Hypocrisy or sincerity?

Lately I’ve been mulling about how far the Republican Party has fallen.

The proud party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Margaret Chase Smith seems barely recognizable these days. The ability to bind up the nation’s wounds, to use the bully pulpit, a man able to replicate the autobahn in the form of a splendid Interstate Highway System and most importantly a woman willing to take on the 1950s’ premier demagogue are missing in action.

A recent letter to the editor concluded with the phrase “in order to keep America free and strong.” I’m not sure how those admirable sentiments square with the fact that 17 Republican Attorneys General recently filed amicus briefs with a “bound to fail” attempt by the Texas Attorney General to tell four swing states that they made a mistake in saying that Biden-Harris had won their Electoral College votes. Is this the same party that claims to cherish states’ rights guaranteed by the 10th Amendment to our Constitution?

I fail to see how being complicit in an attempted coup by 126 members of the House of Representatives (Republicans) can be read as anything but a pledge of allegiance to an autocrat who vows not to concede that he lost the election 306-232 and may have to be dragged kicking and ranting that he won on Jan. 20. In the words of a highly respected economist and author Paul Krugman, “The point is that once a party gets into the habit of rejecting facts it doesn’t want to hear, one fact it’s bound to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election.”

I’d like to believe that respect for the rule of law and our Constitution (oldest written in the world) needs to be a two-way street. Unless a new moral and social contract is instituted to go from a twoparty system to one-party rule, I am afraid the politicians are likely to stay mirror reflections of who we truly are as a nation.

— Michael P. Gaul/ Vallejo