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. For the four years Trump was in office, the GOP busied itself with the projects he ordained important, and little else.

Now, with Trump relegated to Mar-a-Lago and his floundering social media endeavor, the GOP’s been left to its own devices. Lest you think lawmakers have been sitting on their hands, they’ve actually been dizzyingly busy introducing hundreds of pieces of legislation all over the country.

Indeed, Republican state lawmakers across America have introduced more than 500 anti-abortion laws…just this year, which is only halfway done.

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. Busy, busy, busy.

By the sheer volume of new laws, it almost feels like the GOP is solving actual problems. Except when it comes to those, Republicans have become the Do Nothing Party.

After a slew of horrific mass shootings, including in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children were senselessly slaughtered, the vast majority of elected Republicans have offered zero changes to our current gun laws.

Even things that are popular — including among Republican voters — like universal background checks and boosting the age minimum to purchase an assault rifle, have been met with total opposition from lawmakers.

Where Republicans have offered solutions, as BuzzFeed laid out, 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 new 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, the capitulation that we must just live with the mass murder of innocent people in bunches, 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.”

But it’s not just mass shootings. Republicans have decided we just have to accept a whole host of very real problems.

After dismissing COVID-19 as nothing more than a cold, then promising it would be gone within a few months, then blaming Democrats for inventing new variants, many Republicans insisted we just have to live with it, and fought common sense precautions, like masking, social distancing, vaccines and boosters. All of this, while COVID-19 ravaged red states. 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. The chair of the Republican National Committee said the investigation into that dark day amounts to the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Trump has said that if he were re-elected in 2024, he’d consider pardoning anyone convicted in that attack. Will he also consider pardoning others who assault and kill police officers on the streets of our cities?

Similarly, Republicans don’t seem at all concerned about the very real rise in domestic terrorism incidents from white supremacists and antigovernment extremists on the far right. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said bluntly that rightwing domestic terrorism “doesn’t exist.” (It does, and it is up.) And every Republican lawmaker in the House, save one, voted against a bill to expand 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, and they’re real and urgent.

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, the Do Nothings keep doing nothing. After all, it’s so much easier to slay imaginary dragons.