Republican Sen. Mitt Romny [sic] (Utah) on Saturday denounced President Trump's firings of several inspector generals in various federal government offices as a "threat to accountable democracy."We know what a oligarch Romney is, both in his personal identity and his politics, from his losing 2012 Presidential campaign as the Republican nominee against Obama. His most memorable campaign line was, "Corporations are people, my friend." Romney didn't oppose Citizens United with essentially authorized unlimited campaign contribution by corporations and the wealthiest. He didn't advocate rolling back the massive Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest that were set to expire. (Neither did Obama and Biden, as it turned out soon after the election.)
"The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented; doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose. It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power," Romney tweeted. ...
Romney was the sole Republican in the Senate to deviate from his party and vote to convict Trump on one of the two charges of impeachment brought against Trump by House Democrats.
Trump has since targeted Romney, and the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., has even called for the Utah senator to be ousted from the Republican party.
He didn't advocate better regulation of business and banking, or more aggressive measures against climate change. He certainly didn't want to ban the kind of predatory capitalist practices that he used as head of Bain Capital. He didn't advocate for a more peace-oriented foreign policy, or oppose new corporate-deregulation "trade" treaties. Lord knows he didn't advocate for higher wages for workers or laws to facilitate union organizing!
He didn't advocate to protect the right to abortion. He pandered to the Christian fundamentalist right, even though many of them in theory regarded Romney's own Mormon faith as a false religion and refused to acknowledge the Mormons' self-identification as Christian. And, of course, he had no criticism of the Obama Administration for declining to prosecute banker executives for crimes committed in the massive mortgage fraud prior to the 2007-8 crisis. Or for advocating "looking forward, not backward" de facto impunity to people involved in the torture crimes during the Cheney-Bush Administration.
He was a standard conservative Republican, in other words, who was completely fine with the continually radicalizing direction of his Party. The process that in 2016 put an incompetent Orange Clown in the White House.
It made some obvious political sense for national Democratic campaigns to highlight points of bipartisan overlap with the Republicans up through 1992. When Clinton carried California that year, signaling California's transformation into a "safe" Democratic state in Presidential elections. That meant there was less incentive to fish for Presidential votes in Republican-leaning Southern states by putting forward Republican-lite positions and themes.
Unfortunately, the Democrats went right on doing just that. And neglected to do what they really did need, which was a prolonged effort to build the Democratic Party in more conservative states so that the party could successfully contest Republican dominance on the basis of a "national" (i.e., not conservative) basis. Just being able to actively contest Republican House and Senate and gubernatorial candidates would have forced the Republicans to use more resources on campaigns in those states instead of using them on more competitive states against Democrats.
The shock of having Donald Trump as President is something the more establishment Democrats have responded to by doubling-down on their desire to highlight whatever Republicans they can find to agree with them. The NeverTrumper group of conservative Republicans from Butcher's Bill Kristol to Jennifer Rubin to David Frum and various others have been particularly attractive for Democrats to glob onto and post to Facebook, tweet out, and generally look to for rhetorical insights.
This gets to the problem of political "framing" to which the linguist George Lakoff has been calling attention for years. The problem is that when Democrats defer to conservative Republicans like Romney and the NeverTrumpers and more-or-less hide behind such Republicans for cover, they wind up deferring to Republicans on the framing of issues instead of promoting their own framing.
It's not that Democrats shouldn't try to exploit Republican criticisms of Trump. Of course they should.
But if Democratic politicians and publicists are hiding behind Republicans because they don't believe in their own positions or don't have the imagination to defend them properly, that's not a good thing.
And that's a big aspect of the asymmetric partisan polarization that is unfortunately so strongly defines the American political scene today.
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