QUESTION OF THE DAY
Why Do The GOP’s Presidential Wannabes Have No Bold Plans For America?
Republicans have no agenda or solutions, but obstruct everything. Why do aspiring GOP presidents want to lead an unhappy, unhealthy, struggling country rife with gun violence?
I’ll never understand why Republican presidential wannabes, specifically those who come from Congress, don’t write, champion, or even just vote for more long-term, national stimulus bills and policy initiatives that would benefit the American people in the next four, eight, twelve, or more years ahead of their potential presidencies.
Republicans literally didn’t even put together a party platform in 2020. They have become pure obstructionists, and Kevin McCarthy’s upcoming speakership in the House is promising to focus primarily on investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop, looking for ways to arrest Dr. Anthony Fauci, and defending the January 6th rioters who tried to hang Mike Pence between trips inside Congress to smear feces on the walls of Congress. And Republicans are such governmental saboteurs Kevin McCarthy’s speakership is not even assured because he’s not partisan enough for the Freedom Caucus’s tastes!
The only Republican who put together any plan at all was Senator Rick Scott, whose plan was instantly lambasted by everyone for RAISING taxes on poor and working class people, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and sunsetting literally every law in the land every five years unless our increasingly dysfunctional Congress goes out of its way to re-authorize it. The plan was immediately disowned by the rest of the party, and every other Republican returned to the no-agenda strategy for the midterms in which they suffered an electoral disaster.
Democrats, in contrast, have numerous bold plans on every issue to the point that Republicans cry wolf on all of them with fear mongering over Democrats’ “communism.” It’s both a bad faith and ignorant insult.
Now the obvious reason why Republicans behave this way is because of how beneficial hyper-partisan brinkmanship constantly threatening governmental catastrophe for media attention has been for GOP Congressional politics as devised by Mitch McConnell, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and epic narcissists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Ted Cruz.
The anti-Obama impulse to ensure President Obama would be a one-term president, even through his second term, really engulfed conservative politics in a cynicism toward democracy that they have tried ever since to pretend is grassroots populism, which would be more believable if it wasn’t funded by billionaire secret donors giving to massive superPACs and if it hadn’t been losing the popular vote in presidential elections every time except once since 1992.
However, 14 years after their 2008 Obama mindf*ck, Republicans have almost no legitimate legislative platforms or policies for its presidential candidates to run on, and instead obsesses almost exclusively on reactionary “Culture War” battles that conservatives can’t win with policy. GOP campaigns at the local, state, and federal level all center on stopping the “evil, atheist, communist, baby-blood-drinking Democrat” straw man boogeymen that don’t actually exist.
Even when the GOP had a two-year trifecta of federal power from 2017–2019, Republicans absurdly failed to come up with an infrastructure plan or COVID stimulus package right before the 2020 election, even though Democrats were willing to give the GOP a blank check for each, and Republicans most humiliatingly failed to make good on their collective electoral blood-oath to “Repeal and Replace” Obamacare after somehow having literally no ideas on what to replace it with after bitching about it for over a decade.
The GOP has become so mindlessly reactionary that it’s impossible for Republicans to govern. Many of them literally even say out loud they don’t think the government should exist, which is an ironic manner in which to campaign vigorously to get elected to the government and then keep campaigning repeatedly as many times as they can.
This stupid Republican anaconda vise on Congressional enterprise makes sense for Obstructionist-in-Chief Mitch McConnell, who has never been interested in running for president and has heartily embraced the GOP designation as the “Party of No” while comparing himself favorably to both the Grim Reaper and Darth Vader, but why aren’t the GOP’s plethora of presidential egotists more interested in Congressional success?
