time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning jim want to tell jim why del is a retired civil engineer with thirty five years of public service with the u s army corps of engineers and a member of dam sense his work with the national science foundation and then and is the senior policy analyst for the environment in the white house office of science and technology policy was largely focused on climate change policy budgets and research integration in one thousand nine hundred nine he became the deputy district engineer for programs at the walla walla district at the time the lower snake feasibility study was into it fifth year of development this thirty three million dollars study was the most comprehensive ever undertaken by any government to determine the feasibility of breaching dams to restore salmon runs his recommendations to breach the dams based on the study and input from over two hundred thousand commoners who were largely in favor of breaching was ignored and he is here today to talk about the feasibility of breaching the four lower snake river dams jim thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us this morning my pleasure being here i really appreciate your time and all that distance so start out we just mentioned the that you had recommended breaching the dams back when you were working for the army corps of engineers can you talk about the reaction when you made that recommendation well sure it was given the nature and culture of the corps of engineers you know no one has ever talked about bridge in a dam until we were doing that then so to but to actually recommend that we bridge them went over like a lead balloon frankly and so once i said that to the commander and you know he was in a sort of a fury writing all this stuff down it didn't take long for the reality of the situation a sink in that it was you know it's like i became radioactive at that point you know it's like gee we're not iran we can talk to this guy name or you know he just recommend we breach da so anyway it was even difficult for me to understand what the process was from there on and we know that my recommendation went to a commander and it went to the next guy up the chain and the vision headquarters but obviously the decision was not you know carried forward and so it was just you know kind of forgotten about frankly and then i was basically you know said ok we're done you know no more discussion about the dams we've made the decision and so you know when you're in a you know a military organization he's been a civilian you can say ok fine you know that's that's a decision we'll you know we go with it and so at that point it i didn't debated any longer and it was it was just one more of those decisions you make in your career and you move on and that's what i did for the next eight years of my career but you numbers backing you up then i mean you're basing it on a fairly extensive study yes we did we won i got to walla walla district i was in the looking at the final draft of the study at that point or near final and i started noticing anomal particularly economics and so forth that i didn't understand and i would ask questions and get lame answers or be told well the consultant who did that work is you know done under is not under contract anymore so we have to open up a new contract so you get all this government pushback about why we can't change anything also there was a great hesitancy to go back in to reopen assumptions that were made because the assumptions have a lot to do with the outcome economics wise and so you know it's like no it's too late we can't spend any more time on this we've already spent thirty three million yes that's a lot of money but we don't have a complete document here so that's what caused me to say well the economics has got lots of questions and it was evident in the report and anybody that ever in fact you can read these reports today and if you go to these things you will see the same thing i saw is there's some real puzzles in there that just aren't explainable and make it look like well what are we trying to cover up here the biology was pretty clear the biology said we need to bridge these dams is that is the best way to recover salmon sure there was some other gimmicks that could be tried and that's what we did there were two alternatives to you know hang additional infrastructure in the dams to the tune of thirty million dollars but you know those were seen as so  we think that will work but the best bet is damn breaching but so anyway that's that's the kind of the way shook out of the time and why i recommended we bridge the dams all right so fast forward then to you basically were put in limbo there for eight years and then a few years back you kind of had a public outing at a public forum can you talk about that sure and i really wouldn't put in limbo you know i moved on to south atlantic division in atlanta where they want to be to come there and run military construction program so i did that for six years then i retired and moved to port angeles washington and and actually i was reappointed three times by the corps of engineers to do some special the environmental protection agency that they were interested can be having to continue with and so i was i was actually in port angeles in this reappointment part time employment with the corps but i was also trying to be become a retired person and just trying to do those things you know like take my mind off of things and go out and do volunteer like beach cleanups and you know go and help people count salmon smolts and stuff like that just you know kind of get my hands on of things as opposed to thinking about things but at that time in two thousand and eleven the dams were being breached and there was a science symposium going on so i thought i'd go to it and learn what i could about the oh well since i didn't know anything about it i only lived a mile away so i'm sitting there in this big symposium w about eight or nine hundred people and there's two speakers up there talking about the