Kustra: Hold Republicans on the ballot accountable for Trump’s failed presidency

The die has been cast as far as my vote this November. I cast my absentee ballot and did not vote for one Republican on the ballot, which is saying something for a guy who spent 18 years on the ballot as a Republican officeholder, who served as a Dole delegate at one national Republican convention and who worked for a Republican United States senator.

It’s not as though I didn’t give any thought to what some might consider a more thoughtful or judicious way of selecting your candidates for office. Even the most partisan among us must admit there are moments in the electoral process when an office-seeker from the opposite party is more qualified than their party’s candidate. In fact, I cruised down the ballot office by office trying to find a reason to vote for a Republican this year, but the words of George Will, once the conscience of conservatives in the Republican Party, grew louder and louder. Will accused the party of descending into a cult with congressional Republican loyalty-as-lobotomy. Those words certainly apply to the four Trump Republicans Idaho sends to Washington.

I simply could not find a Republican on my ballot who questioned the conduct and the record of a president who has taken the party to a very dark place in our politics today. What our country needs now is a reconfiguration of Republican Party ideals and values that served it so well in the last century. This reconfiguration will not occur from the top down with a few party chieftains in Washington on the day after the November election charting a new course for their party. Instead, it must be a groundswell effort where state and local Republican officeholders and their supporters call for a wider tent to reclaim Republicans who deserted the party in recent years.

You need not venture far back in American history to be reminded of what Republicans stood for just a few years ago. They were preeminent in calling for a strong national defense with America serving as the global leader modeling democracy and representative government for other nations to emulate. Instead, we have a so-called Republican president who sidles up to dictators, tyrants and autocrats, while key members of his party, Sen. Jim Risch in particular serving as chair of Senate Foreign Relations, chicken out in defense of America’s core values.

It was a time when Republican leadership was not afraid to take on the enemies of freedom and democracy as President Reagan did in the ’80s when he aided and abetted the Polish people in their efforts to throw off the yoke of Soviet Russia that had destroyed individual freedom and basic human rights. President Trump, on the other hand, when he was running for president tweeted about strongman Putin “that it’s not our business to judge his merits, it’s up to the voters of the United States.”

“No, Mr. President, you are the leader of the free world and you have at your disposal the intelligence about Russia’s efforts to undermine democracies across Europe and interfere with our elections here in America.” Trump showed his unwillingness to take on the Russian autocrat when he refused to even mention in a phone call with Putin the New York Times report that a Russian intelligence unit placed bounties on the heads of U.S. troops in Afghanistan — even though the White House had known about the purported payments for many months before the New York Times broke the news on June 26. One source told CNN that the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like “two guys in a steam bath.”

We can only imagine what President Reagan who told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” would have said to Putin if he had been on the call. (Trump would have told Gorbachev how nicely the Berlin Wall matched the bland architecture of East Germany.) But we do know what Sen. Risch had to say about Russian bounties on American soldiers. As Trump’s loyal acolyte, he dismissed the report as though the Lord on high had informed him otherwise.

And therein lies the reason I could not bring myself to vote for any Republicans this election. Only when Republicans up and down the ballot see how their steadfast deference to Trump has marginalized the party will there be some consideration of grounding the party in a more center-right position that welcomes disaffected voters it lost. (Let’s not forget that Trump lost to Hilary Clinton by 3 million popular votes.) It will be tougher for Idaho’s Republicans to see the errors of their ways given how lopsided the party’s control of state and local governments is across the state. But in due course, it will come down to how Idaho’s Republican Party wants to be viewed nationally. Either it returns to some degree of moderate conservatism or it becomes the poster child for extremism and demagoguery, an option it seems to find attractive at this point in time.

Vice President Joe Biden has assembled the most broad-based coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents ever assembled in American history for a presidential election. If this sundry collection of Biden supporters serves their purpose of defeating Trump, Republicans in the coalition will have to find a future political home on the political spectrum. They will return to the party if it comes to its senses and retrieves the values and ideals that Trump and his base have trashed. A reorganized and revitalized Republican Party will acknowledge the reality of a shifting demographic that throws off the yoke of Trumpian politics and considers returning to a bigger tent than that constructed by Trump. The alternative is a Republican Party consigned to irrelevancy and unable to capture key public offices and win majorities in the House and Senate.