The Problem With The Republican Party … Is The Republican Party

Written by Daniel Horowitz

Imagine how amazing things could have been had we woken up last Wednesday morning with Republicans winning 54 seats in the Senate and 250 seats in the House. We’d be off to the promised land, right? Wrong! Actually, from a policy perspective, we’d be in the same place we are today, sans the much-needed introspection that is taking place deep in the souls of conservative politicos – an introspection we’ve needed for decades. It’s not about Trump per se, and not even so much about McConnell and McCarthy. It’s that we are the true RINOs – Republicans in name only – in a party that has never shared our values for most of its history.

Here’s a useful political exercise to engage in right now at your desk. Take out two sheets of paper – one for each party. On the Democrat paper, jot down the names of Democrats who dissent from the party dogma on a single issue of our time. Perhaps you might consider issues like COVID shots, global warming agenda, medical freedom, homosexual and transgender agenda, immigration, crime, Ukraine, the World Economic Forum, and of course the traditional issues of guns, abortion, and taxes.

Now, challenge yourself to name a single Democrat who dissents in a meaningful way on any one of those issues, much less a bunch of them – even those from redder states and districts, not to mention those from deep blue districts. What you will find is that there is essentially not a single Democrat from a blue state who will be content even with Obama-era liberalism, and even the red-state ones are the same except for a couple of nuanced rhetorical images designed to obscure their true views.

Now turn your attention to the Republican sheet of paper. I’d ask you to jot down a list of the Republicans who dissent from conservatives in a meaningful way on any one of the aforementioned issues, but you would need an entire box of papers to list the thousands of names of state and federal GOP officials who are downright on the other side of numerous (if not a majority) of those issues. So, it would probably be more efficient to merely list the names of the Republicans who actually fight for us in a meaningful way on the issues that matter, in the way they matter, at the time they matter. On that account, you can probably tear off a corner of the paper for your list and still have plenty of unfilled space! Even the few Republicans who are good on one issue will usually screw us on another fundamental issue. This one might finally be good on medical freedom but crush us on gay “marriage,” or this one who is strong on social values will constantly shill for Ukraine or open borders.

In other words, we can’t have nice things.

Conservative influencers are now in a state of mourning because they didn’t see the beautiful red color filled in on the House and Senate maps with impressive numbers signifying dominant majorities, but if you want dominant majorities, let me show you the GOP majorities in the following red-state legislative bodies. (Note, there might be slight errors, because the exact numbers are still in flux due to final vote counts).

• Alabama: Senate 27-8; House 77-28
• Arkansas: Senate 29-6; House 82-18
• Florida: Senate 28-12; House 85-35
• Georgia: Senate 33-23; House 101-78
• Idaho: Senate 28-7; House 59-11
• Indiana: Senate 40-10; House 71-29
• Iowa: Senate 34-16; House 64-34
• Kansas: Senate 29-11; House 85-40
• Kentucky: Senate 31-7 House 80-20
• Louisiana: Senate 26-11; House 68-34-3
• Mississippi: Senate 36-16; House 75-42-3
• Missouri: Senate 24-10; House 111-52
• Montana: Senate 34-16; House 69-31
• Nebraska: Senate (unicameral) 32-17
• North Dakota: Senate 43-4; House 82-12
• Ohio: Senate 26-7; House 68-31
• Oklahoma: Senate 40-8; House 81-20
• South Carolina: Senate 30-16; House 88-36
• South Dakota: Senate 31-4; House 63-7
• Tennessee: Senate 27-6; House 75-23
• Texas: Senate 19-12; House 86-64
• Utah: Senate 23-6; House 61-14
• West Virginia: Senate 30-4; House 88-12
• Wyoming: Senate; 28-2; House 55-5

Here are 24 states with strong GOP majorities in their legislatures. In all but Louisiana, they either have the governor or the ability to govern from the legislature with veto-override majorities. Next year, they will likely flip the Louisiana governorship, and a year later they have a strong chance of flipping North Carolina, which is already one seat shy of a supermajority in one chamber. Also, there are 24 states with a partisan voter index based on presidential elections that are redder than Florida.

So ask yourself this: Why are we only talking about Florida as the paradigm of governing successfully? Why are all these other states that have been much redder for so much longer still promoting the corporatist woke agenda? Why do their respective departments of health still promote the COVID shots and their departments of education still promote the woke agenda? Why don’t these states look like the conservative mirror image of California, Maryland, and Massachusetts, where Democrats command lopsided majorities?

The answer is because most of the GOP governors and state legislative leaders are a controlled opposition or bought off by the very woke business interests tied in with the WEF globalist agenda. So, what are we going to do about it? What did we expect from narrow McConnell/McCarthy majorities at the federal level when they have failed to govern like DeSantis with supermajorities in so many states for so long?

This is the painful internal discussion we have needed for quite some time, but would have continued to be obscured had Republicans won big this past election. However, such a red wave would not have changed the fact that Republicans, even with larger majorities in many states, fail to stop the left-wing agenda even in the reddest parts of the country. For example, despite a 4-1 majority in the state Senate, the Indiana Republican governor is even participating in the global warming conference designed to destroy our energy and self-reliance. Democrats were almost completely wiped off the map in North Dakota, yet the GOP governor is quite cozy with Bill Gates.

Even in Florida with the best conservative governor of our lifetime, many of the state legislative Republicans, at least until now, have been lethargic at best. Hopefully, that will change during DeSantis’ second term, but it raises the question: Why are we not seeing the same push to transform the machinery of red-state government into an asset rather than a liability for our values as DeSantis did by appointing Dr. Joseph Ladapo surgeon general to make the health department advocate for medical freedom rather than the biomedical security state?

Imagine if there were 20 Floridas instead of just one. Imagine what that would do to deter the radical agenda in Washington and serve as a shining example for the rest of the country. I don’t think we could fathom such a dynamic. Even we cede all the swing states, we have ample power in the deep red states to challenge everything Biden does except for foreign policy. But we are not the Republican Party, and they are not us.

There’s no question that we need a reckoning about the mail-in ballots and how to win a presidential election going forward. But the immediate reckoning must focus on making red states red, making DeSantis the gold standard for every governor, and finding a way to either change the Republican Party through a reform of the primary process or run independent candidates and consign this party to the ash heap of history.

These are states where debates of “candidate quality” or mail-in ballots haven’t made a difference in shifting their orientation more and more to the right, even as other states become more democratic. For example, West Virginia just experienced a red wave, nearly wiping the Democrats completely out of the legislature. So what is the excuse for the continued promotion of left-wing policies in those states? It’s the Republican Party itself.

The entire shelf life of the Whig Party, the last failed party, was shorter than the 33 years the GOP has been around as a fake opposition party since 1989. Immediately after it became apparent that the Whigs stood for nothing on the issue of the time, it was ditched for, ironically, the creation of the Republican Party, following its failure to block the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. We’ve come full circle today with a new time of slavery to globalist transhumanism, biomedical security, transformation of human life, and the surveillance state. The GOP is at best inept in its opposition and at worst complicit in the challenges of our time. Will the election loss finally trigger a Kansas-Nebraska Act moment for the GOP?

Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of TheBlaze and host of the Conservative Review podcast. He writes on the most decisive battleground issues of our times, including the theft of American sovereignty through illegal immigration, the theft of American liberty through tyranny, and the theft of American law and order through criminal justice “reform.”