Republicans cannot win on principle so they have discarded principle

Acknowledging reality will wreck them

The modern Republican Party represents hypocrisy and the promotion of ignorance. American Republicanism is eating itself because younger generations can see it for what it is: old power protecting itself at any cost, including selling lies and acting as dishonest agents of hypocrisy. Consider Heather Cox Richardson’s June 22 take on a recent illustration of this reality:

“Lawmakers today are jockeying before tomorrow’s test vote in the Senate on S1, the For the People Act. This is a sweeping bill that protects the right to vote, ends partisan gerrymandering, limits the influence of money in politics, and establishes new ethics rules for presidents and other federal officeholders. 

Passing election reform is a priority for Democrats, since Republican-dominated legislatures across the country have gerrymandered states to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win majorities and, since President Biden took office, have passed laws suppressing the vote and making it easier for Republican state officials to swing elections to their candidates no matter what voters want.

But it is not just Democrats who want our elections to be cleaner and fairer. S1 is so popular across the nation—among voters of both parties—that Republican operatives agreed in January that there was no point in trying to shift public opinion on it. Instead, they said, they would just kill it in Congress. This conversation, explored in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, happened just after it became clear that Democrats had won a Senate majority and thus Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had previously been Senate Majority Leader, would no longer be able to stop any legislation Republicans didn’t like. 

Still, Republican senators can deploy the filibuster, which permits just 41 of the 50 Republican senators to stop the act from passing. It is possible for the Democrats to break a filibuster, but only if they are all willing. Until recently, it seemed they were not. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), a conservative Democrat in a Republican-dominated state, opposed some of the provisions in S1 and was adamant that he would not vote for an election reform bill on partisan lines. He wanted bipartisan support.

Mitch McConnell is a desperate, amoral, power-hungry piece of human trash. The Democrats need to admit that and stop trying to play the political game fairly. Mitch isn’t and hasn’t been. He says one thing and does another. He’s a man without honor. This political system is already broken and until we can reboot it, it will stay broken. The January 6 insurrection attempt, as inept as it was, is just a prelude.

Good legislation, like the For the People Act, is not in Republicans’ best interest. Republicans do not care about improving American lives. They only care about hanging on to power. To do that, the party has to play an us versus them game. It has to make its base feel threatened by anyone who isn’t white and god-fearing and gun toting. In a win for this worldview, America turns into a fascist state.

The Republican Party cannot win on principle. That’s why it has discarded principle. It is now the party of lies and self-delusion. Maybe it always has been, but I started to see it clearly when millions of people voted for a malignant narcissist to lead them. It became clear to me that our systems of power were completely broken when that evil, bumbling fool incompetently stumbled through four years of unprecedented criminal behavior and the system did not hold him accountable. We live in a broken country and it remains to be seen when the next piece of us gets shattered into bits.

We need to rebuild the entire system from the ground up. We cannot revert to Jim Crow. We cannot tolerate continued gerrymandering. We shouldn’t tolerate people with severe mental illness in positions of legislative power. We have to do something about social media platforms allowing the disease of non-reality based memes to infect the general public. 

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Citations:

1. Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, June 21, 2021. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-21-2021

2. For the People Act of 2021. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1

3. Jim Crow Killed Voting Rights for Generations. Now the GOP Is Repeating History. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/06/jim-crow-killed-voting-rights-for-generations-now-the-gop-is-repeating-history/

4. AOC: Marjorie Taylor Greene Is ‘Deeply Unwell’ and ‘Clearly Needs Some Help.’ https://www.thedailybeast.com/aoc-worries-that-marjorie-taylor-greene-is-deeply-unwell