Vote against the GOP this November, by George Will
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.
The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers . They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.
Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for his life. When Richard Rich, whom More had once mentored, commits perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for Wales, More says: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!” Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the service of a president pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.
Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it. As explained in Federalist 51 : “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Congressional Republicans (congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents) have no higher ambition than to placate this president. By leaving dormant the powers inherent in their institution, they vitiate the Constitution’s vital principle: the separation of powers.
Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring , became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices. Corker’s measure would have required Congress to vote to approve any trade restrictions imposed in the name of “national security.” All Senate Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance and true to the Constitution’s structure. But the Senate would not vote on it — would not allow it to become just the second amendment voted on this year .
This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president. The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control.
The Trump whisperer regarding immigration is Stephen Miller, 32, whose ascent to eminence began when he became the Savonarola of Santa Monica High School . Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign official who fell from the king’s grace but is crawling back (he works for Vice President Pence’s political action committee), recently responded on Fox News to the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome taken from her parents at the border. Lewandowski replied: “Wah, wah.” Meaningless noise is this administration’s appropriate libretto because, just as a magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.
In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.
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Rah rah rah sis boom ba!
Come on people vote Democrat for :
Higher taxes
More illegal immigrants to drive wages down
A peeping Tom in every ladies room!
George Will has better words -
Conservatism is overrated and has seen its day. Pragmatic and common sense Republicanism is taking over. They can't win without us.
Unfortunately if so many cons did not want to try to turn back time they would make more sense. The world has changed. Many conservatives never will.
IMO: Neither ideology is that damn great. So I dont adhere to either. IMO: Most people who are either far left OR far right wing are not dealing with reality and I dont subscribe to non reality much. So I dont give them much credence.
to each their own
?
Will is very conservative. Even as he recognizes that the nation needs the end of Trumpism, he feels obligated to explain how voting against the GOP wouldn't put the Dems in power...
George Will just turned 77. Sounds like dementia is setting in.
This is personal spite from a man who just endorsed Clinton supporter William Weld, apparently because he's the 19th Weld to go to Harvard or something like that. Will's conservatism apparently consists of betraying your supposed ideology to support the right kind of person (old money WASP) who won't offend his sensibilities.
For actual conservatives, the problem isn't congress whose bills they've passed are generally conservative in nature. Trump's mouth is a bigger problem. How making Nancy Pelosi speaker will help that issue is beyond me. And if conservatives take his advice, the people who lose will not be MAGA Trump supporters, it will be the moderate Rubio types and actual conservatives like Ted Cruz.
And what have the Democrats offered to attract Conservatives? Nothing, just more extreme leftism.
So Will essentially wants Conservatives to sit at home and ensure nothing Conservative passes Congress, no judges are confirmed and the halls of Congress are cleared of Conservatives and moderates to be replaced by extremist left wingers in exchange for gaining absolutely nothing?
What a profoundly stupid idea. If you don't like Trump, don't vote for him. But for Will to advocate punishing those who he purports to agree with because of his personal distaste for Trump is moronic and juvenile.
Will is so consumed with anti-Trump hate that he now spends his time being patted on the back by marxists statists on the leftist news programs.
he is devoid of reason
"What luck for governments that the people are stupid." Adolf Hitler.
And Trump has proclaimed a 'red wave.'
Looks like the Russians will be hacking the voting machines again soon then.
Paper ballots, pencils and observers from different parties and there is no hacking or hanging chads (?) to worry about - Canada has no problem at all in a federal election - universal consistency of method across the country. Using computers and internet is just BEGGING for interference.
We didn't have a problem when we had that kind of voting materials either. Kinda hard to hack a pencil
They hack them again. They never hacked them in the first place .
Wrong. Not true, even though you like to think so.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems, top U.S. official says
Jeanette Manfra, head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security.
The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.
In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra , the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.
Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions , said, "2016 was a wake-up call and now it's incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again."
Source:
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Report: Russia probed at least 7 states’ voter systems before the 2016 election
Federal and state officials say there is no evidence votes were changed
Federal officials reportedly concluded by January 2017 that Russians probed election infrastructure in Illinois, Texas, Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, and Wisconsin.
Federal and state officials say they have no evidence to suggest that these Russian intrusions into voter databases or systems changed or altered the outcome of any votes.
But the alleged intrusions are a troubling sign that, without proper defenses, bad actors won’t be deterred from trying again in 2018 or beyond.
Source:
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Do some research before you make foolish comments.
And who was President at that time and what was he doing about it? Didn't I hear somewhere that the order was given to stand down on the Russian Investigation at that time?
You know, the two most important sentences in that comment were:
And furthermore I do agree with Obama in this case, but a candidate can be exonerated for committing a felony and not having that peaceful transfer of power he and Hillary were so fond of reminding us that's what Americans do, only third world countries don't.
I would suggest you take some time and read some of the so-called ads on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I've read over a hundred of them and I ran into many duplicates, so I expect the 3500 or so would only amount to a couple of thousand at the most and everyone I saw was designed to cause racial divide, not favoring Trump any more that favoring Hillary. And almost all the money was spent on them after the election.
My comment was about Russian hacking. Regardless who was in charge then, what is Trump doing about the possible hacking now? That's what's important. Playing rabid politics of "who did it" isn't as important as "who will fix it." And if Trump can't fix it now, then he is no better than Obama was then.
THAT is what is important now with the mid-terms just around the corner, not your useless political blame game. And as so far your Trump has done little to protect our voting system from Russian hacking himself, and protecting out voting system should be one of his top priorities. So that makes him no better than Obama at this point.
Physically impossible because voting machines are not connected to the Internet. The databases are what were supposedly hacked. Word has it that the Russians have invented "ghost" algorithms that can actually change votes in sealed paper ballots. Has something to do with the chemistry of the ink in the ball point pens. It is not in the president's job description to fix alleged jacking problems with Internet web sites, that's a job for law enforcement.
You don't know much about voting systems, do you?
Why do write things that obviously aren't true? .
Federal and state officials say there is no evidence votes were changed
That is from your post.