Soros & Democracy Alliance Billionaires Headed For Your Local Community How Democrat mega-donors plan to retake power for the Left. November 18, 2016 John Perazzo
While Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes, tenured professors, and fainthearted college students nationwide continue to react to Donald Trump's presidential election with anger, bewilderment, bouts of weeping, and illiterate tweets, the core leaders of the political Left are already busy planning how they will seek to deligitimize and destroy Trump's presidency before it even gets off the ground.
The first major effort in that direction occurred this week in Washington’s luxurious Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where a group of super-wealthy leftist funders known as the Democracy Alliance sponsored a three-day, closed-door meeting attended by the multi-billionaire George Soros, the leaders of many left-wing activist groups and labor unions, and Congressional luminaries like Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Keith Ellison. Over the past decade, the Democracy Alliance has given at least $500 million to pro-Democrat and leftist causes. High on the list of priorities at its Washington conference was a discussion of how to derail Trump's “100-day plan,” which the Alliance characterizes as “a terrifying assault on President Obama’s achievements — and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation.”
In a recent email to his allies and donors, Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche offered a clear indication of where the Democrats plan to direct their attention and resources over the next few years. Specifically, he said that this week's conference would focus on assessing “what steps we will take together to … take back power, beginning in the states in 2017 and 2018.” Raj Goyle, a Democratic activist who is also involved with the Democracy Alliance, concurred that “progressive donors and organizations need to immediately correct the lack of investment in state and local strategies.”
Let that sink in: State and local … State and local … State and local.
This strategy of focusing on state and local politics dovetails seamlessly with the monumentally significant, recent announcement that former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will be chairing the newly formed National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), which was developed in close consultation with the Obama White House. NDRC's mission will be to: (a) help Democrats take control of the political offices that decide how state legislative and congressional districts are configured, and (b) configure them in a way that will maximize Democratic power in the U.S. House of Representatives as well as in statehouses across the country.
In almost every U.S. state, the state legislature determines precisely where the boundary lines for each congressional and state legislative district should be situated, and the resulting maps are then either approved or vetoed by the governor. This process occurs every ten years, after the U.S. Census has been taken. Obviously, a political party has a great advantage if, at that juncture in time, it has control of a state legislature, a governorship, or both. Republicans currently control 68 out of 99 state legislative chambers, and 31 out of 50 governorships.
To address this imbalance, NDRC aims to promote the election of Democrats as state lawmakers and governors by means of highly aggressive get-out-the-vote efforts, advertising campaigns, ballot initiatives, and legal challenges to state redistricting maps. The overriding goal is to ensure that those Democrats will be in office when it is time to draw up and approve new district maps after the 2020 Census. And to help the Democrats draw those maps in a manner that favors their party, NDRC will carefully analyze the demographic makeup of every neighborhood, every street, and every city block, in order to ascertain precisely how many Democrats and Republicans, respectively, reside in each proposed district. In states where Democrats are in political control, they will be able — with the aid of the demographic data supplied by NDRC — to tweak and bend the boundary lines of their districts however they wish, so as to create as many majority-Democrat districts as possible.
Of course, to accomplish all this, NDRC will need lots of money. And that's where the Democracy Alliance and George Soros come in. They've got billions of dollars at their disposal. And they can give as much as they want to NDRC, because the organization is incorporated as a tax-exempt “Section 527 Committee” — a term referring to the section of the IRS tax code that governs such entities. As Open Secrets.org explains: “These groups are typically … organized for the purpose of influencing an issue, policy, appointment or election … [and] can raise unlimited funds from individuals, corporations or labor unions, but they must register with the IRS and disclose their contributions and expenditures.”
Unlimited funds. George Soros. Democracy Alliance. Corporate and union donors. A multi-partner marriage of political radicals, made in heaven. And the presence of Democrat patron saints like Eric Holder and Barack Obama — the latter of whom has already stated that the advancement of NDRC's agenda will become the main focus of his own post-presidential activities — will undoubtedly help to convince many leftist millionaires and billionaires that it is worth their while to dump the contents of their wallets into the project.
The Democratic Party may be in turmoil for the moment, but its leaders and funders have never been more driven to increase their political power than they are right now.