snake river dams and i thought that was odd since we're sitting here and l walk country but anyway they were just drawn the analogy between breaching the l y and the snake and they gave very very compelling and good stories of why for the sake of salmon you need to bridge these dams but they also ended up saying you know well but this is a lot tougher than el wa because these dams provide a lot of economic benefit and why it while it's questionable it'll take a long time fifteen to twenty years before we ever get around to resolving you know these economic issues and overcoming those concerns i knew that was wrong and i just couldn't sit there any longer and so i walked around to the front of  the big hall and wondered what i how he's going to enter intervene on this situation and fortunately the moderator said we've got time for one question and so i just jumped up to the mike and said i don't have a question but i got a statement to make and that's when i said you know i told him who i was and you know by drop their jaws when i told him i was from the army corps of engineers i also told me i'd probably get fired for what i was about to say because i was still under this reappointment authority dams and stuff like that and i kind of criticize the public to us said you know you're not paying attention to these documents if you'd read this stuff you know you would have seen that these dams were an economic problem and need to be dealt with so that's how i got back into this and then what i didn't realize is i was being filmed by a film crew from patagonia and they were later afterward they came up to me and said hey we'd like to put you put you in this documentary were making sure fine right ok and so and then they said we want to come and interview you so they did about i don't know six months later and for three hours we went through all of the background on this thing and and i didn't really take it serious but then about a year later they said well you know i started getting you know e mails about hey the thing's going to come out soon you know you're in it and in the movie it was damnation by the way some of you are probably saying that and  they said you know we want you to come into panels with us and so that's when i realized i better do my homework on this and because i don't want to be you know caught ask questions about what why did you recommend reached damn what was your concern so i went back and started reviewing these reports all over again about three years ago and i thought i would find errors like ten million dollars here fifteen million dollars there but after i really got into this thing in with retirement time on my hands i quickly it didn't take long for me to realize that the  errors were in the hundred million dollar range here and there fifty here of hundred there for instance the price of breaching the dam's was not eight or nine hundred million it was more like three hundred fifty million and so those are gross massive errors and so when i looked at how you when you added up all these errors what i realized is it totally changed the economic argument for why we should keep the dams so instead of saying that there's a benefit of a few million dollars in keeping the dam and the cost would be two hundred fifty million dollars a year it was the other way around it was actually something close to one hundred million dollars benefit if you breach the dams so that works out to a three hundred fifty million dollar error that was embedded in those that economics analysis so that's what got me back into the game and then i started you know actually made a trip to d c and met with senior staff with the corps of engineers and pointed this out and so forth and and after you know given my background while alone as an engineer and worked on this stuff you know they they didn't question too much what i was scion and so the conversation sort of shifted well how do we move the ball down the court i mean what do we do about the day almost and so then i  of a sudden i ended up in the role of not only showing correcting numbers but figuring out what is the policies that will allow you to bridge these dams and that's caused me to go back and do some more research rely on my experience in the corps that basically what i realize is the assumption that we've been making that congress needed to do you authorize or authorize the breaching of the dams was not correct and actually i said that in the movie and that's wrong but in the meantime i realize and i've known this for years  the corps has because congress has given the corps a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that all their existing projects are economically viable so if they're investing more money they still have to have a positive return on investment and if they and they have to be good for the environment or let's put it this way they can't harm the environment and they have to be technically efficient other words are not in danger of something well in this case we had an economic problem with the dams and we had clearly an environmental problem we were harming salmon in a big way and so you know that led to the you know my my you know look at this thing and say ok the core does have the responsibility to act on this at that point the next big problem though of course is how do you pay for this you know you're going to breach a dam and even though the price is a lot less the dams are actually quite easy to breach because each of the dams has a earth berm to it a portion of the dam is earthen it can and it's easy to remove that with a couple bulldozers and then you hydraulically breach the rest of it you know the last you know thirty or forty feet of it so it's really simple to do and inexpensive but still even if it's only you know in the case of the first dam it's about forty or fifty million dollars where does that money come from who writes that check and so that where does that that's always a big issue for the corps well what you have people don't realize is that bonneville power administration is actually