If you intend to run for president in the future, and your resumé includes being a part of one of the least respected and least popular institutions in American political life, why would you not be obsessively committed to helping pass bills to solve the country’s problems, or raise Congress’ approval rating so being a member of Congress isn’t literally a black mark on your CV, or promote the best possible long-term, macro-economic environment possible for when you hopefully win the presidency? Oh, and uh, help the American people, too…
With the increasing polarization of US politics and nationalization of state and even local elections, Congressional candidates should want to win every legislative accomplishment possible. Particularly because in America’s unique electoral system it’s quite impossible to predict which candidates will win either party’s nomination, let alone the general election. Despite Democrats routinely winning the national popular vote, Republicans have a clear advantage in the Electoral College, so the past several presidential elections have essentially been toss-ups depending on very narrow vote margins of just a handful of states.
For instance, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was a political long-shot against Hillary Clinton, but he managed to win both the nomination and the general election. In 2012, Mitt Romney benefited from every other GOP candidate’s short-lived frontrunner status self-imploding, but then lost the general election despite believing so thoroughly he would win that he did not even write a concession speech. In 2016, Hillary faced surprisingly heavy competition from Bernie Sanders, and Trump was buoyed by more than a dozen other Republicans splitting the vote with strategies intent on being the last candidate standing against Trump, who the conventional wisdom assumed couldn’t win. Of course, even to the surprise of Trump’s own campaign, he eked out an extremely tight Electoral College win. In 2020, despite Biden having a rough start in the primaries, he won the general election against Trump by over 7 million votes, though still came within a few tens of thousands of votes in the most vital swing states from losing in the Electoral College.
The point is that recent elections show presidential nominations are essentially punts that potentially any candidate can catch and find a path to electoral victory even when an incumbent is on the ballot. Yet throughout the past four presidential election cycles, Republican candidates have proposed very few solutions to the many systemic problems that any president would face regardless of party affiliation.
A topical example is the price of oil, for which presidents are unfairly held politically responsible despite them having almost nothing personally to do with the variable pricing largely set by OPEC, a market-manipulating cartel. Republicans in Congress have done nothing to seriously promote energy independence via green technology to protect Americans from the occasional geopolitical oil price shock, which has happened repeatedly over the past 50 years. The only thing they do act on, however, is to vote against, mock, and attack any Democratic attempt at a “Green New Deal” that would spark whole new industries and create hundreds of thousands of jobs making America more self-sufficient with abundant energy easily sourced in ways that improves health and environmental happiness and poise America to profit handsomely selling our technology and green energy services across the world.
Meanwhile, our national infrastructure continues to decay and be passed up by other developed and even developing nations without Republicans in Congress ever voting for enough stimulus spending to seriously update or replace our aging bridges, roads, airports and seaports, while the massive costs involved with building anything in America continues to be ridiculously higher than almost anywhere else. No number of Trumpian “Infrastructure Weeks” could get Republicans to create their own infrastructure plan, and we had to wait until President Biden passed one.
America’s healthcare system has also been an outlier in cost and inefficiency for decades with pharmaceutical companies price-gouging our seniors and ripping off our government, yet Republicans demonize efficiency as socialism, actually support pharmaceutical companies getting rich ripping us off, vote repeatedly against mandating caps on the price of medicines like insulin for diabetics, and generally don’t think the government should get in the way of America’s sick being exploited financially.
Republicans barely acknowledge, let alone stop, pollution in the air, water, and food as well as climate change, and they willingly accept the plethora of health impacts and extreme weather phenomenon risks that continue to assault our population while denying, obscuring, and even literally erasing the endlessly accumulating scientific measurements, data, and personal horror stories of an alarmingly heating planet.
Immigration reform and border security continues to be the number one election issue of Republicans, and was the cornerstone for Donald Trump’s political career (“Build the wall!”), but Republicans killed the 2014 Gang of Eight compromise that would have addressed many of the issues they complain about daily. When the GOP had a governmental trifecta in the 2017–2018 Congress, they could have passed a big bill that gave billions of dollars to fund new border security agents, holding centers, courthouses, and judges to quickly process the migrants and refugees coming to the border, but instead their priority was cutting taxes for rich people.
The only problem Republicans want to solve — rich people having to pay taxes — isn’t really a societal problem.
