Republicans pick performance over problem-solving
It’s often pointed out that, under the tutelage of former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party abandoned long-held conservative orthodoxies and interests — think lowering the debt and deficit and anti-protectionism — in favor of whatever Trump just said.
Lest you think lawmakers have been sitting on their hands with Trump out of office, they’ve actually been dizzyingly busy.
Republican state lawmakers across America have introduced more than 500 anti-abortion laws just this year. Since 2021, Republican state legislators have introduced more than 200 bills to combat critical race theory.
Driven by the same GOP outrage machine, there have been 1,586 books banned in schools between August of 2021 and April of 2022, most of which targeted LGBTQ people and people of color.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans introduced a staggering 440 bills with provisions that would restrict voting access in 2021. So far in 2022, they’re at 393.
By the sheer volume of new laws, it almost feels like the GOP is solving actual problems. But in reality, Republicans have become the Do Nothing Party.
After a slew of mass shootings, the vast majority of elected Republicans have offered zero changes to our current gun laws. Even things that are popular, such as universal background checks and boosting the age minimum to purchase an assault rifle, have met with total opposition from lawmakers.
Where Republicans have offered solutions, they’ve not explicitly addressed guns but instead inane things like locking doors, more fencing, window coverings, bulletproof backpacks and prayer in school.
A shocking poll from CBS News/YouGov shows just how uninterested Republicans are in doing something about these tragic incidents. While 85% of Democrats and 73% of independents say mass shootings can be stopped, nearly half of Republicans said mass shootings should be accepted as part of a free society.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around that alarming apathy and the perplexing irony in asserting that a society in which grocery stores, movie theaters, churches, synagogues, malls, businesses, news outlets, concerts, hospitals, sporting events and schools are no longer safe is still somehow “free.”
It’s not just mass shootings. Republicans have decided we just have to accept a whole host of very real problems. Many Republicans insisted we just have to live with COVID-19 and fought commonsense precautions, like masking, social distancing, vaccines and boosters. More than a million Americans have died from COVID-19 — and yet a majority of Republicans believe the government spent too much money combating the deadly virus.
Republicans also think there’s little to be done about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, a deadly event meant to overturn a democratic election.
Similarly, Republicans don’t seem at all concerned about the rise in domestic terrorism incidents from white supremacists and anti-government extremists on the far right. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said bluntly that right-wing domestic terrorism doesn’t exist. And every Republican lawmaker in the House, save one, voted against expanding resources to investigate and respond to domestic terrorism.
Guess we’ll just have to live with that, too. Same goes for climate change, the war in Ukraine, and infrastructure issues, about which most Republican lawmakers want to do little or nothing.
These aren’t liberal problems. They’re American problems. If it weren’t so intent on inventing wedge issues and waging culture wars, the GOP could offer conservative ideas to help solve them. Instead, they keep doing nothing. After all, it’s so much easier to slay imaginary dragons.