responsible for about ninety two percent of the cost a minimum of ninety two percent of the cost of those dams and that's that's laid out in the plan formulation in allocation procedures for those dams so that means that bond will power supposed to write that check bottles money doesn't come from congress it comes from the right players out there now so there's a mechanism though where bonneville can actually take a credit by calling that fish mitigation which indeed it is because that's the best fish mitigation you can apply sibley imagine is to fleet free flowing river and so actually so what i found was is there is a way to pay for this without going to congress and and the corps has a fiduciary responsibility anyway to take care problems like that so that's that's kind how i got to the point of where i am now of telling people that you know they need to be bridged here's the here's the economics we can talk more about that in a minute or here is and here's the policy allows you to do it all right and just to clarify we're talking about just the four lower snake river dams you're not proposing breaching other dams either in washington or nationwide that's correct mike this analysis my work everything that i'm from a with i'm totally focused on the lower snake on those four dams today a combination of core money and bonneville power money and that money could be better spent on dams on the columbia on the main stem columbia were those dams or you know produce a lot more hydro power so we're actually losing financially we're losing money on these that's correct they're losers from a real standpoint every year that you're spending money like you know it's we're not getting you can spend it somewhere else but when you put it into the economic context and now what that means is you say well what is over the life of these projects and that's the way the corps has to look at these things what is your return on investment and so what i did to do that as we look at all the cost of the dams and then we had some a couple of groups that were economic consultants to look at both the hydro had surplus power in the region so we had a an economist look at this and he put that report and basically what he came to the conclusion was yes there's basically an eighteen percent surplus of power in the pacific northwest the snake river dams their actual production is only around less than three percent of that and so you really you could shut those dams down and know the lights are going to go in seattle if you do that or they're not going to go off and so you what you all you do is you give up two or three percent of a surplus and what's interesting here is the northwest power plant in council just raised their recent six power plant about two months ago came out and buried down in the one hundred pages of documents there they concluded that you could take out all the coal plants in the pacific northwest breach the four snake dams and you'd still have plenty of power there if you still have a surplus and so you know the and so what's the problem here they also stated that any future demand in the pacific northwest for the next twenty years can be handled through conservation and conservation is basically just putting you know better windows on your house and using led light bulbs now we went one step further though because the course says ok we're making two hundred million dollars a year off those dams right now from hydro power and we should replace that power so we calculated what is the replacement power cost and actually the economist said it's it works out t you can use solar in eastern washington for half the power and if you think about it solar in eastern washington is perfect because in the summer time when you really need it peaking power is when you've got incredible sunlight over there and so pricing it out with solar and a half open market which means a lot of wind energy you're able to replace that power with with and here's the key thing even with that replacement power you don't necessarily need it but if you did when you calculate the total benefit to cost ratio on these four dams it works out to fifteen cents on the dollar that's what the tax payers are getting invested dollars you get fifteen cents back i don't think i need to tell you that's not a very good idea so and so that's the second part of the analysis was adding up all those different costs for recreation and hydro power and so forth and by the way people keep thinking these are flood control dams they are not they're not flood control dams and so that's not an issue but that's you know the downside is  you were losing eighty five cents on the dollar here's the upside if you breach we're talking somewhere between four and twenty dollars of return on investment and the reason there's a range there is because it goes back to hydro power do we need to replace it if not it's twenty one and here's what we're losing out here is in eastern washington of in six counties along that river there therefore going about three to four thousand jobs a year in the recreation industry by not having a f flowing river that equates to about five hundred million dollars in direct expenditures every year that the people of washington are missing out on so you know it's really you know that's the that is part of the economic analysis that we've got numbers on that the corps did initially we've corrected but there's more to it when you free up one hundred forty miles of the lower snake river you open up forty thousand acres of land twenty thousand at acres is under water right now that land used to be agricultural land and so if you take just four five thousand of those acres out of forty thousand in replant vineyards and orchards and stuff like that they used to be there before the dams were put in place you actually are creating a pretty powerful economic engine through this high end agriculture and of course when you talk video culture is an orchard you're talking and you know wineries and all this kind of stuff in the restaurants and ends and all that