The Republican editorial board of the Dallas Morning News recently wrote a scathing editorial about Donald Trump. According to the board, Trump is no Republican. Of course such a bold stance from a newspaper that has endorsed Republican Presidential candidates since 1964 immediately lit up the social media.
But if the DMN should use the same standard for judging the Texas Republican Party on some levels, it is not Republican either. Far right wing tea party authoritarians and Christian fundamentalist extremists are a more likely description of the former Party of Lincoln.
What is a Republican these days? According to the Dallas Morning News:
What does it mean to be a Republican?
For generations, the answer had been clear: A belief in individual liberty. Free markets. Strong national defense.
Individual liberty, heh? For whom? I will address this issue below.
Trump is — or has been — at odds with nearly every GOP ideal this newspaper holds dear.
I am sorry editorial board but Donald Trump is screaming out loud what your precious Party has been whispering behind closed doors since President Richard Nixon (good ol’ Tricky Dick) and his Southern Strategy. Later the Party ushered in Lee Atwater and divisive, scorched earth politics of hatred and fear. Karl Rove and the W./Cheney administration elevated this filthy form of politics to an art form. Karl Rove started whisper campaigns in the South about the then 2000 primary Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. He had a “brown” baby.
W., an entitled draft evader, (the National Guard didn’t serve in combat overseas during the Vietnam War. The wealthy and influential could park there sons there at the time.) smeared the reputation of a decorated war veteran in 2004 who did serve in Vietnam. It’s called the Swift Boating of 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry. W. got away with the hit job. And, as we know, G.W. Bush turned out to be the one of the worst POTUS in recent U.S. history. His policies helped to wipe out our economy in 2007. Not to mention the debacle called Iraq. But conservative newspaper editorial boards, across the U.S., endorsed W. the Worst.
Twice.
Individual liberty? Trump has displayed an authoritarian streak that should horrify limited-government advocates. This impulsive, unbridled New York real estate billionaire and reality-TV star wants to deport people who were born in the U.S. and don't meet his standard for loyalty. He has proposed banning all Muslims from entering the country, even those escaping Islamist rule, and won't rule out creating a database of Muslims already living here.
His open admiration of Russia's Vladimir Putin is alarming.
Authoritarian love birds. Republican Trump and Putin. Loving the leather, money, power and oppression.
What’s new about a Republican love affair with Vladimir Putin? 2008 Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin admired Putin because he drilled for oil while wrestling with bears, according to her. She trashed President Obama for his “limpness” and “weakness” compared to the authoritarian communist dictator.
Let’s not be too sanctimonious about deporting “others,” either. Texas will spend over $1 billion to keep brown people from crossing the state’s Southern border. Meanwhile the state’s public schools are woefully underfunded. They rank close to the bottom of the pile nationwide. That and Texas has the highest number of uninsured and sick residents because the Texas Republican Party hates President Obama and Obamacare more than it cares about the people for whom they took an oath to serve.
There’s plenty of hatred all around for Muslims, too, among the Texas GOP. Governor Greg Abbott recently declared that Texas will not accept Syrian refugees no matter how desperate. Nor does it matter that all refugees have to undergo a rigorous, two year vetting process. Of course the Governor does not have the authority to prohibit refugees but Greg Abbott never misses the opportunity to throw red meat to his right wing hate base.
Let’s not forget, either, that Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz threatened to carpet bomb the Islamic State if he were to be elected President. It’s impossible to protect civilians when blowing up an entire region. Ted Cruz didn’t seem to take innocent Muslims, including children, into consideration in his chest beating warmongering.
During the 2012 Presidential election, Republicans running for U.S. office in Houston (specifically in U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s district) distributed flyers that warned President Obama would bring Sharia law to Texas. (A Christian form of it is already here, compliments of the Texas Taliban, far right Christian fundamentalists, who try to replace science with biblical stories in school textbooks.)
Moving along to the belief in free markets.
Free markets? Economic conservatism? Ronald Reagan once said that "protectionism is destructionism." Trump, on the other hand, has called the Trans-Pacific Partnership "a rape of our country."
