Don’t drink transmission fluid. Or perform a swan dive off the Empire State Building. Or munch on a Tide Pod.
Be cautious, in other words, of the advice offered in “Boycott the Republican Party,” the Atlantic opinion piece authored by Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes, both scholars at the Brookings Institution. Their erudite suggestion? Conservatives should “vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).”
My Sunday column at Townhall.com, “Friendly Suicide Advice for the GOP,” reviewed their proposal and analysis. “[H]orrified” by President Trump, they see congressional Republicans as enablers of his “existential” threat “to American democracy.”
Big government has long frightened me, so I’m certainly not suggesting anyone relax just now. I do wonder, however, why these writers and others in the media have been so blasé to past presidential usurpations (noted in the column) with life-and-death implications.
Rauch and Wittes go so far as to reassuringly explain that “the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order.”
Really?
In 2016, every single Democratic Party U.S. Senator voted to partially repeal the First Amendment of the Constitution. The Democrats’ proposal would have largely ended the prohibition that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” replacing it with “Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.”
In our present “democratic order,” the Constitution recognizes the primary importance of walling off political speech from regulation by these very politicians. The Democrats seek to repeal that order . . . that freedom . . . that criticism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
