The Republican Party of the United States was founded on March 20, 1854
Later, the abbreviation G.O.P. “Grand Old Party” stuck to it, it was also deciphered as “Get Out and Push”, implying that party members should go to the people and promote its ideas.
The party has undergone a significant transformation of the political spectrum since its inception, but it is Donald Trump who has once again turned it towards ‘working America’. The Republicans now face the most responsible choice in recent history.
No one took Trump seriously in the 2016 Republican primaries, with Senator Mit Romney then calling him a “charlatan and a fraud”. However, a calibrated election campaign focused on the aspirations of ordinary Americans – to restore America’s greatness after Barack Obama’s failures – elevated Trump to the presidency. This came as a surprise to Democrats and parts of the Republican party alike.
Trump’s tax reforms, one of the few that Congress was able to push through, and the cuts in unemployment gave ordinary Americans cause for optimism. After all, Trump turned out to be one of the few politicians who kept his promises.
Trump managed to unite the Republicans, and the politicians who openly opposed Trump in it were simply dropping out. The apotheosis of the rallying of the Republican party around Trump, I believe, was the attempted impeachment by the Democrats in 2019. To recall the words from Republican Doug Collins’ speech at the impeachment hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, which rang out across the country:
“In 2016, the American people had the audacity to elect the wrong person for president in front of Democrats. That’s the whole reason we’re here. The Democrats and their allies in the media and the permanent federal bureaucracy are outraged at the American people.
They cannot tolerate as president a man who promised American voters that he would shake up Washington. A man who said he would work for them – the forgotten men and women – rather than the entrenched political elite…
During these hearings, the American electorate has witnessed the entrenched political and media elites in Washington trying to change their will.
The next time we go to the polls, people will ask: “the next time we vote, will our choices be attacked again by elites and perpetual government?” If the answer is in the affirmative, we risk being next to the young democracies receiving our foreign aid.
On 3 November 2020, Trump won the election but subsequently lost the battle for the vote count in key districts that were controlled by the Democrat Party. The facts of fraud, confirmed by eyewitness testimony, have yet to be adequately investigated.
However, the Democratic Party did not have the strength to rig all the elections that were held at the same time as the presidential election, and so the Republicans strengthened their position in all the states where local congressional elections were held, and also reduced the numerical advantage of the Democratic Party in the House, which caused consternation among the Democrats at the top. As all the US mainstream media prophesied a victorious “blue wave” for the Democratic Party that would wash out the weak Republicans in Congress.
The Democratic Party was able to concentrate and hit back in the Senate elections, two seats from Georgia on 5 January 2021. The two Republicans initially had a solid lead, but near the end of the vote count, it repeated the pattern of the presidential election, with the Democratic candidate getting a surge and finishing as the winner. Having achieved, in the Senate, a 50/50 split, plus one vote for the new vice-president, Kamala Harris, the Democrats expect to implement all their radical reforms.
Of course, the hardest blow to the Republican Party came on January 6, 2021, when, after Trump’s rally, a crowd of his supporters moved to Capitol Hill and some demonstrators, including some from the radical left, broke into the Capitol building. Security services then evacuated the congressmen, who were then approving the lists of state electors who had voted in the US presidential election.
After the protesters were removed from the Capitol and the hearings resumed, some Republicans abandoned the idea of challenging the electoral rolls because of possible presidential election irregularities. The media unanimously called Trump supporters “domestic terrorists” and suggested that he should be impeached for sedition.
However, what happened at the Capitol raises many questions, as there is video evidence that police did not interfere with the protesters’ entry into the Capitol building. Capitol security camera footage that could shed light on what happened on January 6 has for some reason not been made available to the public until now. In addition, the resigned Capitol police chief, who was dismissed for incompetence, said in his defence that his request for additional forces was not responded to by the relevant authorities for a very long time.
The Democratic Party suggested that the Republicans, represented by US Vice President Mike Pence, should sign a surrender and use the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove Trump from power. However, Pence pointed out in a response letter:
“Last week I defied pressure to use force beyond my constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election, and now I will not succumb to House efforts to play political games at such a serious time in our nation’s life.”
As you are well aware, the 25th Amendment was designed to deal with presidential incapacity or disability. Just a few months ago, when you introduced the bill to create the 25th Amendment commission, you said, “the fitness of a president for office should be determined by science and facts”.
Under our Constitution, the 25th Amendment is not a means to punish or usurp power. To invoke the 25th Amendment would thus set a terrible precedent.
POLITICO reports that according to insider information, the meeting of Republican Party members after the January 6 events lasted more than two hours. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority representative in the House of Representatives, said that Trump bears some responsibility for the Capitol riots, which were not without casualties.
