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Why Don’t Republicans DO Anything Once in Office?
I moved to the Illinois 10th Congressional District in 2003. My congressman Mark Kirk promoted himself as fiscally conservative and socially moderate and he was the perfect fit for for the district. He’d worked for the previous congressman John Porter. He served five terms in the House and one in the Senate (2001-2017). While he was a Senator, he had a bad stroke and is a retired politician after being defeated in 2016. Since then, the map for the 10th district has since been redrawn to make it more Democratic.
I normally wouldn’t repeat a private conversation, but since Kirk’s days as a politician are over it can’t hurt him. My wife worked as a volunteer in 2004 for a woman who was running for the Illinois Senate. In the process, she got to know many people working for the GOP township organizations and one told her of a conversation she had with Kirk before he ran in the 2000 primary. She basically tutored him on what positions he needed to hold to be a viable primary candidate; thus, his true opinions were to the left of his public positions.
I suspect that’s common for Republican politicians in Washington. I heard recently that the donor class is to the left of the average voter in both parties and I wonder if that’s also true for the folks in Congress. It may help explain why Republicans do so little when they’re in the majority. We know that the bureaucracy is against them but I wonder how many of them are just timeservers. Could that have been the case with Paul Ryan?
Published in Politics
For some reason, it seems fairly typical that people who get wealthy come to hate the system that made it possible. So they end up supporting and donating to causes that hurt most people, and would have hurt themselves too BEFORE they got rich.
The NTRO tactic during the 2000 election was to avoid Bush and campaign for Kirk. Bush was considered divisive. Since we lived in Evanston…well we crossed the DMZ and got involved in the 10th District. I can’t tell you how many phone conversations I had with retired priests living at Loyola about Kirk’s leftist views, especially on abortion. First and last campaign we were involved in. Local republican politics in the Land of Lincoln is a joke.
If you go back to the origins of the Republican party, they’ve always been in favor of a massive centralized state. They were never conservative, at least in a constitutional sense. Lincoln himself was a devote of Henry Clay’s American System. Massive internal improvements at the federal level/consolidation of corporation and state. Republicans fool voters into voting for them by occasionally giving tax cuts while expanding spending on everything else and growing the regulatory state.
Well, a Third Party is a well-known dead end, so the path is taking over/back the existing Republican Party.
Unless you’d prefer to make a try at reforming the Democrats.
There’s nothing to take back, as I outlined above. There’s nothing to take over, as the party made very clear to Donald Trump. I don’t look at things surface level. I’m never voting for a Republican again after how cowardly they acted in 2020. They better give me a damn good reason to vote for them, and I hope they get destroyed at the polls until they do. I’d much rather Democrats drive the country over the cliff at 100 mph than Republicans doing the exact same thing at 80.
And a similar sentiment is behind my attitude that I’m okay with Biden actually winning, IF IT’S REAL, because if that’s what people really want, they deserve to get it, good and hard. But I’m not willing to just believe that Biden won simply because the left tells me he did.
[Apologies, wrong thread.]
Member of Congress never lose their place for spending other peoples money
I’m not sure how popular it will be, but this essay at American Greatness by Angelo Codevilla seems appropriate here on the topic of inaction.
And . . .
And . . .
I think it is one or more of three possibilities. One is that they are in favor of pulling up the ladder behind them now that they have gotten success. The second is that many who are rich feel that they got there via luck to a certain extent and thus want to expiate some guilt that they feel for their success. Lastly, some just want to put on an appearance of being a philanthropist to deflect criticism.
Not all, but many who are successful and accumulate significant wealth as a result do so with a less than circumspect view of it. Think Mark Zuckerberg here. Despite their creation of this wealth, they view the system as finite and, once atop, then look to protect themselves.
So you have Zuck buying up his competition and getting in bed with the party that wants to control who wins and loses, rather than the one that espouses the principles that made his wealth possible.
Anyhow, a lot of people are the same. Others understand the creation and destruction cycle and are fine with it. Zuck and his cohorts want to halt that because they’re afraid of being replaced. It all boils down to insecurity.
I love this post just for the title. Now, I’ll go and read it and all of the comments. I hope I won’t be disappointed.
How many years was it into his administration before Trump let it slip? At one point he said, “I think I’m getting a handle on this now“, or words to that effect. The old boy had no idea what he was in for when he took office. And I think he was more bluster than balls. I wish that had not been the case.
There’s only 14 now, so no matter what, you can’t be TOO disappointed.
He still had more balls than any before him at least since Reagan, and maybe including Reagan too since his opposition was much less… unhinged, is all I can think of.
I can’t really disagree. It was amazing how many of the GOPe could stand upright and walk without benefit of a spine.
