what happens to the republican party

**RandomGuy** · 04-20-2023

The (Republican) Party’s Over
We asked four recovering Republicans if the GOP is salvageable. Hint: They laughed.

With each passing month, week, and day, the Republican Party contrives to go a little crazier, one step more radical—to smash one more norm or tradition. If you still think that surely they’ll come to their senses one of these days, you’re just not paying attention.

What is to be done?

New Republic editor Michael Tomasky gathered four close observers of the party’s decline and fall via Zoom in early March to discuss the current and future state of the Republican Party: Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011; Juleanna Glover, who worked for Vice President Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft; Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist and author of The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right; and Nicolle Wallace, who was President George W. Bush’s communications director and senior adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign and now hosts MSNBC’s Deadline: White House.

....

WALLACE: I think that the mistake that I continue to make is that it wants to be salvaged. I think it is cons uted as it wants to be. You see new Republicans emerge in the mold of destructors and not builders. And I think that the people who want to salvage it aren’t really vibrant, healthy parts of the Republican body politic anymore. And the people who like it as it is don’t want to be salvaged.

BOOT: Nicolle has certainly put her finger on a lot of the dysfunction in the current Republican Party, which I, like a lot of the other folks here, don’t recognize from the days when I was a Republican—when it stood for free markets, international leadership, was pro-immigration, was pro-NATO, pro- a lot of things that have been abandoned along the way. Although this has been a cruel period for a lot of us who were once affiliated with the GOP, I’ve kind of given up my expectation that I had a few years ago that this is going to lead to some giant crack-up that was going to lead to electoral annihilation, and the Republicans would come to their senses, because, unfortunately, I think the path that they’re on is actually reasonably popular.

I mean, they took control of the House, right? They’re not getting destroyed. They’re very close to the Senate. They have a reasonable chance to take back the White House, especially if they nominate Ron DeSantis rather than Donald Trump, because DeSantis is basically going to give you Trumpism without Trump. So that’s a formula that a lot of people think could be successful. Unfortunately, I think we’re not going to have any time in the foreseeable future a sane, center-right political party in this country. We’re going to have whatever the GOP is, which is largely this far-right populist construct. I wish that voters were rejecting it. But outside of the popular vote for presidential contests, they really aren’t rejecting it. It’s still a very viable political en y.

JULEANNA GLOVER: I feel as though the Republican Party is in a place where the Whigs were in the mid-1850s, which is dissolute, racked over a moral question, i.e., slavery. Then it came to dissolve, and something new arose after that.

TOMASKY: What, if I may ask, is the moral question today for the Republicans?

GLOVER: It’s Trumpism. Are our leaders people who we think should be, above all, principled, honest, exemplary human beings, or is this just about sort of thuggish survival of the fittest, whoever appears the strongest gets to rule the party? Of the Republicans who are currently going to run against Trump, I would not be able to support anybody except for maybe New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and maybe former Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers—people who have been adamantly anti-Trump. Any of the folks that have brooked him or collaborated with him, they’re morally compromised. For whatever comes next, I think it’s going to be among those who have cleanly broken with Trump and have the moral standing to build what’s next.

...

Interesting discussion.

https://newrepublic.com/article/1717...can-party-dead

**RandomGuy** · 04-20-2023

WALLACE: I think that’s the political piece of this. You’re talking about a way to break a cycle. I think that Liz Cheney sustained it over the summer during the period of public hearings for the January 6 select committee. Trumpism has to be repeatedly pushed through the frame of a threat to the democracy that it proved itself to be visibly on January 6, but that bears itself out as a threat of every single day. I mean, every voter integrity law is voter suppression being pushed through, predicated on a lie that there was fraud.

**Winehole23** · 04-20-2023

if you can't win the voters, suppress voting

**Winehole23** · 04-20-2023

the rules are for thee, not for me

**Ef-man** · 04-21-2023

Boom!