stuff that goes with that that is an incredible economic benefit that's never been counted and then what's cool for the state of washington is that lands will be transferred to the state of washington and that then any revenue from those lands goes into the state school budget and so we know the state school budgets a problem in this state where we got a bill payer maybe twenty thirty million dollars a year minimum they could go into the budget just by doing that so talk about the environmental benefits one of the big losers  stuff well that's because they compare it to maybe twenty years ago when we had very bad ocean conditions and salmon were in trouble along with you know what caused the dams and everything else but in frankly when you look at it in the historical perspective between ten and twenty million salmon made it up to the lower snake river and so these numbers that we're looking at today three four hundred five hundred thousand at the tops of salmon is a fraction of that you know so no we don't have this abundance that people talk about the records  e because we use shifting baselines and the other thing about these salmon is people after understand is about eighty five percent of them are hatchery salmon and here is the real urgency is that these hatchery salmon are depleting the genetics of the wild salmon and so we're down to just a handful ten or fifteen percent of the salmon left are actually truly wild and that genetics depletes every year and they and our own government documents and individuals that are really experiencing this are telling us we've only got a couple years left before we lose the last while genetics once that happens actually salmon will to follow you know depletion they they can't sustain themselves at this with this poor genetics and so it won't salmon you know start falling off too that's already happened we can see in the numbers this year so this whole idea about abundance is kind of a myth and the fact is this is this is the urgency this is why we say these dams have got to be breaching has got to start this year in two thousand and sixteen because we're running out of time and you know we hear about you know that we just had a judge's decision that says you know hey the the government's plans for the fifth time have been the judge said they're no good you've got to start over well that's great that he point out that you know we had validates what we've been saying you need to bridge the dams but on the other hand for him for him and the government to say you know he's the judge he said you know it's been a couple years you know give me a new plan but on the other hand the government doesn't have to do that they can bridge these dams today but what they want to do and there's a lot of groups behind them klu including a lot of the environmental groups say well yeah we want to fresh start we want to really look at this thing we want new numbers and what people forget we've been at this for twenty over twenty years and you know it's kind of like imagine that you know you're a patient in a hospital and you know you've got four bullets in your chest and you're bleeding to death and yet instead of you know having surgeons remove those bullets you've got a bunch of technicians and folks that say well let's study this let's see if we can come up with some alternate technologies let's see why don't we just you know use a lot of blood transfusions and and try some fancy things that might dissolve bullets in the chest or something and so you spent twenty or thirty years in recovery room and you're still there and so that's where we are we're not we can't start over we can't bring in a new team of doctors and you know they're making plenty of money off these doctors making plenty of money off this twenty or thirty year experiment but if you're that patient you're still are cameroon you want to fix the fixes take the bullets out in this case it's take the four dams out of the river and let the salmon get back and that's the how that's how you recover them but we're almost out of time to do that and even the hatchery operations we have are very expensive and completely inadequate well i will only speak to the hatcheries that on the lower snake river they were put there to mitigate for the loss of salmon they they are not doing very well in fact i mean the genetics of those salmon art or very poor and they actually have or depleting the ability of the wild salmon to maintain their genes they also compete with the food and so when you've got these warm reservoirs and so forth and  competing for food and stuff like that it just makes it more difficult for the wild salmon so and hatcheries are very expensive and that's one of the biggest cost increases i've discovered is that they're incredibly expensive to maintain and replace and yet that seems to be the preferred method is to keep pumping more salmon or more blood into his patient instead of taking the bullets out of the chest i know you studied climate impacts previously as part of your profession and don't be the dams themselves create the reservoirs create warm zones that are actually damaging to the fish well absolutely you know in a reservoir compared to a fully free flowing  river will absorb a lot more heat and that's been going on since they first put the reservoirs and in so there's always been a temperature issue and what the temperature does you know salmon need very cold water to survive and so when it gets up warms up then it kills the juveniles and the adults as well or inhibits their ability to migrate and it also increases predication because the predators like the warmer waters of the salmon with climate change is just getting worse last year we saw the entire we lost nearly the entire idaho sockeye run we're in that same situation this year and that's why we're saying and you need to begin drawing down that top reza of or in the next month or two in order to get to that reservoir out of the way so we can get cooler water into the river and that cooler water goes all the way down t columbia too so