Tag Archives: political parties

Mindset

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The problem is laid out early in the Wall Street Journal article:

Republicans are playing defense in Ohio and a growing number of other red states….

No. Republicans should not be playing defense anywhere, but especially not in the so-called battleground constituencies. That’s a purely reactive mindset and behavior, and it meekly surrenders the initiative to the Progressive-Democrats.

Republican candidates should be out among their constituents and among heretofore Progressive-Democrat Party constituencies and among areas where voters are typically undecided or are uncommitted to one party or the other. They should be talking about their own policies in concrete, measurable terms, and they should be talking similarly about their particular Progressive-Democrat opponent’s policies, where that one has any, and about the utter lack of policy beyond Never Trump ideology where that Progressive-Democrat candidate has nothing else on offer. In talking about those two sets of policies or about policy vs Never Trump, Republicans should be emphasizing both those differences and the failures of those Progressive-Democrat positions.

In particular, Ohio Republican Senate candidate Jon Husted should be talking about his specific policy successes and comparing those to what Progressive-Democrat candidate Sherrod Brown has on offer—a prior three-term record of progressive taxing and spending with nothing accomplished for the benefit of Ohio’s workers, steelworkers included. Just money taken out of Ohio citizens’ pockets and wasted.

But that’s not enough by itself. Mid-term elections are characterized by Progressive-Democratic Party voters coming out in droves while Republican voters sit on their couches in the supposed comfort of their homes. Republican candidates need to be encouraging those voters to get out and vote. They can best do this by explicitly and repeatedly urging them to go vote and by showing how their own policies best support the needs and wants of those voters.

There’s more required, though. Those Republican voters need actually to bestir themselves to vote. They shouldn’t be waiting to be told; they should be acting on their own initiative. Republican voters need to understand that every decision to not bother to vote is an active decision to favor the Progressive-Democrat candidate with their non-vote.

In the end, Republicans need to be forcing Progressive-Democrat candidates to react to their initiatives, always and everywhere. If they don’t, they’ll lose this election in both houses of Congress, the Presidential election in ’28, and for elections to come for generations.

Pick One, Ace

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) had this to say on the Supreme Court’s nearly total elimination of racist racial gerrymandering with its Louisiana v Callais ruling:

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities. And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

Our voting rules can explicitly favor one group of American voters over other groups of American voters, which favoring can come only at the direct expense of those others, explicitly deprecating those voters’ votes as such favoritism does.

Or our voting rules can, finally, recognize that all American voters are just that—American voters—and so entirely equal under law, even voting law.

As Obama said as the Democratic Party’s keynote speaker at its 2004 National Convention,

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

That includes voters in America.

This sort of duplicity is all too typical of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

Dangerously Naïve Assumption

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Matthew Continetti, in his Free Expression piece, had this early on:

Yet Democrats are looking at the wrong maps. They’re winning the gerrymander battle while losing the larger war for America’s future. Their state machines produce Democratic victories, but from a shrinking base. Their populations are fleeing high taxes and housing shortages for Republican strongholds. Nor are Democrats prepared for 2030, when the decennial census will realign national politics toward the GOP-friendly South.

As Continetti noted,

House Minority Leader Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) threatened retaliation and summed up his party’s philosophy: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

But he missed the implications of that, and that miss falsifies his underlying assumption that the Census Bureau count and subsequent House Representatives reallocation will occur in the normal fashion. That’s a dangerous miss, but he’s not alone in making that naïve assumption. No one in the press is thinking about the effect on the Census Bureau of Progressive-Democratic Party victories in the next two elections.

When the Progressive-Democrats gain control of the House and possibly the Senate after the 2026 elections, retain House control and retain or gain the majority in the Senate while winning the White House in the 2028 elections, this is what Party will do. First, it will use its Senate majority, possibly as early as January 2027, to gain outright control of the Senate by eliminating the filibuster altogether. That’ll be bad enough, devolving us from the liberty-preserving republican democracy of our present government structure to the tyranny of popular democracy.

Next, they’ll rescind any requirement for voters to show ID in order to vote, and they’ll lift restrictions on who is allowed to cross our border and under what conditions. To prevent States like Texas from doing their own border enforcement, they’ll pack the Supreme Court in order to get the judicial rulings they want regarding immigration and voting rights.

