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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Republican’

Republican Plans Once Again Foiled By Republicans

Posted by M. C. on February 10, 2024

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https://babylonbee.com/news/republican-plans-once-again-foiled-by-republicans

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republicans managed to once again foil the plans of Republicans to accomplish anything whatsoever in Congress.

Though the Republican party still holds a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, it has struggled to make progress on several aspects of its agenda due to the interference and obstacles placed in its way by the Republican party.

“We really stopped us in our tracks this time,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “We have plans to accomplish some big things to help the American people and fix some of the glaring problems facing our nation, but we keep facing strong opposition from us at every turn. If we can’t find a way to overcome us, we’ll continue to keep us from getting things done. We’ve become a real problem for us.”

The GOP’s latest embarrassing setbacks included failing to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas despite the ongoing migrant crisis at the southern border and a lopsided failure to pass Speaker Johnson’s Israel aid package. Republican lawmakers placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Republican lawmakers. “It’s those darn Republicans blocking everything we do,” said Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. “The Republicans would get a lot more accomplished if it weren’t for the Republicans.”

At publishing time, Republicans were making a renewed effort to emphasize the importance of voters electing Republicans to help the Republican party deal with the opposition of the Republican party.

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TGIF: Tribalism and the Dark Art of the Package Deal

Posted by M. C. on September 2, 2023

we should be wary about common phrases like moving further to the left/right or becoming more progressive/conservative. The reason is that there is no single-issue spectrum with fixed points to move along. The tribes define, not reflect, what it means to be rightwing, leftwing, conservative, and liberal/progressive.

If you have doubts about this, try stating the principles that unify the conservative and progressive programs or the party platforms. You can’t do it. If you ask a conservative or progressive what principle unifies his program, his answer, write the Lewises, will be a post-hoc rationalization. The tribes could exchange positions (and have) and still rationalize their new programs in terms of their previous answers.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-package-deal/

by Sheldon Richman

Tribalism not only lives; it rules — even more than I thought! I’ve been reading Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis’s book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America. It’s certainly clarified my thinking.

The Lewis brothers are a historian and a political scientist. What they show is something that I and many others have only partly understood. But for me, that’s changing now. (Here’s an interview with them.)

Their thesis is that the terms left, right, liberal, progressive, conservative, Republican, and Democrat do not indicate opposing sides of a single basic ideological principle that would make their respective policy programs coherent. Instead, those labels identify two social/cultural tribes that are based on something other than ideology. The disparate components of their respective policy package deals change, depending on contingent events, but the tribes endure with few defections. Compare “right-wing” Republican leaders Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. You can do the same with the “left.”

What do those labels really mean? You can’t say, for example, that the left is for big government and the right is for small government: too many shifts and inconsistencies have occurred. Think of their changing attitudes toward free speech, foreign intervention, surveillance and the intel apparatus, free trade, the rule of law, and even tax cuts.  Republicans have joined Democrats in opposing even future cuts to doomed Social Security and Medicare. Why don’t the media report that the Republicans have moved to the left on entitlements? Anything they do is called a move to the right; anything the Democrats do is a move to the left. How can that be?

Have you heard the cliche “This isn’t your father’s Republican [or Democratic] Party?” Tribal change is not new. (That was lifted from an Oldsmobile advertising slogan.)

When you come right down to it, members of Team Red hate members of Team Blue because they wear the wrong color jersey and vice versa.

The Lewises’ “social theory” explains the scene better than the prevailing “essentialist theory.” If the two tribes had ideologically driven platforms, each side’s members could coherently (but not necessarily correctly) say, “My team’s positions are all good because of our underlying vision, and the opposing team’s positions are therefore all bad. But if their lists of positions are grab bags determined by something other than a worldview, then the members can’t reasonably say that.

See the rest here

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The Republican Debt-Circus Charade – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on January 21, 2023

How long have we heard Republicans calling for a “balanced-budget amendment”? Decades! But it’s all been idle, hypocritical chatter.

How do we know that? Because Republicans now have the opportunity to require a balanced budget. Yes, right now! They don’t need a constitutional amendment to achieve a balanced budget. All they have to do is insist on enforcement of the debt ceiling. No more new debt. 

https://www.fff.org/2023/01/20/the-republican-debt-circus-charade/

by Jacob G. Hornberger

It seems like just yesterday that the debt-ceiling circus returned to Washington. Actually, it was October 2021, a little over two years ago. That circus was just like all the ones that preceded it. The mainstream press and other acolytes of the welfare-warfare state issued all sorts of dire predictions if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised. As soon as the debt-ceiling was raised, no one advocated cutting government spending to prepare for the next time that the debt ceiling was reached. Everyone knew that as soon as the new debt ceiling was reached, they could do the same thing again.

In other words, for the past two years, it has been business as usual — federal government expenditures exceeding tax revenues by around $1 trillion per year. And everyone knew that within a couple of years, the debt ceiling would be reached again. 

