Today, Katherine Rampell wrote a column in the Washington Post that struck a nerve for me.
Under a Heading which read: “Don’t Blame ‘Washington.’ Blame the GOP” she began by writing:
“Dysfunctional Washington refuses to work out its differences to solve problems that matter to Americans. So say pundits and policy activists, perhaps hoping that diffuse criticism, rather than finger-pointing, will yield a government willing to govern.
But the problem isn’t “Washington.” It isn’t “Congress,” either. The problem is elected officials from a single political party: the GOP.”
Here is the link to her column:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-blame-washington-blame-the-gop/2018/02/19/f374bf28-15ba-11e8-92c9-376b4fe57ff7_story.html?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.fc7a52ef7b08
I thought that’s true, but it is not a new thought.
Why haven’t we done something about it?
In 2014, Thomas Mann a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution which is usually identified as a “liberal” Institution and Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, collaborated on a book titled: “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics Of Extremism.”
And for the first time in a serious way, the authors named the responsible factor: The Republican Party.
They wrote that “Today’s Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party – “ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional” – doesn’t work in a “separation –of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.”
Mann and Ornstein in speaking truth to the Country were path finders who were ahead of their time, but as their title suggests, and as Katherine Rampell explains, it’s now even worse than they said.
Now, it is “crystal” clear that the majority of Republican members of Congress don’t care whether majorities can “work their will” as long as they get their way.
If huge majorities of the public want stricter gun control measures in the wake of the terrible gun massacres (80 to 90-percent majorities), why these people don’t care.
If a large majority of the public wants Federal Government Assistance for poor Americans to afford Medical Insurance, why these people don’t care.
If large majorities of the public don’t want severe cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Programs for the poor, why these people don’t care.
And let’s be clear who they are: They are today’s Republicans, a shameful rabble of greedy men and women who do their evil work under the banner of what once was a Grand Old Party.
We are truly at a “tipping point.” Are we a Government, “of the people, by the people, for the people” as Lincoln said or shall we perish from the earth in the hands of today’s Trumpified Republicans?
We must destroy these modern “Philistines” at the ballot box. We must encourage citizens to vote this November, in the off year elections, and in 2020.
We can and we must return our system to a functioning democracy, a Republic, actually, in which the majority’s will is reflected in our laws and in our government’s programs.
Perhaps, when the Trumpified Republicans are destroyed like the Phoenix of Greek Mythology which rose from the ashes, the new Republican party will be the party of the old GOP, a party that seeks to put its ideas into practice through persuasion and compromise.
We need that GOP.
So, in the spirit of the explanation by a U S Major during the Vietnam war of why the South Vietnamese village of Ben Tre, a stronghold for the communist Viet Cong was bombed and shelled into oblivion with the loss of many innocent civilian lives, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” let us destroy this parasite of a Republican party in order to save it!