Conservatives are challenging Trump, finding ‘It ain’t easy being Republican’
Now I know how Kermit the Frog feels when he sings “It’s not easy being green.” As a Republican with 18 years of elected office under my belt and sporting that (R) behind my name every time I ran for office, it ain’t easy being a Republican these days. Forgive a reminder that even those who slept through history class know, but the Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, and I logged more rubber chicken dinner speeches celebrating Lincoln’s birthday than Lincoln himself. Fortunately for Lincoln, his party had not yet invented the modern-day Lincoln Day dinner to celebrate his birthday and display how far the party has strayed over the years from Lincoln’s example.
For over three years now, President Trump has taken the Republican Party on a journey that moves the party further and further away from Lincoln. Lincoln preserved the Union and breathed new life into the “United” States of America, while Trump tears apart the political and social fabric that holds this nation together.
When I look back on my decision to join the Republican Party, I think I’m right back where I started. When I served on the staff of the Republican speaker of the House in Springfield, I asked the purpose of the strange telephone hidden away under the speaker’s desk. I was told it was a direct line to Mayor Daley of Chicago.
When the speaker was a Democrat, he took his orders regarding legislation straight from the Chicago Mayor’s office who called on that private telephone line. Add the dictatorial control the Chicago Machine had over the nominating process, placing only loyal and subservient candidates on the ballot and you begin to understand why the terms “boss” and “machine” best described Mayor Daley and his Democratic Party at the time.
That’s why I joined the Republican Party in Illinois after growing up in a Democratic household. The Republican Party seemed a party more open to newcomers and outsiders, and I qualified as both, coming from the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. The Republican Party at the time engaged citizens in the political process and did not allow political bosses in Chicago to ordain election outcomes and legislative decisions in the state Legislature.
Fast forward to Trump’s three years in office and his record strikes me as strangely reminiscent of the Daley Machine. Daley had autocratic control over members of his party, and no one strayed from a party line vote if she was interested in getting re-elected. Whether it’s Trump’s infatuation with Putin or Kim, his betrayal of Kurdish fighters in Syria, his inhumane border policies that separates babies and children from their parents, his tax cuts on corporations that will push the federal deficit to a trillion dollars over the next decade or his interference with military discipline decisions, most Republican officeholders have rushed to his defense like lemmings to the sea.
Just as Mayor Daley was giving orders to his Democrat legislators from the telephone under the speaker’s desk, Trump was recently tweeting orders on how to question the witnesses to his House Republicans during the recent impeachment hearings.
There were a few independent Democrats who survived Mayor Daley’s efforts to throw them out of office, and there are Republicans today who, like Kermit having to bear the weight of being green, find it ain’t easy being Republican. But that hasn’t stopped them from speaking out.
There is an impressive list of conservative thinkers and politicians who now question how so many Republican officeholders can ignore Trump’s abuses of power. Those willing to speak out include former Ohio Republican Governor and Congressman John Kasich whose conservative pedigree was well-established in Congress. Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld exercised his dissatisfaction with the party by announcing as a Republican candidate for president in 2020. Republican Congressman Justin Amash actually left the party, claiming that “party leaders distract and divide the public by exploiting wedge issues and waging pointless messaging wars that…fuel mistrust and anger.”
A group of lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society, including Tom Ridge, former Republican governor of Pennsylvania and secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, urged fellow conservatives to speak up about what they described as Trump’s betrayals of “bedrock legal norms.” In the words of John B. Bellinger III, a top State Department and White House lawyer under Bush, “conservative lawyers are not doing enough to protect constitutional principles that are being undermined by the statements and actions of this president.”
Tom Nichols, who teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy and quit the Republican Party, is one of the Trump Republicans’ fiercest conservative critics, accusing congressional Republicans of having sold their souls in fear of the dreaded primary. And the preeminent icon of the conservative movement in America, George Will, quit the party in 2016 when it became apparent Trump would be the Republican nominee. Since then, he has warned Republican lawmakers that if they don’t stand up to Trump, they deserve to lose everything in next year’s election.
Then there’s Charlie Sykes, the conservative talk show host, Bill Kristol, the neoconservative, former Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and Congressman Will Hurd, all of whom are outspoken critics of Trump. And there’s more.
As for my party affiliation, it has come full circle. I now find myself in a party that looks so much like the party I fled years ago when its slavish devotion to Machine politics allowed for little diversity of thought and opinion. A state where the congressional delegation takes a pass when asked to comment on a president who has made a mockery of our constitutional system and debased our culture in ways that might make it impossible to heal and recover.
Kermit, I know how you feel.