Ah, yes. St. Ronald Reagan. The President who used “welfare queens” as a ruse to decimate the middle class. Reagan’s former Budget Director, David Stockman admitted that trickle down economics, is nothing more than a trojan horse for tax cuts for the rich. It is a myth that tax cuts will float all boats. In fact, the opposite is true. The Texas GOP embraces all of Reagan’s cynical endeavors that favored the 1-2% while punishing the less wealthy.
Now, let’s explore individual liberties as they stand in Texas.
The Texas Republican lawmakers embrace individual liberties for those who look and think like they do. If one should be an economically disadvantaged woman, a person of color or any kind of minority, rights and freedoms are constantly under attack. The Texas Anti-Abortion Law and the state’s Voter ID Law prove this point. These laws were so extreme that a federal court and the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down both.
One of the most conservative courts in the U.S., the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled the Voter ID Law as a violation of voting rights. In 2014 the Texas GOP Jim Crow law robbed over 600,000 registered voters of their right to vote. How’s that for individual liberty? Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton tried to mask this bigoted effort with fairy tales about rampant voter fraud in Texas.
A lower court judge found that about 608,000 registered voters in Texas lacked the types of identification required by the law, and that a disproportionate number were black or Hispanic. The judge based that finding on testimony and data presented by experts during a 2014 trial in Corpus Christi. Texas’ lawyers disputed that figure.
In its ruling, the Fifth Circuit asked a lower court judge to come up with a remedy that “disrupts voter identification rules for the 2016 election season as little as possible, yet eliminates” the law’s discriminatory effect on minority voters. One possible solution, the court noted, would be to allow voter-registration cards to be used as identification. The court also instructed the judge to re-evaluate the evidence about whether the Texas Legislature intentionally discriminated against blacks and Hispanics, but encouraged the judge to wait until after the November election.
You bet the Texas Legislature did intentionally discriminate against black and Hispanic voters. The reason I know this is because Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Paxton and Republican lawmakers have been busted again, soon after the Court’s ruling. Instead of educating voters about their rights, the Party is attempting to mislead and intimidate voters instead. The white authoritarian men never give up.
The Obama administration is accusing Texas of undermining a federal court order that softened the state's voter ID law by releasing "misleading" and "restrictive" information to voters and polls workers ahead of November's election.
In a Tuesday filing, the U.S. Department of Justice says Texas officials have used press releases, a state website and training documents for election officials to narrow "dramatically the scope of voters protected" under an order signed last month by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos.
The DOJ is asking Ramos to force Texas to "issue corrections" to already-published materials, change the wording of public education and poll worker information moving forward and to ensure television and radio ads "accurately reflect the text of the Remedial Order."
As a volunteer for the Harris Co. (Houston area) Democratic Party who works the phones on election days I can already foresee the confusion among voters in November. Fortunately we have several weeks until early voting to educate our Party’s base.
The Texas GOP also lost in its efforts to all but outright ban abortions in the state. The law did indeed severely limit abortions for economically disadvantaged women who live in rural areas. When the state ran Planned Parenthood out on a rail, affordable access to women’s healthcare in many rural areas left with it.
Fortunately Supreme Court threw out the unforgiving Texas abortion law access. Abortion is legal in this country but the Texas Republican Party ignored the fact. It reverted instead to a fundamentalist Christian belief system that opposes abortion for religious reasons. The anti-abortion law robbed thousands of women of their right to a legal procedure. Perhaps the Court should rule that the Party must make financial reparations to these women.
Knowing what we know about the Texas Republican Party given its 50+ years of dog whistles as well as its bigoted, relentless attempts to punish people of color, the impoverished and the sick by robbing them of their individual liberties, opportunities and legal procedures, is the Party still one of Lincoln?
I’d say absolutely not. The Texas Republican Party has instead plummeted to the level of far right authoritarian zealots and Christian fundamentalist extremists. Donald Trump is this Party’s perfect Presidential candidate. Indeed, Rick Perry and Greg Abbott have wholeheartedly endorsed Trump. Birds of a feather will flock together.