Exclusive: Text messages reveal Trump operatives considered using breached voting data to decertify Georgia’s Senate runoff in 2021

In mid-January 2021, two men hired by former President Donald Trump’s legal team discussed over text message what to do with data obtained from a breached voting machine in a rural county in Georgia, including whether to use it as part of an attempt to decertify the state’s pending Senate runoff results.

The texts, sent two weeks after operatives breached a voting machine in Coffee County, Georgia, reveal for the first time that Trump allies considered using voting data not only to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but also in an effort to keep a Republican hold on the US Senate. 

“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia, wrote in a January 19 text to Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a firm that purports to run audits of voting systems.

The plot to breach voting systems in Coffee County, coordinated by members of Trump’s legal team including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, is part of a broader criminal investigation into 2020 election interference led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Willis’ office is weighing a potential racketeering case against multiple defendants and is actively deciding who to bring charges against, sources tell CNN. Willis has subpoenaed a number of individuals involved in the Coffee County breach, including the two men who carried it out who were in touch with Penrose and Logan.

https://www.cnn.com/trump-georgia-se...ed-voting-data

**Ef-man** · 04-21-2023

ing GOP is showing its true colors by hating on vets needing VA.

**Winehole23** · 04-22-2023

Banana republic .

**Winehole23** · 04-23-2023

When the people vote for stuff you don't like, make voting harder.

**Blake** · 04-23-2023

A whopping two-thirds of Republican primary voters say they stand behind former President Donald Trump and dismiss concerns about his electability, despite his recent criminal arrest and other legal investigations into his past conduct, a new national NBC News poll finds.

That — along with his double-digit lead over his nearest potential GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — makes Trump the clear front-runner in the early race for the Republican presidential nomination.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...atio-rcna80917

**boutons_deux** · 04-23-2023

by this time next year, Trash could be indicted 3 times. And his rape trial starts in a few days.

**Winehole23** · 04-24-2023

Another solution in search of a problem. No exception for blind people.

Republicans like criminalizing and suppressing voting. Election security is a fig leaf for their gross pandering to their shrinking base of fear addled boomers and southern whites.

https://legiscan.com/AL/bill/HB209/2023

**Winehole23** · 04-24-2023

literally no one supports this

**ChumpDumper** · 04-24-2023

Originally Posted by Winehole23

literally no one supports this

I guews that's where CC got his talking point.

**Winehole23** · 04-24-2023

Originally Posted by ChumpDumper

I guews that's where CC got his talking point.

Guys like MM and CC are probably pro-abortion because they like the idea of condom free, sequence free sex and forcing their girlfriends to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

**Winehole23** · 04-24-2023

anti-democratic shenanigans

**Ef-man** · 04-24-2023

Originally Posted by Winehole23

literally no one supports this

Ahem, not sure about that. I am sure the parents of several baby-boomers, gen-x, and millennials that post on ST would abort them, if given a chance, tbh.

**Winehole23** · 04-24-2023

Ins utionalizing minority rule

**ElNono** · 04-24-2023

Originally Posted by Winehole23

Ins utionalizing minority rule

I told you democracy isn't working for Conservatives. This is what happens when everything you stand for is crude unpopular traditionalism.

**FuzzyLumpkins** · 04-24-2023

Originally Posted by ElNono

I told you democracy isn't working for Conservatives. This is what happens when everything you stand for is crude unpopular traditionalism.

Hasn't been for awhile. Thus the gerrymander, obstructionism, and packing the courts. These are not the actions of people that are confident in their majority.

**boutons_deux** · 04-24-2023

Originally Posted by FuzzyLumpkins

Hasn't been for awhile. Thus the gerrymander, obstructionism, and packing the courts. These are not the actions of people that are confident in their majority.

Repugs are confident that they are the nationwide MINORITY, empowered by the ing anti-democratic Cons ution (EC and Senate) and SCOTUS6 permitting gerrymandering and gutting VRA.

Repugs have been LYING about voter fraud (ie, against Repugs) since St Ronnie's storm, to justify voter suppression.