Last week Republican House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-largo and knelt down to kiss Donald Trump’s ring, at least I think it was his ring.
It pleased most Republican voters. A Vox/DFP poll released January 11th found that 72% of them still question the legitimacy of the presidential election, and half of them opposed Joe Biden’s Inauguration.
Quinnipiac University poll taken around the same time found similar results. Worse, a You/Gov poll found that 45% of all Republicans backed the storming of the Capitol.
Most people think Trump made the Republican Party into what it has become. I think Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude described the relationship more accurately when he said, “Donald Trump didn’t deform the Republican Party. The Republican Party vomited up Donald Trump.”
Now that he is gone he is still with them because his disdain for the Constitution and his autocratic view of the presidency fit their own anti-government views perfectly.
So here is the truth about Republicans who never tell the truth. They have no desire to protect and defend the Constitution and no interest in preserving our democracy.
Their idea of defending the Constitution is to raid the Capitol, take over Congress, and threaten to kill the Vice-President of the United States and the Speaker of the House.
These are not people who are going to work with Joe Biden when he invited every American in his Inaugural Address to do what Americans have done in the past: “…come together to carry all of us forward.”
He was not asking Republicans to support all his policies. He was asking them and all of us to care enough about our country to work together to solve our problems.
That is how we can begin to repair our broken social contract and embrace the values of truth, liberty, and justice for all that have kept us going because we never gave up on them.
There may be a handful of Republican Senators who are willing to join President Biden and the rest of us, serious differences in points of view notwithstanding, but they are a decided minority. There are even fewer in the House.
At the moment Trumpism controls most Republicans. The only way that can change is if a sufficient number of Republican voters stop voting these people into office.
It’s what I call consequential voting, a simple concept wherein voters make an honest assessment of the consequences of their vote before they cast it.
That assessment is based on a basic question: “Will my vote be good for the country and our democracy?”
The time when Republicans voted Republican because they were Republican is over, and the reason is that being a Republican doesn’t mean what it used to.
Republicans used to be conservatives who promoted limited government and personal responsibility. They didn’t want to destroy the government. They wanted to make it work efficiently based on conservative principles.
That has changed. Most Republicans today, at least those in control, don’t care about government. They just as soon it fail as not since they hate everything about government, unless, of course, they are in power and can use it for their personal advantage.
This is why in 2020 the Republican National Committee decided to forego adopting a Party Platform and, instead, called on all Republicans to “enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda” that had nothing to do with offering conservative solutions to the nation’s problems.
The future of the Republican Party depends on its voters seeing what has happened to their party and then refuse to support ideologues who pretend to be conservatives by not voting for them.
This has to happen at the state level as well as the federal. Republicans in several states are already busy submitting bills to limit mail-in voting, apparently because it worked too smoothly and flawlessly in 2020 for their taste. Their way of protecting the integrity of the vote is to prevent Democrats from voting which is their version of free and fair elections.
Consequential voting is not rocket science. It’s common sense. It’s about thinking before you act as a way for the Republican Party to stop throwing up people like Donald Trump.
Moreover, it is good not only for Republicans. They need it because it’s an emergency for them, but it is also good for all of us, Democrats, Republicans, independents, now more than ever.
To say the survival of democracy in America is at stake may sound too melodramatic, yet, it is exactly the threat Republicans pose. They are shaking the foundations of our way of life from within, something that has never happened before. It’s not easy to believe, but believe it we must.
But here is the irony of our dilemma. The quality of our collective future depends on the threat our nation is facing being defeated by the very people who allowed it to take root in their party in the first place.
In short, conservative Republicans must take back control of their party or, if they cannot do that, then destroy it and start over.
The rest of us must help and encourage them in the limited ways available to us. It’s their fight, but one thing we can do is to commit ourselves to consequential voting to demonstrate that we are only asking them to do what we are willing to do ourselves.
linnposts.com 