The passing of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 by the US Senate over the weekend, and the probable passing of it by the House and subsequent signing by President Biden, brings to the fore the actions of Republicans in response to this bill.
In the House, it passed its initial test with no House Republican support; in the Senate, no Republican voted for it. It now returns to the House to approve the changes made by the Senate.
We can call the Republicans’ actions intransigence, provincialism, belief in their own propaganda, even fear, whether it be political or personal.
But, to me, this is a version of purity.
For Republicans, each of their actions are measured against a metric of faithfulness to the Republican creed, and that creed includes assertions of the evils of Democrats, of socialism, expertise; the importance of knowing that God is behind your every move so long as those moves are blessed by God – or, more importantly, its representatives on Earth, namely the leading, attention-hungry clerics. An important corollary of that last is the evil of compromise, as Barry Goldwater noted more than 50 years ago.
So motivations will be various, but I think will fall into the four categories above. And the result?
The base, as it slowly deflates from demographics and defections, may love it.
But everyone else is watching. We’re in the middle of a national crisis, and every single Republican dug in their heels and shrieked No!
So this is the Big Bet: Will the Biden plan work? The Republicans, whether Senator McConnell and Rep McCarthy, the Republican Congressional leaders, understand it or not, have harnessed their Party’s future not to a Republican horse, but to a Democratic horse. Rather than using their positions to try to get a Republican plan to work, they’ll be using their positions to attempt the opposite with the Democratic plan.
And, if they succeed, a lot of American citizens, voting citizens, will get hurt.
So even their big bet, if they win it, will be bitter wine.
But this is what their amateurism, their unseriousness, has led to. They now have to rely on their ability to lie and distract, on Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax to distract and lie for them, and for President Trump to get out and do what he does best – lie for them.
All while Trump hates on them and insists on purifying the Party to his own liking.
Like most theological and ideological purity schemes, there’s little actual substance beyond the dislike for the experts who come up with conclusions inconsistent with their ideology, their frantic need for power, and their mad, mad theology, and that lack of substance, that lack of honesty, in the end results in disaster. Or, as I noted years and years ago, someday the Republican Party will have all of three members – and two of them will be on probation for impurity.
That dagger called a RINO has much more work to do, I suspect. The only question is whether it’ll be Trump, the clerics, or someone else.