Thus, just like clockwork, it’s déjà vu all over again. In fact, the mainstream press doesn’t even have to write new editorials or op-eds. All they have to do is trot out the ones from 2021 (and before) and use them. No one would be the wiser. Why write new ones when the old ones will work just as well?

But perhaps the most noteworthy thing to notice about the debt-ceiling circus is Republicans. Whenever there is a Republican president, Republicans stay silent about or, even worse, supportive of out-of-control spending and debt. President Trump, for example, added around $8 trillion to the national debt. You could call him the King of Debt. The Republican members of Congress were as quiet as church mice or, even worse, wildly supportive of their big-spender and big-debt leader. 

Now that the debt ceiling has been reached under Democrat president Joe Biden, the Republicans have suddenly discovered their inner secret self of fiscal responsibility. They are demanding that Biden agree to undefined reductions in federal spending as a condition for agreeing to lift the debt ceiling. For his part, Biden says he’s not budging. He’s determined to continue the out-of-control federal spending and debt spree, no matter what.

Let me tell you how this ends. The Republicans will cave. Republicans always cave. This time will be no different. Oh, sure, they might finally get Biden and the Democrats to agree to some minor reduction in spending  — no doubt spread over the next 10 years, but for all practical purposes it will do nothing to prevent the federal government from continuing to hurl America into national bankruptcy. 

See the rest here

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The Silence of the Shepherds › American Greatness

Posted by M. C. on August 14, 2021

And yet it seems that the recall is poised to succeed. And who is most likely to be the next governor of ultra-liberal California? None other than conservative talk show host Larry Elder because he actually is followed by what seems to be a plurality of the people. In an environment in which trust is very low, any amount of the genuine article, earned by exposing oneself to the worst that the establishment can dish out, is priceless.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/the-silence-of-the-shepherds/

By Angelo Codevilla

Republican officials’ timidity with regard to the outrages that the Democratic Party is committing against the American people under the Biden Administration dampens the American people’s urge to resist. Their default of leadership helps the Democrats’ seizure of long-term oligarchic power. The people’s deep resentment, however, will follow whoever and whatever ventures offer protection. As ever, leadership falls to whomever actually leads.

Unanimously, Republican officials denounce the Biden Administration’s decision to suspend laws requiring rent payments, while continuing to enforce landlords’ obligations to pay their mortgages. But no official is organizing landlords to band together to withhold their mortgage payments from banks. 

Nearly all Republicans decry the government’s collaboration with airlines, schools, and big businesses to establish vaccine passports as conditions to return to normal life. The same goes for mask mandates. All know that public health is an excuse for long-term social control. Yet no one is organizing the majority of Americans who object to this into groups the size of which enable them to stop this power grab. 

No Republican official dissents from the vast majority of Americans who are aghast at the opening of our southern border, and at certain Democrats’ assertion that illegal aliens are essentially “Americans” who should have the right to vote. No Republican has suggested that the next Congress and president has the power and obligation to deport each and every one of them. 

Countless Americans seethe at being targeted as white supremacists whose every objection to government power is presumptively criminal. But no Republican politician has promised to hold to account any and all officials who so abuse their fellow citizens. 

Most Republicans denounce the Biden Administration’s expenditure of trillions of borrowed dollars to further empower themselves, resulting immediately in higher prices for everything, and pricing more and more Americans out of home ownership. Yet nearly half of Senate Republicans voted to approve the $1.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill.

And yet we may be sure that any number of Republicans imagine themselves as candidates for the presidency in 2024. One may ask on what basis senators, who might have used their national standing to organize and lead Americans into collective protective actions but chose not to, will ask for the people’s votes. All will point to statements of theirs that complain about each and every abuse. But joining in the beleaguered Americans’ complaints does nothing to relieve them. Attitude is not the same thing as leadership. That goes for all, from former President Donald Trump to Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

Republicans who hold state or local office, and who use their powers to their limits, are in a category of their own. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, the most prominent of these, has effectively interposed state authority to protect his citizens insofar as that is possible. Some governors and legislators have pledged non-compliance with eventual federal legislation that does away with requirements for identification in elections. Any number of county sheriffs have declared they will not enforce many actual or threatened regulations. In North Carolina, newly elected Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn led a group of citizens to protest a school board’s imposition of a racist curriculum. 

In short, wherever real leadership arises, the people reward it by following it. At some point, local leadership must translate into national leadership, if only because that is the only kind of leadership that now exists.

Perhaps, then, there is little use in decrying the Republican establishment’s effective abdication. They act as they do for a variety of reasons of their own. Some hold back for fear of presuming Donald Trump’s supposed prerogative to lead. But as time passes, Trump’s partisans become as compelled as anyone else to ask where, precisely, words without practical consequence would lead? Others’ reticence is all too clearly connected to their fear of taking upon themselves the wrath of a now nearly all-powerful oligarchy. For whatever purpose, most of the Republican Party is disqualifying itself for reasons of no relevance to the rest of us.

