Around this time next year, President Joe Biden will be readying his second inauguration speech or our 47th president will be close to moving into the White House. So it is, we begin the 2024 presidential campaign this week, at least for Republicans.
There’s still plenty of votes to count in between the Iowa caucuses, the Jan. 23 New Hampshire GOP primary and the Nov. 5 election. Former President Donald Trump maintains huge polling leads against his chief rivals, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and even Biden.
Both Haley and DeSantis seem to enjoy throwing barbs at each other instead of pointing to the many faults of Donald Trump, who has more than California’s earthquake-prone landscape. Despite this, Republican voters want to nominate him for a second presidential run.
His dwindling number of opponents, meanwhile, seem to loathe each other instead of Trump. In a Des Moines debate prior to the Iowa caucuses, DeSantis labeled Haley “another mealy-mouthed politician” Haley, in turn, said: “You can’t trust what Ron’s saying.”
This came after former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had filed paperwork to appear on the Illinois March primary, pulled out of the presidential sweepstakes proclaiming, “I would rather lose by telling the truth than lie to win.” Ah, if only all our politicians meant that.
Meanwhile the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives continues to ignore the issues Americans want addressed and worry about: Reproductive rights, the porous Southern Border, the economy, assault weapons, national security, keeping Social Security and Medicare financially sound, raising the nation’s retirement age, climate change, the war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war and China’s growing global hegemony. And there’s more that should be addressed, but not as long as the party’s leaders remain distracted.
The House GOP seeks an unprecedented action of impeaching a member of a president’s Cabinet, alleging Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is not upholding immigration laws. Republicans say they can prove the secretary has been “derelict in his duty” for being weak at enforcing immigration rules.
Republicans have also called Hunter Biden, the president’s son, to a congressional committee hearing. When he showed in public, they seemed disappointed. Apparently, they wanted to grill him in private about his financial affairs and any links to his father, but not in public.
They also want to impeach President Biden because they seem not to like his policies and politics. Just as Democrats did in the early years of Trump’s presidency.
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There must be a virus going around in Republican circles. The symptoms include babbling about “high crimes and misdemeanors”– the constitutional benchmark for impeachment.
Such zany actions may make for entertaining political theater, but poor governance. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan, needs to focus or rebrand itself.
Embracing Donald Trump in 2016 cost Republicans statewide and countywide in 2018. Once a strong majority party in Lake County, GOPsters find themselves a struggling minority cadre, mirroring what has happened across Illinois.
The party’s slender majority in the U.S. House is fragile at best since a far right-wing coup to oust Kevin McCarthy, the previous GOP speaker. Especially if Trump leads the ticket come November.
Many of us are waiting for a true leader to surface and move the GOP from dysfunctional sniping to charging forward with ideas and discourse that can spark Americans’ imaginations. One like Republican Lowell Weicker, a progressive Republican U.S. senator and Connecticut governor, who died last year at age 93.
Fifty years ago, at the height of the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon, it was Weicker who stood up for what’s right and for what Americans expect of their elected officials. “Republicans do not cover up,” he declared.
“Republicans do not go ahead and threaten; Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts; and, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed,” Weicker said, according to what was mined from testimony at congressional hearings on President Nixon’s behavior in office.
Fast-forward from 1974 to 2024, and there is an indicted Republican presidential candidate asking voters to return him to the White House. Front-runner Trump has followed a Nixonian path set before him.
Trump certainly is compiling an enemies list made up of those who he believes have slighted him, including members of the media. Nixon did the same.
Nixon, who resigned the office rather than be impeached, also was behind commission of illegal acts by his inner-circle accomplices who ended up in jail. Trump is facing state and federal lawsuits over his actions trying to overturn the 2020 election –“The Steal” as he maintains.
Besides Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, where are those Republicans in 2024 willing to stand like Lowell Weicker for a decent and open GOP? Are there any left?
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
X @sellenews