Liberal commentator Robert Reich today endorsed the idea of a new Republican Party to save America, with former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney at its head. “Don’t get me wrong,” he writes. “I’m not endorsing Liz Cheney for president. I’ve disagreed with too many of her policy ideas and votes over the years. I’m merely suggesting that it would be good for all of us if she took the reins of a new Republican Party — good for Republicans, good for Democrats, good for democracy, good for America.”
It is clear that today’s Republican party “no longer believes in the values of liberal democracy. It has become a cesspool of authoritarian nihilism,” Reich says. Mitt Romney said it better: “[A] very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” Cheney responded to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that the criminal indictments of former president Donald Trump are politically motivated, saying, “Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party. Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history. Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”
The question is how to save democracy. Many people fear that a third party would take votes away from President Joe Biden Jr. and put Trump back into the White House, and for that reason feel compelled to vote Democrat.
Interestingly, just a few weeks ago, Reich himself took that position. “If candidates from No Labels, the Green Party, and the People’s Party peel off just 15 percent of the anti-Trump vote from Biden, and Trump’s base stays with him, Trump would win all five swing states comfortably and return to the Oval Office,” he wrote. “Voting your conscience”, he said, is “cynical propaganda designed to obscure the reality that any anti-Trump votes they pull away from Biden will only help ensure a Trump victory.”
Former New Hampshire senator Wayne King writes in his Anamaki Chronicles that such thinking is what led Daniel Webster, who strongly opposed the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act, to support it because of his concerns that the Union would not be not strong enough at that time to win a civil war. “Webster felt it was imperative that he buy extra time for the Union before war ensued. He knew that agreeing to a compromise that allowed for the Fugitive Slave Act would be a stain on his legacy, even though Lincoln himself agreed to the compromise.”
Just as the Republican Party has all but formally endorsed Donald Trump for president, the Democratic National Committee is doing everything it can to make sure Joe Biden is the nominee, just as it “used every possible means of underhanded and anti-democratic means to deny the nomination to Bernie [Sanders] back in 2016,” King noted. The DNC has been bullying New Hampshire to give up its first-in-the-nation presidential primary to allow South Carolina to hold the first primary election — not only because it has a more diverse population as it points out but also because South Caroline was the first state to vote for Biden to be president. King writes:
This week, the Democratic National Committee will meet to affirm a new set of “Rules”, nothing with the force of law of course because they have no legal authority. The rules create special categories of delegates that are intended to override and steal the votes from New Hampshire citizens. Joe Biden is expected to “skip” New Hampshire’s primary, but the special delegates to be adopted by the Democratic Party will be able to override any vote of NH citizens. It gives new meaning to the old phrase: “Heads I win. Tails you lose.” Any alternative candidate, no matter how well they do, will find their votes cast for Joe Biden. If you thought the Chicago Convention of 68 was bad, this one could be worse.
This may surprise you: “There is nothing in the constitution or in the main corpus of law that gives either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party any legal authority,” King writes. “If the Federal or State Governments had not — long ago — surrendered the mechanisms for conducting elections — particularly primary elections — to the two major political parties, candidates vying to be the alternative to the chosen candidates of the power brokers in the Democratic and Republican parties would be able to challenge, in the courts, the banana republic tactics currently infecting our election process, and the Federal and State Governments would NEVER be able to get away with the perversion of the process that both the Republican and Democratic parties are engaged in.”
New Hampshire’s primary is, by law, to be the first in the nation. The DNC cannot change that, despite its threats, because it has no legal authority to do so — so it is changing its rules to discount any New Hampshire votes that do not match their desired outcome. That would, indeed, be stealing the election.
Just as it did with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee is working hard to make sure its hand-picked candidate is the one nominated. “Many have argued that it was this behavior that ultimately gave us Donald Trump as our President. However we will never know because there was never a head-to-head election between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump,” King writes.
Matt Taibbi, who has been maligned for engaging in genuine investigative journalism, wrote, “The best time for a serious election with the very best candidates is right now. It is never tomorrow or the next cycle or the cycle after that, and anyone who says as much is propagandizing for a faith, not a politics or program that might actually deliver us from our many demons.”
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