He explicitly told his fellow party members that the riots at the Capitol were not caused by antifa but by right-wing extremists and therefore called for a different version not to be spread as it was misinformation. The meeting discussed ways other than impeachment to hold Trump accountable for what happened. Those present were inclined to publicly condemn Trump and set up a commission of enquiry into the Capitol attack.
“While the press has been full of speculation, I have not made a final decision on how I will vote, and I intend to hear the legal arguments when they are presented to the Senate,” was the response from Senate Republican Majority Leader – Mitch McConnell, in response to rumours spread by The New York Times that he is telling colleagues that Trump has committed impeachable crimes.
Democrats are obsessed with impeaching Trump and a vote in the House of Representatives on the articles of impeachment has already passed. By a margin of 232 votes to 197, the House approved the impeachment resolution, with only 10 Republicans out of 207 voting in favour.
However, Mitch McConnell has already announced that he will not recall the senators from their “holiday”; they will meet on January 19 and will not have time to vote on impeachment before Joe Biden, the new US president, takes office on January 20. Republican Senator Tom Cotton explained:
“The Senate has no constitutional power to conduct impeachment proceedings against a former president. The founders designed the impeachment process as a way to remove officials from public office, not as an investigation against private citizens”, – he explained the hype the Democrats are building around impeaching Trump. However, Democrats don’t want to see this logic of law enforcement, they want to destroy Trump.
Naturally, those Republicans who continue to publicly support Trump have been persecuted in all forms. Harvard University’s Institute of Politics announced that their alumna, Congresswoman Eliza Stefanik, had been removed from its Advisory Committee for spreading false allegations of fraud in the presidential election.
Senator Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who were being considered for the top three Republican presidential candidates in the US in 2024, have been accused by Democrats of promoting sedition for their support for Trump and attempting to challenge the electoral rolls.
“They have betrayed their oath of office and incited violent rebellion against our democracy”, – wrote Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, “I call on them to resign immediately. If they do not resign, the Senate will have to expel them.” – “The violent rabble that attacked the Capitol consisted of people who do not accept democracy and want to take over this country by force”, – wrote Senator Patty Murray, the third ranking Democrat.
“Any senator who stands up and supports the power of force over the power of democracy has broken his oath of office. Senators Hawley and Cruz should resign”, – she said.
The US constitution allows the Houses of Congress to determine their own rules of procedure and punish their members for disorderly conduct. However, removal requires a 2/3 vote and is unlikely to happen, even in this situation.
The attack on the Republicans has also come from US corporations. The Wall Street Journal reported that JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the US, said it was stopping donations to Republican political aid committees (PACs). Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, BP, AT&T, Ford Motor Co., CVS Health Corp, Wells Fargo, Exxon Mobil Corp, Dow Chemical, the Marriott hotel chain and, of course, Facebook have all come out in statements about funding restrictions.
The situation is extremely serious, since politics and money stand side by side in the US, and it is not for nothing that the institution of lobbying is the most developed in the world. The Koch Brothers Corporation is a long-standing sponsor of the Republican Party, and Trump, when he became president, authorized the construction of the long-suffering Keystone XL oil pipeline in the interests of the Kochs.
So, through American for Prosperity CEO Emily Seidel, the brothers said they would “weigh in” on the actions of Republican lawmakers before sponsoring them, in the context of what happened on January 6 in Congress.
Other key donors to the Republican Party, including Chicago’s Ricketts family, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus and financier Ken Griffin, have so far declined to comment on their future plans. However, another blow to the party’s finances was dealt by the death of longtime sponsor, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who passed away on January 13 at the age of 87.
All of this puts the Republican Party leadership facing the most serious choice in recent history: support Trump or disavow him and remain in the American establishment. This choice is extremely important because according to a poll conducted by Rasmussen reports of December 21, 2020, when asked, “When the Republican Party reorganizes next year, should it be more like President Trump or the average Republican member of Congress?”, 72% of Republicans answered that it should be more like Trump.
Even after what happened on January 6, when some Republicans expressed disappointment that Trump didn’t support those who stormed the Capitol, according to The Hill polls, Republican support for Trump has only fallen by 10%, from 87% to 77%.
So what will the top Republicans choose?
The way to repudiate Trump and the bulk of his voters is to keep their place in the establishment and live quietly under the Democrats until the 2024 election, in the hope that Joe Biden will in the meantime “bring the country to heel” and people will have no choice but to vote for them?
Yes, the chances of that are by no means nil, but neither will Trump sit idly by. Given his business acumen and position as a cornered lion, he will show that the top Republicans have only duplicitously played roles during his presidency and it will be a disaster for them.
Or will Republicans finally rally around Trump and some of them put everything they’ve managed to achieve in life on the line? Yes, it will take the heat of political confrontation in the United States to a new level, but it will give a chance to resolve the controversy before the senile Democratic Party finally ruins the country.
Oleg Ladogin, RUSSTRAT