Finally, they’ll use all of that to cement for generations Party control over the popular democracy they will have created: they’ll alter the rules of counting the Census Bureau is required to use to prevent just that Representative reallocation in order create and preserve their Electoral College advantage.

There’s one more step that will put a big, blue bow on it. Many of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States are making agreements among themselves to have each State award its Electoral College votes to the Presidential candidate that wins the national-level popular vote. Interstate agreements or compacts are illegal without explicit Congressional approval of each agreement or compact attempted, per our Constitution’s Art I, Sect 10, Clause 3. The Party-run Congress will promptly approve those agreements.

Our nation faces nation-defining elections in 2026 and 2028. The futures of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren depend on the outcomes of those elections.

What are they Going to Do about It?

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The Wall Street Journal opened its house editorial with this:

The gerrymander race to the bottom escalated on Tuesday as Democrats in Virginia won a narrow victory to redraw their state map to add as many as four Democratic House seats. This is bad news for GOP control of the House in November, but Republicans can also blame President Trump for starting this rolling rock that has now come down on their heads.

Say that’s true—and it likely is. It’s also true, though, that Texas was pressured by the courts to redraw its Congressional district maps because, those courts had decided, the then-just-drawn map was overly racially gerrymandered. However, the State’s Republican-led legislature didn’t need to redraw its map the way it did, if the goal was only to correct a court-claimed racial mistake.

At bottom, though, the question is, So what? This is where the Republicans are, regardless of how they got here.

What are they going to do about it? Wasting time, energy, and resources pointing fingers is time, energy, and resources they should be putting into unifying their party and dealing constructively with the situation—national as well as local—as it is. That begins with individual candidates getting out among their constituents, Left, Right, and Center, and talking directly to them about the candidates’ concrete policies and how those are better than the Progressive-Democrats’ and how each Republican candidate’s policies will directly benefit each set of constituents.

We Win the Elections

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Bruce Gilley, Portland State University Professor of Political Science and New College of Florida Presidential Scholar in Residence, asked an important question in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

What Do Democrats Mean by “Democracy?”

Then he answered his question:

What Democrats and leftist activists mean by a “transition to democracy” is a transition to permanent Democratic Party rule.

He’s right, except for one misconception: the Democratic Party no longer exists; it has been replaced by the Progressive-Democratic Party, whose adherents subscribe lock, stock, and barrel to the basic tenets of the founders of the modern Progressive movement. Those tenets are, first, the nationalization of our economy, from Teddy Roosevelt’s effort to nationalize one-sixth of our then national economy, our railroads, through Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to seize all of our factories east of the Mississippi to force them to produce what he wanted produced in the amounts and at the prices he wanted, to Harry Truman’s attempt to seize our iron industry because he didn’t like the way a strike was going, to Barack Obama’s successful nationalization of one-sixth of today’s economy, our health care provision and health care coverage industries.

The second Progressive tenet is the utter racism of the movement, from Wilson’s rank consideration of blacks to be intrinsically inferior and thus needing the “protections” of segregation, Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to integrate our military, through to today’s Party and Leftist supporters demand for special treatment of blacks and women, ostensibly to make up for past wrongs inflicted on them, but really an acting out of Party’s and Leftists’ belief that blacks and women are intrinsically incapable of competing in our economy without special treatment, and through also, to Party’s and Leftists’ identity politics which is overtly racist and sexist.

The third tenet is Party’s utter contempt for us average Americans, from Herb Croly’s bland statement that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat, to Progressive-Democrat politicians dismissing the Tea Party movement as Astroturfers and as just bitter Bible-toting and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country to be disregarded, to a Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate dismissing millions of us as irredeemable and deplorable, to a Progressive-Democratic Party President averring that 15% of us are just no good.

Thus: what the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians mean by democracy is, indeed, straightforward: “We win elections and run the country our way.” This is empirically demonstrated over the last few years by Party routinely shutting down our government every time its politicians can’t get their way through elections or otherwise politically while being the minority party in the Senate.

Party politicians’ promise—not threat—to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster ranks right up there as concrete demonstration of their definition. They know full well, that eliminating the filibuster will destroy the republican democracy structure of our government and replace it with the tyranny of popular democracy, with them in charge. That destruction is not a bug in their ideology; it’s the end game.