Congressional GOP Wants One-Party Rule for a Thousand Years. They Aren't Fearful of Trump. They Want Him to Succeed.
February 17, 2020
1934 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg were orderly by comparison to the Trump campaign rallies, but they are both built around a cult of an infallible leaders. (Bundesarchiv)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
No, Congressional Republicans (with the exception of Mitt Romney) will not suddenly reveal themselves as principled even if Trump were to resign, which is near impossible to consider. Democrats who pride themselves on civility and honorable behavior make the mistake of projecting those virtues onto Senate and House Republicans.
Yes, the rumors of some Senate Republicans who only voted to acquit Trump out of fear may have some truth, but then again, it may be nothing more than Bill Barr’s contrived claim that Trump’s tweeting was making his job more difficult. In the end, Barr has just been engaging in a cover-up, most likely coordinated with the White. House, of multiple cover-ups of acts of injustice to get Trump capos not to reveal evidence of Trump’s criminal behavior and to investigate Trump’s “enemies.” Not to mention Barr’s dishonest summaries of DOJ investigations that concern Trump.
There. is no reason to believe that Congressional Republicans want to rein in Trump anymore than to believe Barr is engaged in carrying out impartial justice.
No, Republicans didn’t acquit Trump just. our of fear. To the contrary, they share Trump’s goal of one-party rule — attained through stolen elections and massive disinformation campaigns — that would last, as Hitler declared for his Third Reich, a thousand years. Lost in Democratic leadership speculation that it was Trump’s vindictiveness and fear that he would support primary challengers to anyone who voted against him on impeachment, lost to that simplistic explanation is that the Republican Party has been engaged in trying to suppress the two-party system for decades. Not to mention, the Neo-Confederacy brand of the Republican Party since Nixon.
With the advent of an unhinged vengeful despot demagogue in the White House, who is openly soliciting help in stealing the 2020 election, the Congressional Republicans probably have two thoughts: !) the Trump campaign’s open commitment to use dirty tricks, voter suppression and foreign interference to steal the election for Trump will help those up for re-election down ballot; and 2) the Republicans know that they are now a minority and cannot win a popular vote nationally and that they control the Senate only because of the artifact of (at the time of the Constitution) slave states (now including rural Western and Midwestern Red States) being granted two senators.
Thus a state such as Wyoming has two senators as a population of 580,000, while California has two senators, with the same power, with more than 40 million people. So the Senate Republicans control the Senate under the pernicious and underhanded Mitch McConnell even though Democratic Senate candidates received 12 million more votes than Republican candidates in 2018. So don’t rule out that the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate were thinking more about a strong man who would preserve minority Republican rule without the least compunction of fair play.
It is hard for many Democrats who believe in the Constitution and the lore of American democracy being a role model for the world to accept that the Republican white Christian minority are looking to hold on power at all costs even it means they are helping dismantle democracy and emboldening an aspiring dictator. The reality is that democracy is a threat to their rule, and Trump is their leader in suppressing majority rule and enfranchisement, and a Republican dictatorship preserving minority rule would be just fine with them.
As Barry Craig noted in LA Progressive: “Trump isn’t driving Republican opinion. He’s just reflecting it.”
In 1947, while a Congressman, John F. Kennedy said in a speech: “There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line – no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.”
For those Democrats who are squeamish about any comparisons to Hitler and the Third Reich, JFK was right on the money. Trump is, it goes without saying, the master of the big lie, more than 15,000 and counting. Like Hitler, he believes in one party rule. Like Hitler, who damned the democratic Weimar Republic, Trump believes Democratic leaders are “vermin” and “scum” and should be imprisoned. Like Trump, Hitler used mass audiences to appeal to the basest instincts of his followers, to lure them into the fanciful notion of a pure German bloodline, to promise them that he would make Germany great again (ergo The Third Reich).
Don’t for a minute think that the Republicans in Congress are abandoning principles out of fear alone. Trump is their leader advancing the minority white Christians into a thousand years of one-party rule.