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Academic

: Essentially Contested America

Should the Republican Party Be Punished in November 2008?

By Robert Justin Lipkin

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The Guardian reported last month that: "The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, was behind a controversial decision to block California's attempt to impose tough emission bc:

limits on car manufacturers, according to insiders at the government Environmental Protection Agency. . . . Staff at the agency, which announced last week that California's proposed limits were redundant, said the agency's chief went against their expert advice after car executives met Cheney, and a Chrysler executive delivered a letter to the EPA saying why the state should not be allowed to regulate greenhouse gases. . . . EPA staff members told the Los Angeles Times that the agency's head, the Bush appointee Stephen Johnson, ignored their conclusions and shut himself off from consultation in the month before the announcement. He then informed them of his decision and instructed them to provide the legal rationale for it, they said. . . . 'California met every criteria ... on the merits,' an anonymous member of the EPA staff told the Times. 'The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years ... We told him that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts.' . . . In an editorial, the New York Times described the decision as, 'an indefensible act of executive arrogance that can only be explained as the product of ideological blindness and as a political payoff to the automobile industry.'" For more click here.

These people--the President and the Vice-President and their minions--are lawless reprobates who are perverting the Constitution. In any serious republican democracy both individuals would be impeached and removed from office. That won't happen here. However, if we cannot punish these evil doers, we can punish the Republican Party especially those individuals who have supported Mr. Bush consistently throughout his catastrophic regime.

Even more so than Democrats or the general electorate right-thinking Republicans need to punish their own Party who must be held responsible for inflicting this terrible injury to the national soul. Ironically, Republicans of almost any stripe, themselves have reason to be outraged at the Bush presidency. Bush has betrayed fiscal conservatives by increasing the cost and size of government. Social conservatives has been betrayed by Bush's indifference to their concern over same-sex marriage and abortion. Republicans concerned about undocumented workers find no solace from Bush. Moderate Republicans have no voice in the Bush White House. Except for fanatical Bush supporters, the Republican Party has betrayed Republicans as tragically as it has betrayed the nation. Conservative scholar Bruce Fein has urged impeachment on the ground that failure to castigate the current administration for arrogantly exceeding its constitutional authority is tantamount to leaving a loaded gun around for future presidents to use. Well, for a variety of reasons, Congress is too cowardly to initiate impeachment hearings except for quite sincere, but quixotic attempts by various congresspersons. But that does not prevent Republicans and other patriots from showing that any political party that supports constitutional criminals will pay a severe price at the polls. If the Republican candidate wins in November, it signals that the electorate doesn't much care about presidents who pervert the Constitution. That's an authentically dangerous message for the electorate to send to future generations.

The smart money says the Republican will lose in November. Some of the National Review crowd think this is due to the public's disenchantment with the conservatism of the eighties and fp: nineties, you know, the stuck in the mud of Reaganism. But future events can derail such long-term predictions. If the Republican candidate loses in November, it should be made clear in the campaign and afterward that the loss is not due to any disenchantment with conservative ideology, but rather that the Republican Party betrayed the nation by supportiing Bush in the 2004 election. For his duplicity and inability to appreciate and remain loyal to American constitutional traditions, the Party should have dumped him just as the Democratic Party dumped one of Bush's remote ancestors, Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth president of the United States. Sure the political savants and realists will simply reject this proposal as just another progressive, quixotic delusion. Maybe so. But if politics is to make any sense in the future responsibility must be assumed by the purveyors of catastrophe in this case the National Republican Party.