We’re on the road to Ripon — or at least we need to be.
In 1854, appalled by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Whig Party’s endless appetite for compromise with slavery and the Democratic Party, a group of activists met at a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, to form a new political party that would actually stand for something. The new Republican Party ran its first presidential candidate, the explorer and army officer John C. Fremont, in 1856 under the slogan, “Free speech, free press, free men, free labor, free territory, and Fremont.”
We’re there again. The Republican Party is useless to the point of insult, a capitulationist entity that exists to overspend borrowed money and agree with Democrats, or at least not disagree with them too much.
We keep chasing out the elected officials who make it too obvious. But every effort to replace an Adam Kinzinger or a Liz Cheney just leads to the emergence of a new zombie who steps forward to take their places.
As we sail past $34 trillion in federal debt, heading inexorably to $50 trillion and watching the endless denunciation of “extremists” who propose to apply a little light medicine to the metastasizing cancer of federal spending, we need to consider the possibility that the party can’t be saved. It should be replaced.
In New Jersey last week, an FBI dragnet aggressively pursued a former National Guard sergeant who allegedly sprayed some bear spray toward Capitol police — not on Capitol police — on January 6, 2021.
Just short of three years after the absurd “insurrection,” federal law enforcement is still opening new cases over that old news.
The FBI showed up with an arrest warrant at the home of the desultory bear-sprayer Gregory Yetman two years, 10 months, and three days after his alleged crime. The FBI and the Justice Department will not stop making new January 6 cases. They are committed to keeping the January 6 story front and center in the national narrative. They’re putting on a political show for the upcoming presidential elections, and we all know it.
Nationally, the party we have has no value and not much potential for developing any. We can do better, or our children are in deep trouble.
Meanwhile, a throng of Hamas supporters descended on the White House last week, climbing security fences and vandalizing the property. (See pictures of the damage here.) Like the Antifa and Black Lives Matter mobs that burned American cities in the summer of 2020, the people who blocked access to the White House and aggressively destroyed property around it last week needn’t worry that Attorney General Merrick Garland will consider them a significant target for prosecution. FBI raids are for the political right. The FBI is the sword and the shield of the Democratic Party, when it isn’t on loan to Planned Parenthood. The politicization of federal law enforcement is many things, but subtle is not one of them.
The Republican response to all of this was to block an effort by “extremist” members of the House GOP caucus, who tried to take away funding from the FBI’s planned new headquarters in Maryland. Seventy House Republicans voted to make sure the FBI gets its new building so that the agency has plenty of room to go on criminalizing conservative politics and opposition to abortion.
Or consider the effort of U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to defund a federal mandate for every new car sold in the United States in a few years to come with a “kill switch” allowing remote shutdowns. Again, that effort failed in a Republican-majority House, with Republican votes.
At the mostly pointless Republican presidential debate that I didn’t watch on Wednesday, candidate Vivek Ramaswamy opened with a blast at the Republican National Committee and its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel — who chose dismal “mainstream” news anchors, mindless promoters of the pathetic Russia dossier hoax, to serve as the moderators for a conservative debate. It was the most obvious point that could possibly have been made, but no one else made it, and a good number of Republican grandees postured as having been offended by the argument.
We’ve all become accustomed to a Republican Party that sides with its dumbest, laziest enemies. We should consider not doing that any more, yes? So that maybe one major political party in the United States reliably represents views that are actually in the mainstream all over the country? Political parties are enshrined nowhere. They aren’t mentioned in the Constitution, and they aren’t inevitable. There is no reason we cannot dispose of them when they stop working.
In state legislatures, Republicans still have elected officials who will fight for something, as red-state child mutilation bans have shown. Some of them can be part of the foundation of a new party. Nationally, the party we have has no value and not much potential for developing any. We can do better, or our children are in deep trouble.
I’ll consider, as an alternative, a plan to save the Republican Party. But we’re running out of time.