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March 28, 2023

Following the news and politics of the day, I often ask myself rhetorically, “Why vote GOP?”  Hillary Clinton claimed during the Benghazi hearings, a deadly disaster over which she presided, “What difference… does it make?” One could say the same about voting for Republicans, at least at a Congressional, and in some cases gubernatorial level.

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I asked this question on these pages on August 2021. At the time I bemoaned the fact that during President Donald Trump’s first two years in office, Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress, and accomplished little.

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Despite lofty campaign promises in 2016, they squandered their majority in opposition to their party’s leader, President Trump, simply because elected Republicans were part of “the big club” and Trump wasn’t in it.

Obamacare was not repealed, Planned Parenthood remained funded. Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails were not seriously investigated, while fully fabricated Russian collusion dossiers, paid for by the Clinton campaign hamstrung the first years of the Trump administration. Most elected Republicans sat on their hands and thereby condoned the Trump witch hunt.

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The border wall was not funded, as the GOP Congress felt it was more important to kiss the boots of the Chamber of Congress and donor class than respect the wishes of Republican voters who elected Trump to “build the wall” and “drain the swamp”.

I will give credit where credit is due for the House introducing tax cuts which passed into law, and the Senate for withstanding withering opposition from Democrats and their media megaphones, confirming three conservative Supreme Court justices.

Due to overall inaction, the GOP lost the House and then the Senate as their voters must have asked themselves, “Why vote Republican?”

Fast forward to today and look at how most GOP members of Congress despise their voters, and anyone remotely connected to Donald Trump.

Start with Ukraine. Republican Senators John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio are full speed ahead defending Ukraine’s border with Russia but have zero interest in securing America’s border with the rest of the world. Another donor class Republican, Senator Thom Tillis is more concerned with feeding Africa than his own constituents saying,

Take a look at do you really want Russia to own the breadbasket of Europe, and that’s Ukraine, affecting food supplies? People are forgetting what we’ve had to do to get food into North Africa because of the conflict. Do you really want that under Russian control?

What about Americans who can’t afford their grocery bills after a year of double-digit food inflation? How are these Republicans any different than the suddenly hawkish Democrats, spending money we don’t have on another foreign war where America has little if any national interest?