Last week, retired conservative federal appeals court judge Michael Luttig said that there is no Republican Party. He added that the political parties are the guardians of democracy and without them both our democracy is in great peril.
Asked why he believed that there wasn’t a Republican Party, Luttig told a CNN interviewer that, “Today there is no such shared set of beliefs and values and principles, or even policy views, within the Republican Party for America … Until or unless the Republican Party can pull itself together into a credible Republican political party, we simply don’t have two competing parties in America.” (READ MORE: Why Is Trump Popular? It’s More Than Class Struggle)
Luttig isn’t just another grumpy old guy wishing for the return of Ronald Reagan. His powerful conservative intellect was demonstrated in fifteen years on the bench of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The question he raises about the disunity of beliefs, values, and principles among Republicans is exactly correct. It’s a question to which the Republican establishment has no answer.
Luttig is an opponent of former president Donald Trump. He’s said that Republicans were “spineless” for marching in lockstep behind Trump.
The Republican Party is, indeed, split into several factions, none of which agree with any other. Among them are the MAGA-Trumpers, the never-Trumpers, and many — perhaps a majority — of others such as myself who will vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee for president not because he’s a good choice but only because he’s light years better than Joe Biden. (RELATED: Republicans Win Presidency! Expand House Majority! Regain Senate!)
You’ve noticed by now that it’s all about Trump. Trump is the center of the Republican universe because he and his supporters have created what the Chinese used to call a “cult of personality” around him.
The Trump cultists, and Trump himself, insist that people have unquestioned loyalty to him and no one else. That insistence precludes any debate about Trump’s policies, values, and beliefs.
Conservatives have principles which the Republican Party honors mostly by violating them. We believe in peace through strength and correct identification of our enemies. We believe in a small government that taxes the least necessary to perform its Constitutional functions and little else.
In the simplest terms conservatives believe generally that the government should defend the nation, deliver the mail, and otherwise get the hell out of our lives.
We’ve gone through an era of neocons, who want to intervene militarily almost everywhere. We have also — before, during, and after the neocons — gone through times of “big government conservatives,” as if there were such a thing.
We’re now a bit less than two weeks before the first Republican primary debate on August 23. That debate should be a showcase for us to see what Trump and his challengers have to say that would make them the best choice to oppose Biden next fall. But we won’t.
The Republican National Committee has made the promise to support the party’s eventual nominee a condition to eligibility for the debate. Trump won’t sign up to that. Chris Christie — who is in the race to out-insult Trump — has said he’d make the promise but won’t really mean it. Trump may do the same, but he may also refuse to appear, so we may be left with a contest between also-rans.
The debate — whether or not Trump appears — will be all about Trump, not about the mess Biden has made of our economy, our borders, our crime-ridden cities, and our military. Most of the questions will involve Trump, not Biden. There will be questions about how Trump could govern with three (soon to be four) indictments against him. And that’s entirely wrong.
Republicans should be able to unite around the themes of the damage Biden has done to our nation.
Yes, the indictments of Trump are election interference designed to prevent him from campaigning. But — as this column has stated — the classified documents case against Trump is so strong that he will probably not beat the rap.
There are very few people who haven’t made up their minds about Trump. The Trump cultists will always support him regardless of what he says or does, even if he is convicted. And there are many more American voters who simply hate Trump.
Republicans should be able to unite around the themes of the damage Biden has done to our nation. As James Carville’s famous sign during the first Clinton campaign, said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
“Bidenomics” is a disaster, his reckless spending being the proximate cause of the inflation and high interest rates every American family suffers. Biden’s open borders have let about seven million illegal aliens into the country which further burdens our economy.
Biden is, with glaring clarity, mentally deficient to a degree that he cannot serve as president now, far less in the future. The evidence of his, and his family’s, corruption is reason enough to deny him another term as president.
Biden abandoned hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies in his abrupt withdrawal which cost the lives of 13 US troops and left billions of military equipment to the Taliban.
Biden and Soros-backed local prosecutors and mayors have rendered our cities crime-ridden places that no one should have to live in. Former vice president Mike Pence should be asked whether he sticks by his statement that our cities weren’t his concern.
Biden has injected a “wokeness” into our military that will take decades to get rid of. It is essential that we do because Biden’s policies have made our military unready to fight. He has drawn down our military arsenal of weapons to benefit Ukraine to the degree that will take almost a decade to bring up to snuff and Biden is doing too little to accomplish that.
Biden has also drawn so much oil out of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve — solely to depress the price of gasoline for his political benefit — that it may never recover. It’s down to about thirty-eight percent of what it was twenty years ago, not enough to sustain us for very long if our oil supply was embargoed as it was in the early 1970s.
Those issues, and Biden’s other disastrous failures, should be the focus of the entire Republican 2024 campaign. These matters are what Republicans should focus on to unify the Republican Party and make it — as Luttig said — a real political party again. They should be the focus of the August debate but they won’t be because it’ll all be about Trump.
There are a few good conservatives, such as Sen. Tim Scott, who may try to refocus the debate on Biden where it belongs. But even with the Fox News panel moderating the debate, that will almost certainly fail.
To unify Republicans and conservatives — and the difference between them is quite real — the focus of the August debate and every one after it should be Biden’s failures and not Trump.
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