EJ Dionne on the Character of Today’s Republican Party

I’m catching up on EJ Dionne’s recent columns – a task that’s always worth whatever time it takes.  If you’ve ever read any of his books or heard him on the radio or seen him on TV, you know how level-headed and even-handed he is.  So it’s striking to me that so many of these recent columns are openly exasperated with today’s GOP and its refusal to engage constructively with the challenges facing our country.

Today’s GOP. Nuts Enough yet?

Take a quick look at Plain Vanilla Bipartisanship, The Republicans’ Lust for Impeachment, Paul Ryan’s Stale Ideas on Poverty and A Conservative Judiciary Run Amok, all from the last month, and then ask yourself why this country needs a Republican Party at all if this is all they have to offer.

This fall the Illinois GOP has given us a ballot full of candidates who will push the GOP even further to the right.  Jim Oberweis and Darlene Senger and Bruce Rauner and the rest are Tea Party darlings who illustrate perfectly the observation (quoted in another recent Dionne piece, Can the Voters Change the GOP?) that the Republican Party has been “‘hijacked’ by a ‘radical right wing’ that is not simply ‘anti-government’ but also ‘anti-governance.'”

The thing to remember is that, however fringe they may get, they can still win if we don’t do our job.  If the only voters who come out in November are the angry, myopic GOP base, then their candidates win and they get to deepen the incoherent, cruel mess EJ Dionne is describing.

The antidote is straightforward: Vote!  and Vote Democratic!