Is It Time To Abandon The Republican Party?

This has been weighing heavily on my mind in recent weeks, and it’s time to deal with it in public. It is my considered opinion that the Republican party has abdicated its responsibility and corrupted itself to the point where it may no longer be salvageable. That it may well be time to abandon the GOP and form another party that is dedicated to responsible governing.

I say this for several reasons, but let’s start with how elected Republicans are behaving. I mean, sure, we hear them berating Democrats for everything under the sun, but how do THEY behave? How do THEY handle the power that exists in our overly-large central government?

I covered this in another blog post, but recently the Republican leadership of a subcommittee decided to arrest a liberal journalist who wanted to film their open-to-the-public committee meeting. Why? Because the journalist wanted to use this footage in a documentary that went against what the Republicans on the Committee believed. In other words, they abused their power for their own ends, ignoring things like the First Amendment and the principle of open government. Isn’t that what they repeatedly attack Democrats for allegedly doing?

And this isn’t an isolated incident, I’m sad to say. Republicans are showing again and again that, despite the crowd-pleasing rhetoric that they want to limit the size and power of government, they are very comfortable, even happy, to use that power for their own ends. They CLAIM to want to limit the power of government, to reduce spending, and to rein in a government that is too involved in too many areas of our lives… but do they really mean it? Perhaps a few do, but not the majority of elected officials, and not the leadership of the GOP itself. They LIKE that power, and they want to maintain their access to it.

And the way they are behaving regarding elections these days is not only disgusting, it’s downright dishonest. I mean, think about it…


I’ve heard for the past four elections how absolutely critical it is that we get a Republican elected, because the Democrat candidate (fill in the blank) is the devil incarnate and will destroy our nation as we know it. They use this to encourage us to “come together” behind “whoever the nominee” eventually is. And WHY do they do this? Because they know most of us wouldn’t vote for the people they want as our candidate, and they must win.

They know we won’t support their choices, because fiscal conservatism has disappeared from the Republican party. The people we refer to as conservatives today, such as John McCain, Mitt Romney, and George Bush, we would have once called moderates. And those we call moderates today would once have been called liberals. And the liberals? They used to be the extreme left wing of the party.

As we’ve seen in recent elections, the Democrats tend to nominate candidates who are more and more liberal. The Republicans see this and decide to nominate… a moderate candidate. Why? Because the fiscally conservative candidates “can’t win,” so we have to go with a moderate. In effect, this has shifted the entire spectrum to the left, to the point where a candidate who says we shouldn’t spend our nation into bankruptcy is considered a raving, right-wing lunatic.

Victory for the Republican party has come to mean winning at the ballot box. It doesn’t really matter what the candidate believes or how he will govern. As long as he is a Republican, then the party has won a victory. And that victory has come to be the end-all be-all for the party, trumping such mundane trivialities as wise governing.

The entire nominating process for the Republican party has been subverted. Exit polls for every election contest so far has shown that “electability” is the single most important criteria considered by voters. And the GOP leadership has encouraged this for years. How many have heard somebody say that ANY Republican is better than Obama? Do they seriously want us to believe that having an ‘R’ next to their name is reason enough for us to choose them? Are they insane?

In years past, the primary process was the time for voters to examine the qualities of the various candidates in order to choose the one whom we believed was most qualified at this time to be President of the United States. We used to use this process to select a man we believed would govern wisely and well. But with this new focus on “win at any cost,” we don’t do that anymore. And if we don’t look at the qualities of the candidates now, during the primaries, when will we do so?

Under the system as it now stands, we never do.

With “electability” as the most important quality for a candidate, this means that we don’t CARE what the candidate is like. We’ll elect a liberal if he’s the nominee… just as long as he’s got that ‘R’ next to his name that means we won. The Republican party would count it as a victory if a raging liberal was elected President. That is, if that candidate was fielded by the Republican party. Don’t believe me? They were ready to do it with John McCain, and they’re ready to do it with Mitt Romney.

The nominating process has to be the point where we select the qualities of the candidate, and if we don’t, then how do we ever expect to get a good candidate? With our current structure, we can’t.

For these reasons, and other related reasons that I haven’t iterated here, I think it is time for us to seriously consider abandoning the Republican party. They don’t care about the Constitution or fiscally conservative governing, all they care about is winning elections and wielding power. So why should we stay with them, since they will not represent the things we want them to, the things they claim they do?

Whether we shift to an already existing third party (like the Libertarians or the Constitution Party) or we start a brand new party of our own, it is past time we shed the baggage of so-called “leaders” who are more interested in using the system to acquire power for their own ends than they are in wisely governing our nation. It is time to jettison this dead weight and form a new, leaner party dedicated to doing what the Republicans have grown too fat and lazy to do.

The sooner we realize that the Republican Party, as it stands today, is as much the enemy of good governance as is the Democrat party, the sooner we can start trying to effect real reform. If we decide against this course of action, if we decide we’re okay with approving pre-selected “moderates” or “liberals” to run as Republican candidates and ultimately fail to fix our problems, then we share the responsibility for this nation’s demise.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to do what we clearly have to do?

UPDATE: Here's an article showing that three of the four Presidential candidates would actually INCREASE the federal debt over the next decade. It's a good illustrator of my point, and another reason to ditch the GOP.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/23/new-report-on-gop-primary-contenders-say?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reason%2FHitandRun+%28Reason+Online+-+Hit+%26+Run+Blog%29

"The remaining trio of conventional GOP presidential wannabes—Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich—aren’t serious about cutting spending, or about truly improving the nation's long-term fiscal path. They’re invested in the rhetoric of debt reduction, but not the policies that would make it happen."