it cools off the whole system so yes that's a big problem and we don't want to neglect mentioning another key species here in our area which is the southern pods of orca whales that are like or yes there they're starving according to the orca biologist and most people don't realize that there are other orca's that eat seals and other stuff but these particular work is only a chinook so they are at risk too and they're only endangered species list and so we've you know we're going to lose those too and i think this all points to the urgency that we've been trying to express to the government leaders in washington d c and to senate the two senators in the state the governor was some you know  with a lot of success here locally because regionally everybody's so bought into these dams they just can't imagine that there's any alternative and yet we've shown that that is not the case there are great there's a much better alternative but trying to find a way to influence these people and get the message to them is been a task and so i remind people when we talk about this and you listeners out there is that you know who do you know who do you know that knows can talk to the white house or the president or the governor inslee or senator murray or something and get the message them allow this levin to have a discussion about this you know for instance we know that paul allen is very interested in a snake river dams and in fact may have you know he has people working on plans to deal with this but i don't think mr allen actually knows what what what i've just explained to you people he knows some of it from the salmon but he didn't i don't know that he's been given the economic story i don't know that he's been given the urgency that we're dealing with and so we're you know somebody can be a real hero here whoever really initiate some get something going with the government here is going to be the hero and this may be a chance for him if he's interested in this is to do something now call the president or work with the governor or something like that to convince them that the federal agencies created this mess and it's up to them to solve it and they certainly can but they're going to need some nudging because you understand you know it's all political and it's going to take that kind of leverage so you know somebody like paul allen could actually make a you know if he engages now as opposed to waiting five or six years to get involved in more studies because we can't do more studies we don't need to do any more studies we got all the data we need and you know the numbers are there and so it's a matter of just you know poll and trigger on this and getting those you know in this case getting those important numbers to pass on to others well the simplest way is we have a website and it's damn sense is not really an organization it's just a web sites and it's it's damn as a m s e n s a dot org  and you can go there and you can see all the letters of record in reports in the economic work is all that is all sitting there there's ways that we have phone numbers and so forth where you can contact you know we do a phone drill on the white house every friday and so if you dial two  two four five six one one one you can call the white house operator and you tell them tell obama to breach the lower snake names now while he's president and that's key he's got to do this while he's the president we can start this process all over again and if he doesn't do it it's not go happen folks not for a long time and it's over for the salmon and probably you know and the orcas as well which means we're not far behind if that is true all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming as spending time with us this  morning well thanks mike i really appreciate you invite me time once again for community form and we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning david daily david daly is editor in chief at salon a digital media fellow for the wilson center for humanities and the arts at the grady school of journalism at the university of georgia and he is author of the new book which i can't say the full name due to actually see requirements but it rhymes with socked rat sucked the true story behind the secret plan to steal america's democracy david thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning my pleasure thank you for having me so start out tell us what was the motivation in writing your new book well you know i did not fundamentally understand what happened in two thousand and twelve when barack obama gets reelected president democrats win twenty five of the thirty three senate seats that are up that year and they only take back seven seats in the house and the republicans hold the to thirty four to a one majority there and i said boy that doesn't make sense and i look back at it and it turns out that the democrats won one point four million more votes in the aggregate in in two thousand and twelve in house elections than republicans did and i said boy that's a pretty solid number and it turns out that that's the first time since one thousand nine hundred two only the second time since world war two that the party that wins the most votes does not take the majority of the seats so i said that also seems kind of like an outlier and as i kept digging i learned about two things that i had never heard of the a political action group called the republican state leadership committee and a plan that they devised called red map for redistricting majority project the goal was to turn the house map read in both state legislatures and congress and it began essentially after barack obama wins his first election in two thousand and eight republicans realize they were staring at a looming demographic time bomb and they also realized something devious and diabolical they realized that the really important election was not the one that they had just gotten crushed in the truly important election was going to be in two thousand and ten because two thousand and ten is  year and after every census year the