Dems and Media Make Rules for GOP
Let’s Twitterize this opinion piece. Let’s be friendly to readers with short attention spans, like the writer’s. Let’s stray from long-worded, short-on-sensibility commentaries common to the establishment press, seen in establishment publications.
The infighting over how Republicans choose their presidential nominee amazingly resembles the way the party’s leaders have governed during the Obama administration.
Ergo, it would be reasonable that the Republican National Committee hand the disagreement between grassroots voters and establishment politicians, like McConnell, Graham, McCain, Boehner, (Ryan still in doubt) and others who value their standing with establishment media above all else. This gang of groundrels would meet with top Democrats, who, guided by friends in the mainstream media, decide what party rules at the convention should be.
The result would be a nominee both Democrat-friendly and media-friendly.
Isn’t that the way eventual losers-to-Democrats-in-the-fall-election John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 were chosen? Isn’t that the way Republican leaders have operated during Obama’s reign?
It didn’t matter whether Republicans had control of Congress or not. The behavior was the same: pontificate, then meet with leading Democrats and prominent liberal powers, then compromise (another phrase for Democrats win) and move on to another “issue.”
Democrats and their stalwart allies in the press were leading beneficiaries of Republican leadership.
Current leading myth.
A president Cruz would wipe out the Internal Revenue Service. No, his “flat tax” scheme would still be such that Congress, the White House and bureaucrats would manipulate the Tax Code, to award friends, punish enemies, influence human behavior, etc.
The belief that a tax return could be filled out using only one page is as fanciful as abolishing the IRS. Cruz, Congress and bureaucrats would still have the power to decide who gets tax deductions and who doesn’t, leading to reams of attached pages.
The “flat” tax won’t start flat, and even if it did it wouldn’t stay flat any longer than the time it takes for Congress, White House, bureaucrats — and lobbyists for special interests — to get greedy hands on it.
What Cruz is doing is Clintonizing. What he means is that he would abolish the name of the tax-regulating and tax-collecting agency, not the reason for its existence.
Democrats and others clamoring for the death of the Republican Party should be careful of what they wish.
What liberals put forth as the savior of a particular problem often backfires, comes back to haunt them.
That is the case of a federal court trial in North Carolina, where redistricting by a Republican legislature is being challenged.
What those dastardly Republicans did was draw congressional boundaries creating two majority-black districts.
That’s right. They did what Democrats and other friendly liberals have gone to court many times since the Voting Rights Act of 1964 went into effect. They have said laws were needed to make elections “fair and favored.”
The idea was to require a varying number of congressional districts, in the South, to be created that would result in the election of minority candidates; ire enough black voters to guarantee election of a black candidate.
Never mind that blacks not living in a black-proof district were disenfranchised. No known liberal cared for them. Only conservatives like me spoke for them.
Now what Democrats are saying is that, after the last census, Republicans drew two districts that rely too much on race factors and that packed blacks in higher concentration than ever before. Opponents of the Republican meddling have argued that evidence shows that black voters have been able to elect their preferred candidates where their voting-age population was well below 50 percent. So the guarantee of black candidate success is not needed.
It is indeed puzzling, unless the aim is to guarantee election of preferred candidates in non majority-black districts, too.
L.E. Brown, Jr. is an independent writer based in Magnolia, N.C. Contact him at [email protected].
