Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, January 8, 2022

A Post-Governing Party

 Martin Longman makes a case for any Republican with a shred of public virtue to resign rather than further debase themselves by toeing the Trumpist line with regards to January 6th. It's a good point, that the purpose of our legislative and electoral system is to create independent legislators - sadly, like Joe Manchin, but there are more felicitous examples. If you are subsuming your independence and critical reasoning functions to appease the QAnon/Stop the Steal crowd, you're no longer valuable as a legislator. You could literally be replaced by a bot.

The other important aspect of this shift in the GOP is their move to a post-governing party. The GOP is fundamentally about winning elections and having power, rather than doing anything with that power. Sure, cutting taxes is fun, but stacking the courts is really only for...having power. It will be interesting to see how the Trumpist state governments fair as they ban abortions and cut spending to the bone on things like education and healthcare. If Sam Brownback's Kansas is a model, it won't go well.

The GOP doesn't want to do the hard work of governing. They just want power. So if that means siding with seditionists and criminals...cool.

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