Republicans in Name Only: The Old GOP is No More

It's the MAGA party now. Vote accordingly.

Last week, Utah Senator Mitt Romney announced that he would not seek re-election when his term ends in January 2025. “I have spent my last 25 years in public service of one kind or another. At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-eighties,” he said. “Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.”

After taking swipes at both POTUS and FPOTUS, he continued: “Political motivations too often impede the solutions that these challenges demand. The next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership.”

To step down and pass the torch before age and infirmity sets in is a noble impulse. That Romney has watched the public deterioration of Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell probably informed this decision. But would he be quite so eager to hang up the spikes if the GOP—a party that nominated him for president not that long ago—had not gone off the rails? “It’s pretty clear that the party is inclined to a populist demagogue message,” he told the Washington Post, using two words where one—fascist—would have sufficed.

That’s one way of saying it. Another is this: the Republican Party that Mitt Romney knew and loved and believed in no longer exists. That era is over. The Old Guard GOP are either dead, gone, or on the way out. The party of Nixon and Reagan, Bush and Cheney, Romney and McCain, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham has become the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Donald Trump.

In the past, Republican popularity with voters derived from: 1) the GOP’s traditionalist “family values” stance, 2) its commitment to law and order, 3) its reputation as being better with national security, and 4) its “fiscal conservative” economic agenda: cut taxes, reign in spending. Even in the boom times, the Republican plank was more hat than cattle. But now? None of those things are even remotely accurate, if in fact they ever were. Let’s take a look:

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“Family Values”

I have often disagreed with Romney on matters large and small, but he is, without question, a man of character and high moral standing. Today’s Republican Party offers no one with that kind of integrity. There is no honor among thieves.

Last week, Lauren Boebert, a rising star within the new Republican Party, was thrown out of a regional production of Beetlejuice: The Musical for causing a disturbance. As the Denver Post reported:

The incident report states that after receiving the intermission warning, about five minutes into the second act security officials received “another complaint about the patrons being loud and at the time (they) were recording.” Taking pictures or recording is not permitted at shows.

The report quotes one of the ushers: “They told me they would not leave. I told them that they need to leave the theater and if they do not, they will be trespassing. The patrons said they would not leave. I told them I would (be) going to get Denver Police. They said go get them.”

Subsequent video revealed that Boebert, who was wearing a low-cut spaghetti-strap dress, was macking down with her date—later revealed to be a Democrat who owns a gay- and drag-friendly bar. “Macking down” means that he was fondling her suddenly-ample breasts, and she was grabbing at his crotch like she was changing gears on her stick-shift. Footage also showed her insouciantly vaping.

This matters because, first, there were plenty of kids in attendance. Not that the presence of minors has stopped Boebert’s gentleman companions before. As covered previously at PREVAIL:

In December of 2003, Lauren Roberts turned 17 (the age of consent in Colorado), and Jayson Boebert turned 23. On January 28, 2004, Jayson was arrested at a bowling alley for showing his tattoo to some underage girls. (He was arrested because the tattoo, apparently, is on his penis.) (Seriously, read the police report that Colorado blogger Anne Landman dug up. It’s really something.) A month later, Jayson was arrested again, this time for harassing and physically assaulting Lauren.

Second, Boebert has been outspoken in her condemnation of drag shows specifically and the LGBTQ community generally. Remember her idiotic tweet? “Take your children to Church,” she advised, “not drag bars.” She is a raging hypocrite who thinks the rules don’t apply to her—or her disgusting family.

There are, of course, plenty of other examples of egregious GOP hypocrisy regarding family values. Boebert’s gross display is only the most recent.

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Law and Order

This week, the Texas State Senate voted to acquit the state’s impeached attorney general, Ken Paxton, on all charges, despite his obvious and glaring guilt. Paxton, who has also been under federal indictment for years now, is so breathtakingly corrupt that even members of his own party, including Dade Phelan, the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, pushed to impeach him.

In a statement after the acquittal, Phelan said, rightly, that Paxton “clearly abused his power, compromised his agency and its employees and moved mountains to protect and benefit himself. The Senate’s refusal to remove Ken Paxton from office, is, however, not the end of this matter. Ken Paxton is the subject of multiple other lawsuit, indictments and investigations. If new facts continue to come out, those who allow him to keep his office will have much to answer for.”

There is no rule of law in Texas.

But it gets worse. Mike Allen of Axios reports that the state senators were pressured to acquit the crooked AG, a big Donald Trump ally: “National Republicans organized an under-the-radar campaign of outside conservative pressure on the Texas senators designed to neutralize mainstream media coverage, top strategists tell me. This outside unofficial team operated independently of the Paxton legal operation—like ‘a super PAC without the money,’ a top GOP strategist said.”

This is straight-up mob shit. This is Vito and Carmine showing up at your office, saying, “Helluva government job you got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

There are plenty of other examples of brazen Republican criminality—Trump did try to overthrow the government in a violent coup attempt, after all—but this is the most recent.

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National Security

As he himself has admitted, and as we have all seen, Trump, the former president and the presumptive 2024 GOP nominee, kept boxes—many, many boxes—of classified documents in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, a private event space that is among the least secure facilities in the country. The documents in those boxes related to nuclear secrets, military information, and intelligence activity. You know, things that keep us safe. And he didn’t even leave the boxes near the gilded toilet.

This week, ABC News reported that Trump used some of the classified documents as scrap paper, to make to-do lists for his administrative assistant, Molly Michael. Worse, he appears to have instructed her to lie to federal agents about the provenance of the boxes of classified material: “Sources said that after Trump heard the FBI wanted to interview Michael last year, Trump allegedly told her, ‘You don’t know anything about the boxes.’”

The ABC News report then says, “It’s unclear exactly what he meant by that,” but anyone who has watched even half an episode of The Sopranos knows precisely what he meant by that.

Again: this is just what happened this past week. He will still get the nomination.

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Fiscal Conservatism

Fiscal conservatives like Rand Paul are forever warning about the dangers of unsustainable national debt. They are so hyper-focused on this issue, it can almost be characterized as a kink. And yet Republican presidents routinely spend like MbS buying former Trump officials—and the last two have been the worst culprits since the Civil War.

ProPublica released a study on the national debt in the last week of the Trump presidency. It paints a bleak picture:

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.

The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

While the pandemic certainly contributed to Trump’s unrestrained spending, it’s not accurate to pin the blame on that exclusively. “The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar,” the ProPublica authors write. “So when the once-in-a-lifetime viral disaster slammed our country and we threw more than $3 trillion into COVID-19-related stimulus, there was no longer any margin for error.”

This recklessness, plus the disastrous trillions George W. Bush wasted on tax cuts for the rich and his useless Middle East wars, will cripple our economy for generations. And yet Rand Paul and his ilk will merrily endorse the Republican candidate, who would, if elected, continue to rob the Treasury to enrich his cronies.

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The Republican Party brand is strong. The myths and lies persist. Many if not most people respond more to “culture war” wedge issues and colorful personalities than, you know, reality. And while elephants have long memories, American voters do not.

“People respond to new news,” Romney said in the WaPo interview. “They don’t respond to old news. I mean, January 6th is old news. The documents, it’s old news. The call to [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger, it’s old news.” The death of over a million Americans of covid-19 due to Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic response is also old news, so old that Romney forgot to mention it.

The old GOP is dead. The Republican Party has been appropriated by deviants, crooks, liars, and profligates. The events of this week have made this abundantly clear. But come next November, will anyone remember?

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. Former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.