traditionally, there wasn't much difference between Republicans and Democrats, but now lines are starting to harden.

"There is an increased level of partisanship as things get closer between the parties. A lot of the intensified partisanship in Congress is being reflected in the state legislatures," Kurtz said.

"It is intense at the federal level, and trickling down," said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

These days, Norquist and other conservative activists use the GOP tilt in the legislatures to make life difficult for Democratic members of Congress. On issue after issue - the war on terror, taxes, judicial appointees - Republican leaders in Washington have been getting GOP-controlled legislatures to go on record in support of Bush initiatives. It makes it more difficult for Democrats to explain unpopular votes back home.

"It's not some D.C. guy telling them what to do. It's South Dakotans telling Tom Daschle (the Democratic Senate leader from South Dakota) how they feel," Norquist said.

Conservative efforts to capture state legislatures date back to the Reagan era, when former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont set up a political action committee named GOPAC to breed candidates at the state and local level. Gingrich employed the PAC in his drive to seize control of the House in 1994. The level of detail was precise. Aside from money and professional advice, members of the farm teams got audio cassettes that taught them about tactics and issues as they drove around their states.

Redistricting helped the GOP as well, Kurtz said. After the 1990 census, the Republicans joined forces with minority groups in urban areas to draft compact legislative districts that boosted the number of minority Democrats from cities, but diluted the Democratic vote, and representation, in the suburbs and rural areas.

The resultant political parity is cause for increased rancor.

"When you have many more chambers in play from election to election, you have more of these pitched battles between the parties," Storey said. "When one party dominates, sometimes the minority is willing to work with the majority in a way that is not as confrontational. If the margins are very close, the thinking shifts. When you are only a few seats behind you tend to have a more competitive, electoral focus."

Texas offers a good example. When Bush was first elected governor, conservative Democrats ruled the Legislature and Bush served as a pragmatist who could sit down and work with the other party. Ten years later, in part because of his popularity in the state, the GOP controls both chambers of the Legislature and the governor's office for the first time since Reconstruction.

With control of the U.S. House of Representatives now resting with a handful of swing seats, Republican leaders have tried to exploit last year's capture of the Texas and Colorado legislatures by reopening congressional redistricting. It was the first time in at least 50 years, said Storey, that a state had chosen to revisit the process twice in the same decade.

Colorado Democrats are asking the courts to strike down the new GOP-drawn lines; their counterparts in Texas fled the state to deprive the Republicans of a necessary quorum and block the plan's passage.

Any doubts that actions in Texas were tied to the partisan jousting in Washington vanished last week when U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the Republican House majority leader, acknowledged that his staff had sought help from the Justice Department and the Federal Aviation Administration to try to track down the missing Texas Democrats. The new Department of Homeland Security had also been asked by Texas police to help trace the political fugitives.

Rep. Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat from California, has introduced legislation in Congress that would limit redistricting to once a decade and so prevent legislatures from reopening the process. In a "Dear Colleague" letter, she suggested that if that measure fails, Democratic-controlled legislatures such as those in California, Oklahoma or New Mexico might follow the Republican example.

Rep. Charlie Stenholm, a conservative Democrat best known for siding with President Reagan against the liberals of the Democratic caucus in the 1980s, was left sputtering last week at DeLay's tactics. Complaining about a breakdown of trust and civility in the House, he asked, "Who is causing it in the House of Representatives? The same person or persons who are causing it in the Texas Legislature."

Stenholm's ire is explainable. The GOP can live with urban liberals such as Waters, Norquist said; it's moderates such as Stenholm who are its prime targets. If the Texas redistricting plan is adopted, Norquist said, ``it is exactly the Stenholms of the world who will disappear, … the moderate Democrats. They will go so that no Texan need grow up thinking that being a Democrat is acceptable behavior."