constitution mandates the redrawing of every legislative district in the country in your state house and senate and then usually those legislative bodies are responsible for redrawing all four hundred thirty five congressional districts so they hit on a really interesting plan they said let's figure out how the redistricting process works in every state and let's look at how in the next election we can target local races and state races with the goal of having every and the only seats at the table when these lines are drawn after the two thousand and ten election they raise thirty million bucks for this it's not that much money in the big in the big picture of american politics you can barely lose a senate race for thirty million bucks these days but that kind of money spread into state and local races in pennsylvania wisconsin north carolina ohio michigan texas colorado indiana states across the country was enough to flip legislative districts and give republicans control of two thirds of the legislative chambers in the country so when it came time to redistrict in two thousand and eleven they were in the catbird seat in state after state even in blue and purple states and they could draw themselves maps that they could not lose on for the next ten years so the answer in two thousand and twelve when the democrats get one point four million more votes but are still staring down a thirty three seat minority in the house of representatives is that the republicans use the oldest trick in the book at the gerrymander in a thoroughly modern and devious and brilliant new way talk more about the history of gerrymandering bats that goes back a long way as it goes back all the way to the founding of the country you can trace the gerrymander back to two elbridge a cherry the old governor of massachusetts in seven ninety his party knows they're about to lose the next election but again it's a zero year so they are able to draw these sort of fanciful swirling districts around boston in in such a way that a political cartoonist that that they look like a salamander's so that they call them bridges gerrymander the term sticks and politicians have used this for ever it is it is not a new trick it has been a very useful tool to give a political enemy to steal a seat here in there that maybe you don't deserve it's been a good incumbent protection racket i mean essentially every ten years the leaders of the two parties in the in each state they get together in and do this in a back room in order to you know give themselves all the seats that they already had essentially what the republicans realize is that this can be a tool for governing from the minority and that's what changes in two thousand and ten the two thousand and ten gerrymander is unlike any in our history and people look past it and people missed this because we assumed it was the same kind of politics as usual it's not what they did in two thousand and ten was to use the gerrymander in a whole new way it was not what we all learned about an eighth grade civics class anymore this was high tech it was cutting edge it was fueled by more money than had ever gone into it before and there was a political intent behind using this to draw a fire wall against the popular will that is going to last the next ten years the technology has gotten so good and and the map drawing so precise and perfect that there is just about no landslide imaginable that could turn these maps before two thousand and twenty one and if the democrats don't get organized before then they'll be and figure out how to take back that these legislative chambers before during the next several election cycles this could continue on republican state leadership committee and he's a brilliant strategist and he essentially is the the architect of this of this plan he's a state government guy so he understands that if you you can get more for your buck in these local races he understands the nature of the political scene in all of these states so he looks at a state like pennsylvania and says boy we're going to win the governorship that year we have the senate but we are down four seats in the house so they target six specific districts and they spend about one hundred thousand one hundred fifty thousand in each of these six districts with the goal of knocking out six democrats and flipping the pennsylvania house in pennsylvania the house the senate and the governor have the only three seats at the table when it comes to who redistricting so they draw themselves a congressional map that in two thousand and twelve the first time those maps are used a big obama year obama takes the state by a couple hundred thousand votes house democrats win one hundred thousand more votes than republican candidates but the delegation code has thirteen five republicans so the democrats get fifty one fifty two percent of the vote and they get twenty eight percent of the seats thirteen five in a state that democrats have more have more votes and this plays itself out in state after state so michigan that year two hundred forty thousand more votes for democratic congressional candidates fourteen person delegation goes nine five republican north carolina pretty much split a small republican majority there but they take ten of thirteen states ohio a national bellwether every single year we all stay up until midnight to see who is going to win ohio in the presidency it's pretty much fifty fifty in the in the in the aggregate vote for congressional candidates they've got sixteen seats those are twelve for republican so seventy five percent of the seats with like fifty point something percent of the vote you add all that up in these states and it gets you pretty close to control of congress  moreover it's just you know deeply undemocratic if you believe in the basic ideals of representative democracy and what it means and they were very strategic and the wait for the twenty turn election the way they manage the campaigns there they waited till the last several weeks before their members it's amazing they spent they spent