Politicians from both parties have criticized the extremely toxic amounts of corporate and special interest money in our political system, the revolving door of government officials leaving office straight to cushy lobbying firms and vice versa, and the shocking power and influence of Big Tech, yet the only efforts Republicans have made to curb this oligarchic influence involve governmental censorship and fascist corporate intimidation against liberal-leaning businesses and tycoons because Republicans have benefitted at historic levels from this spectacular corruption offering quid pro quo tax cuts for preposterous dark money superPAC funding. Republicans don’t let Democratic efforts to curb this cancer in our politics get anywhere near their superPAC wallets, and these latest midterm elections saw some Republican candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio almost exclusively get sponsored by a single billionaire.
To at least try and address the root problems of these issues with some fashion of compromise is literally Congress’s job, but Republicans are unwilling to compromise either with Democrats or each other when an occasional Republican member is personally affected by an issue and therefore, unsurprisingly, takes the liberal perspective on it with miraculously discovered empathy. When some minuscule, bipartisan agreement does occur, the GOP erupts into political fratricide, and offending Republicans get branded as RINOs and typically lose their next primary election.
The weirdest, and most morally abhorrent, aspect of the GOP’s obstinacy to improve society is on guns. America’s gun crisis will continue plaguing future Republican presidents just as much as it does Democratic presidents, who actually want to do something to stop the endless carnage and murder. But, even though new regulations and bans on military-grade weapons like high velocity assault weapons would still allow hunters and home-protectors to have any number of rifles, shotguns and pistols, Republicans oppose any action that will stop disgruntled young men displaying numerous red flags from buying an AR-15 and earning brief infamy in a cliché mass shooting.
Why don’t Republican presidential wannabes want to help mitigate America’s mass-murder problem? Do they want to have to stop what they’re doing in the White House every month to visit some elementary school where two dozen eight-year-olds got decapitated with an AR-15? With a little bit of decisive Congressional action now, their potential presidency could be a much nicer experience with many fewer murdered children.
The omnipresent filibuster threat makes bad politics for Republicans because of how Constitutionally difficult big governmental action in our gridlocked Congress is with our particular setup of checks and balances on any action. Republican presidential wannabes would be smart to block any filibuster attempts, let Democrats do all the heavy lifting of passing bold plans for the future and also let them take the political damage such efforts inevitably cause, and then the Republican presidential wannabes could take credit for the dividends of such action down the road when they hopefully move into the White House. Like how Donald Trump took credit for Barack Obama’s herculean efforts to fix and build the historically strong economy that Trump then wrecked when he epically bungled the first unforced crisis he had to deal with, COVID. Future Republican presidents aspirants could even pretend the passed Democratic plans are disasters, but that they have solutions to improve it, and pass some small, largely ceremonial reform amendments to take credit for the programs’ enduring success while campaigning for president!
So the question for current presidential hopefuls in Congress like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Rick Scott, who are almost certainly going to run in 2024 and 2028, is what is your end-goal? Are you really trying to lead a country you’ve done everything in your Congressional power to sabotage by blocking every Democratic proposal remotely beneficial for the American people from passing?
If you get elected, do you really want to spend your entire presidency fighting the exact same stupid political battles for issues that never get solved?
Do you really really want to risk taking 100% of the blame for high gas prices because you purposely kept the government from supporting a robust American energy market with higher percentages of clean solar, wind, and potentially nuclear energy? Do you want to risk taking the blame for America’s suffering via healthcare exploitation, immigration chaos, crumbling infrastructure, etc.?
Why not let Democrats take care of these problems now and take credit for the future dividends when you ascend to the Presidency?
It may even help you get elected, who knows? If every GOP candidate in a crowded presidential primary field is competing over who hates the government the most, and who has done the most to obstruct governmental efficiency, why not try the opposite and see what happens? Maybe if you run a primary campaign presenting yourself not as a flame-throwing ideologue of cruel, anti-everything libertarianism but rather a bipartisan, results-driven achiever of quality governance you’ll come across to voters as, dare I say it, presidential?
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