Polls say that The Orange One would beat Heels-Up by five points in a 2024 matchup. Gives me some hope. I think that Trump learned a lot in his time in office. Second go ’round would be really entertaining.
Maybe they like the restaurants in D.C. better than in rural Illinois. And figured out they can get a plumb lobbying assignment if they lose an election.
Or a daily cable TV show like Joe Scarborough.
Tolbert was hard to dislike but he was a Chamber of Commerce Republican.
Richard, there is a very easy answer to your question. The answer is, Washington DC is toxic for anyone who stays there a year or more. Any member of Congress or Senator, of any political persuasion, is drawn into the DC culture, and it becomes nearly impossible to extricate oneself from that culture. The culture of adulation for any politician, fancy cocktail parties, the world’s best fringe benefits including juicy pension, press access, lobbyist attention (including free meals and other gifts), and obviously the power to spend other people’s money, is a culture that eats away at anyone’s principles. The fact that the incumbent in any position is nearly always guaranteed re-election makes it even worse. Since there are no term limits for either house, any incumbent who wants to stay, can stay, and they know that they will never have to do any productive work for the rest of their lives. It’s really easy to forget who sent you there, and just keep doing what you have been doing, forever. There are no effective downsides, as long as any indiscretions are kept quiet. All the downsides fall on the public, who normally are very far away.
Polls don’t matter. If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that The Swamp will do anything and everything to protect its power, including clouding an election and crippling our economy. Trump would need to win by 30 points in order to be declared the victor.
I doubt that anyone is truly ready to be President, but Trump was uniquely unready. He actually believed in two fantasies that only one he was finally disabused of.
The first one was that once he was elected President that he would be able to enact the policies that he ran on and the gov’t would faithfully enact his wishes. He truly felt that when he told an agency to do something that the agency would actually do it. He never understood, even to the end, that the bureaucracy not only didn’t support him, they actively undermined him at every step of the way. Those of us that follow the shenanigans of the bureaucracy have always known that the bureaucrats have never supported GOP Presidents. They just slow walk every reform or change until a Democrat gets into power and then they go like gangbusters to enact those policies.
The second fantasy that he held, and did learn better after a while, was that the Democrats would work with him on things that they wanted and he was OK with. He learned after the first year in office that not only were the Democrats not willing to work with him, the GOP undermined him at every turn as well. One has only to look at how Speaker Ryan refused to allow any of Trump’s agenda to make it to the floor of the House and the only legislation that they enacted was a tax cut as opposed to the core things that Trump campaigned on.
Too painfully but exactly on point.
My take: fully 40-50% of R office holders ran to ‘do something’ which inevitably means increasing the size and scope of government. Of the rest, some want to make actual cuts and/or return to the limits of the U.S. Constitution, maybe 10-20%. The rest are there for the prestige and perks. And that’s in the ‘Conservative’ party. The numbers are much, much worse in the ‘Liberal’ party. I blame the voters for allowing this situation to develop through inattention and inactivity. Or maybe the majority of them like it this way?
The first paragraph is consistent with what Limbaugh said about Trump’s expectations. It is disappointing that he took so long to realize it. The second paragraph explains why many of us have nothing but contempt for the GOPe.
You bring up a very good point. In the early 60s I think Art Linkletter had a boy on who surprisingly said that he didn’t want to be president; he said it was too much responsibility. Art was so impressed he gave him a prize of $10, I think. Back then the common perception was that anyone could become president, any wholesome, hard-working, good kid could achieve and rise to the highest, most responsible position in the country. But this was a time before virtually no one had to have an accountant or a computer program for their personal income taxes.
Now, every president needs trusted and experienced,
entrenchedestablishment advisors to know how to play the system, and the system is stronger than any one man and his administration. Look at the DIA. If reports can be believed, the Chinese defector knew enough, with enough specificity, about government corruption that he only trusted the DIA for his safety, and the DIA couldn’t trust any other agency to keep a secret or to not thwart and undermine their investigation.Talk about conspiracies, the Swamp, and naivete.
Yes, and it remains to be seen if the GOP ever learns from this. I was reading an article elsewhere that was talking about how the working class, long a Dem base, is now moving towards the GOP. Alas, way too many of the GOP don’t want them.
I doubt it. The GOPe and the NT scum can go fornicate themselves as far as I’m concerned. They shafted the TEA Party and Trump voters, but what goes around comes around eventually. In case none of them have noticed, Trump hasn’t gone away.
and more of the GOP — Not the GOPe — seems to follow Trump’s lead:
Alaska GOP Joins President Trump and Endorses Senate Challenger Tshibaka Over Incumbent Murkowski (thegatewaypundit.com)
Murkowski is like a bad penny. Or Kevin Costner’s character in Waterworld as described by Dennis Hopper’s…like a turn that just won’t flush.