This is what has happened in California. Republicans have not challenged Democrats statewide for nearly a generation. The Democratic Party, exercising a supermajority in the legislature as well as control of each and every institution in the state, has governed in a way that alienated the majority of the state’s residents, causing uncounted numbers of citizens to flee, seeking refuge in other states. The effort to recall the governor who symbolizes this state of affairs came from ordinary people, not from Republican officials. And the Republicans who have sought to profit from those efforts have drawn little public support—money notwithstanding.

And yet it seems that the recall is poised to succeed. And who is most likely to be the next governor of ultra-liberal California? None other than conservative talk show host Larry Elder because he actually is followed by what seems to be a plurality of the people. In an environment in which trust is very low, any amount of the genuine article, earned by exposing oneself to the worst that the establishment can dish out, is priceless.

In sum, the combination of establishment misrule and Republican impotence leaves the field open to whomever takes it upon himself to lead.

About Angelo Codevilla

Angelo M. Codevilla is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace (Hoover Institution Press, 2014).

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Democrat Pilot And Republican Co-Pilot Argue Over How Fast They Should Fly Plane Into Ground | The Babylon Bee

Posted by M. C. on June 3, 2021

https://babylonbee.com/news/democrat-pilot-wants-to-crash-plane-at-high-speed-republican-co-pilot-recommends-crashing-at-lower-speed-instead

U.S.—According to alerts from the FAA, the flight crew of a Boeing 747 flying somewhere over the United States is locked in a dispute over how fast they should crash their plane into the ground.

Witnesses say the pilot, a Democrat, wants to fly the plane into the ground at 700 MPH.

The Republican co-pilot, however, has proposed crashing at a much more reasonable speed of 600 MPH. 

“We need to be responsible here!” said First Officer Dan McTan, who prides himself in his Conservative values. “700 MPH is reckless and irresponsible! Crashing at 600 MPH will allow the crew and passengers a full 1.3 seconds of additional life before they are incinerated in a massive fireball! Let’s be reasonable!” 

Pilot In Command Xanderillo Cruggsteen disagrees. “700 MPH is the way to go and you’re a racist!!!!” he responded with a loud and terrible shriek. 

In the end, the crew members elected to dive into the earth below at 695 MPH. Thankfully, the Democrat pilot and Republican Co-Pilot each had very expensive parachutes and were able to bail out safely before everyone else went down. 

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Beginning of US Slavery – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 28, 2019

There are several challenges one can make about Hannah-Jones’ article, but I’m going to focus on the article’s most serious error, namely that the nation’s founders intended for us to be a democracy. That error is shared by too many Americans.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/walter-e-williams/beginning-of-us-slavery/

By

The New York Times has begun a major initiative, the “1619 Project,” to observe the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe American history so that slavery and the contributions of black Americans explain who we are as a nation. Nikole Hannah-Jones, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine wrote the lead article, “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One.” She writes, “Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.”

There are several challenges one can make about Hannah-Jones’ article, but I’m going to focus on the article’s most serious error, namely that the nation’s founders intended for us to be a democracy. That error is shared by too many Americans. The word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Instead of a democracy, the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, declares, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Think about it and ask yourself whether our Pledge of Allegiance says to “the democracy for which it stands” or to “the republic for which it stands.” Is Julia Ward Howe’s popular Civil War song titled “The Battle Hymn of the Democracy” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

The founders had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, that in a pure democracy “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegate Edmund Randolph said, “that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams said: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

The U.S. Constitution is replete with anti-majority rule, undemocratic provisions. One provision, heavily criticized, is the Electoral College. In their wisdom, the framers gave us the Electoral College so that in presidential elections, heavily populated states could not run roughshod over sparsely populated states. In order to amend the Constitution, it requires a two-thirds vote of both Houses, or two-thirds of state legislatures, to propose an amendment, and requires three-fourths of state legislatures for ratification. Part of the reason for having a bicameral Congress is that it places another obstacle to majority rule. Fifty-one senators can block the wishes of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The president, with a veto, can thwart the will of all 535 members of Congress. It takes a two-thirds vote, not just a majority, of both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto.

In addition to not understanding our Constitution, Hannah-Jones’ article, like in most discussions of black history, fails to acknowledge that black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles in the shortest span of time than any other racial group in mankind’s history. The evidence: If black Americans were thought of as a nation with our own gross domestic product, we’d rank among the 20 wealthiest nations. It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, who headed the world’s mightiest military. A few black Americans are among the world’s wealthiest. Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities.

The significance of this is that in 1865, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed that such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half, if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as importantly, it speaks to the greatness of a nation within which such progress was possible, progress that would have been impossible anywhere else. The challenge before us is how those gains can be extended to a large percentage of black people for whom they appear elusive.

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Democracy is immoral and always leads to tyranny - War Is ...

 

 

 

 

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Mr. Lubner was born a Republican (without a spine)

Posted by M. C. on August 2, 2011

Kathleen Parker, in today’s Erie Times News, thinks the Tea Partiers should be banned to the nether regions for weakening the Republican party. Kathleen is right but backwards. The traditional Republcan party is the spineless half bother who, like in a Castle movie, should be kept locked in the attic. Read the rest of this entry »

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