thirty million dollars on red map and about seventeen or eighteen million of that comes in in the last six weeks of this of these campaigns so essentially you're talking about the you know last days of september first days of october on these candidates have got their budgets set you know and suddenly  know they never imagine that outside groups in d c are about to drop six figures on their head and it blows up at these races you know it was already going to be a bad year for democrats it was an out year you know the midterm election year after after all when it was a tough twenty ten it was already a tough environment for a lot of these democrats this makes it just about impossible and they take all of these guys down they take about seven hundred state legislative seats that year they sweep down ballot at just the right time and they take all of these chambers and more importantly they are ready in two thousand and eleven to go state by state and to redistrict and to take no prisoners and to be sure that they superglued these gains in place they they take the spoils of the two thousand and ten victory by remapping aggressively and secretly and like no one has ever seen before in two thousand and eleven and then you see in in two thousand and twelve exactly how well those maps hold up and the money that they used for that twenty ten campaign where did that come from it is largely raised by the republican state leadership committee from typical big republican donors of the u s chamber of commerce wal mart a t n t  altria the the big corporate money that you expect to see behind the republican party but something else happens that year i mean in january of two thousand and ten the citizens united verdict  comes down and all of a sudden you can use pretty much unlimited anonymous dark money that is untraceable and really hard to track so you can follow some of the big money into red map and then it's the trail starts to fade a little bit as the money goes back and forth between the various between the r s l see and some of the groups that they're working with on the ground in some of these states and then if you look at like north carolina where there's a vast array of of of coke brother type groups under the control of a local koch brother type named art pope the money gets really really hard to to to track and follow but it's  it's it's a bargain basement price to lock in control of a chamber at that kind of at that kind of money thirty million bucks for for for for that it's the it's the political bargain of the of the century and is this happening about the same time as alec is really getting up to speed which primarily focuses on state level laws the thing we have to remember here is that they've gerrymandered that the state lines the same way that they've gerrymandered the congressional lines so you have states like florida or ohio where there are super majorities for the republicans in the house and in some cases the senate even though they're that they get fewer votes it still leads to veto proof majority is in these states and that allows groups like alec to run completely amok you know it is it's it's it's the gerrymandering of wisconsin and michigan and north carolina that leads to things like transgender bathroom laws or to collective bargaining rights being stripped in wisconsin or to the emergency manager act in michigan which a gerrymander legislature passes a citizens say no way and they overturn it at referendum a cherry entered legislature says sorry but we're putting it back and then that law used to you know take away the management and the government in flint michigan and you see the water crisis that ensues when they begin trying to run an african american community that the republican the leadership in michigan does not care about and doesn't want to spend any money on and you know kids get poisoned with the bad water there are very real and serious consequences for this both the national level and at the state level and it's so deeply knotted up that it is going to take a long long time to go ahead and  do it so it sounds like they're basically set themselves up to be bulletproof so i think that that's what's happened you have a minority that has locked themselves into an undefeatable electoral position and when you when our democratic institutions become a bulletproof like that they cease to be democratic  and sixteen i imagine the same thing is going to happen as it did in two thousand and twelve you're going to see a million two million maybe even a little bit excuse me a bit more than that as a majority of votes cast for their democratic house candidates it's not going to budge the house of representatives and people are going to have to look at this and understand why and get angry you saw the other day that house democrats finally got angry about not being able to get any commonsense gun legislation through and they conducted a sit in the underlying root issue here however is gerrymandering and redistricting and it's not until you solve the gerrymandering and and the redistricting that you have any shot at getting policy outcomes that we actually care about and want to see that has to be priority one until that is fixed nothing else is going to change and people can have as many sit ins on guns as they want it's not going to change until you redraw the lines in such a way that they are actually affected and responsive to the popular will the way we all believe that this country he is supposed to work it's not working that way right now so it sounds like you dave at least one example where there was pushback from the states about the decisions that came out of  journeyman during so i have there been any challenges to the germinating and are you saying that then we basically have to wait till twenty twenty one for this to be solved we we only have a and more precise when they use it in two thousand and twenty so it is danger time now and i don't see the democrats taking this issue especially seriously yet you barely saw i mean even bernie sanders talking about a