The GOP needs to say, ‘Our bad’
In early 1861, folks gathered in Brownsville hoping to do their part to stop the slide toward Civil War. They elected a remarkable number of organizational vice presidents – 28 – and proclaimed their hope to “drop partisan feelings and prejudices.”
It didn’t work.
The dispute over slavery had become too volatile and incendiary. Americans turned from ballots to bullets.
Hundreds of thousands died.
The failure of politics to forestall the slaughter of the War Between the States speaks to us across the generations.
The meltdown of party politics in our own time is truly alarming. The siege of the Capitol and the election of modern “fire-eaters” like Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and political opportunists such as Guy Reschenthaler and Josh Hawley suggest troubling times ahead.
Back in the day, one side was more at fault than the other. The antebellum Democrats of the South couldn’t abide the election of a Republican – even one as centrist as Lincoln.
Today, the Republican party stands accused.
Sorry, but there is not equivalency on the other side to what Republicans are doing to undermine American democracy.
Republicans are out of control. They need to rein themselves in. There is a better way forward. For example:
Early last December, state Senate and House Republicans addressed a letter to the Pennsylvania congressional delegation which urged the Washington lawmakers to “reject” the state certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the November election.
The letter was signed by 64 state lawmakers, including local state Republican Reps. Matthew Dowling, Ryan Warner, and Bud Cook, plus state Sen. Patrick Stefano.
Stefano signed a similar letter dated Jan. 6. This one, containing the signatures of 27 Republican members of the state Senate, was addressed to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.
It urged McConnell and McCarthy to “dispute the certification” of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College vote “until an investigation is completed” of election fraud allegations, presumably by the senators themselves, since that job had already been done by the truest and best arbiters of such matters – the courts.
Adding to the injury these allegations inflicted was the bogus charge leveled by state Re. Frank Ryan in late December and tweeted out by President Trump – to wit, that Pennsylvania cast far more votes than it had voters in the November election.
These letters, of Dec. 4, Dec. 28, and Jan. 6, are still out there; never rescinded, never withdrawn, they document the sorry tale of the party’s turn from democracy; more immediately, they speak to the false narrative of a stolen election peddled by a lawless president.
What role the letters played in inciting some in the crowd to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 is up for debate.
But as Stephen Caruso and Elizabeth Hardison of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star perceptively noted in a Jan. 10 article, “Since November (2020), legislative Republicans have been at the center of challenges to Pennsylvania’s election results.”
While never “explicitly embracing” the full Trump narrative of a stolen election, Caruso and Hardison write, Harrisburg Republicans have never found it in their interest to step away from it, either.
Republican lawmakers always stopping “short of denouncing” the narrative, Caruso and Hardison reported, claiming that “pressure from their constituents required them to launch” objections that mirrored the ex-president’s own.
The now-classic example of this feckless behavior was state Senate Republican majority leader Kim Ward’s statement to the New York Times, that had she dissented from the Trumpian line, “I’d got my (Westmoreland County) house bombed …”
It’s not like all Republican leaders have given into their fears or abandoned common sense and democratic norms. State Rep. Natalie Mihalek of Washington County told the Capital-Star on Jan. 10, “I do believe words have consequences. And those consequences were on full display” at the national Capitol during the siege.
Bottom line, while political mea culpas are not easy, Pennsylvania Republicans need to get right by democracy. And they can begin the process by renouncing the three letters that played such a large role in denying the reality of Joe Biden’s election.
Both the state and nation need two strong political parties committed to democracy. Otherwise, we risk failure on a scale we haven’t seen since 1861.
Richard Robbins lives the Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.