political revolution i didn't talk a whole a whole lot about redistricting and gerrymandering and that is at the root of why all of these policy outcomes come out the way they do it's at the root of the obstruction of a two term president it's at the root of government shutdowns it's at the at the at the nature in the tone in the tenor of the kinds of republicans that get elected and it creates the kind of conditions that where a strongman like donald trump can waltz in and take control of the party i mean it is it is our politics are a mess and they're broken and dysfunctional because of the way that we have corrupted the fundamental building blocks of them these district lines so obviously that the democrats were asleep at the wheel you can touch on that but i really want to get to then what are the potential solutions between now and twenty twenty are there any states that are they have an equitable system for deciding what the districts are this is it's really really hard we are the only democracy in the world that lets the politicians draw their own lines and essentially choose their own voters  we have to get it out of their hands nonpartisan commissions sometimes work sometimes don't sometimes it's just another way of keeping the politicians in charge when the politicians appoint the members of the nonpartisan commissions that doesn't necessarily remove the politics from this you all in washington seem to have a really essentially fair system of doing this you know it's a commission of citizens and wise and wise men and women it seems who have integrity and believe in the electoral process  it's the opposite of red map which was about how do we use this as a lever to take control and what you see in arizona when a commission comes in is essentially it's just another it's just another partisan fight taken into a different room in florida they pass a referendum mandate a nonpartisan redistricting and the republican operatives do an unbelievable job of creating an entire shadow redistricting process having their operatives draw these perfect maps and then introduce them under under names of citizens sometimes under under phony email addresses created by somebody in the names of former internes or who are there or the maps come in under under under the names of the wife of the local republican leader and they filter these maps in to politicians who are expecting to receive them and they become the actual districts and all of this gets gets get sun unveiled in an amazing lawsuit in florida which ended up getting a couple of the districts tossed out and an outraged judges who saw it as a conspiracy to you know thord the constitutional will of the people  it is a really hard thing to do and the intensity that politicians and partisan operatives have on trying to keep control of this suggests exactly how important it is this is not something that they want pride away and they have fought secretly and furtively desperately to hold on to it and to do it in the shadows and it's only when we can put some light on this process that the rest of us can understand exactly how important it is it's not boring it is it is the it is the fundamental nature of what has to change in order to fix our politics so if you were put in charge of you are the new magistrate for fixing the u s electoral system what would you do to address this i think we have to realize that this current system is fundamentally broken i think we need some radical reforms we have to think about electoral reform in a brand new way a group called fair vote that has really interesting ideas on multimember districts on an instant runoff voting on ideas that take control of the process completely out of the political system and put them back in our hands referendums work and i do think that more states ought to do them they are a terrific way to educate people on the importance of these lines  and they pass in red states and in blue states and you know ohio florida arizona california have all passed you know in the last decade essentially  nonpartisan redistricting reform it's a really important piece of this i think people understand at a gut level that something is is broken and not working and we want to  matter and we want them to be a conversation about the future of the country and to be about persuasion and when you have as many non competitive districts as we do you don't have to do persuasion all you have to do is appeal to the angriest base of your party and these primaries become a battle between i'm crazy no i'm crazier than the new are and in a deeper and purer way and it's it's bad and you end up with an extreme running to many of these seats and pushing us in a direction where we don't want to go so i'm somewhat amazed that so much time could go by before someone like yourself finally call it's all this into a book and and brings us the horrible news  where has the mainstream media been boy the mainstream media still believes that both sides do this the mainstream media still thinks that gerrymandering is they don't understand exactly how it changed in two thousand and ten they missed that this was the atomic bomb of redistricting and gerrymandering that that this was a fundamental new way of approaching this problem  and as long as the mainstream media continues to talk about this is if it's just politics as usual they completely miss how it has transformed our political system from top to bottom all right well we're just about  time we're talking with david daly he is editor in chief at salon dot com and author of the new but book rat i can't say the second word but it rhymes with socked the true story behind the secret plan to steal america's democracy and so in addition to your book can people find out more about this salon sure that there's that there's a lot of good stories on salon about this there's a lot of stories on fair vote dot org about this  think there are people who are finally starting to take this seriously and there is five years left to go before something has to happen let's get to work well with that we're