Republicans are ceding the battlefield to the Democrats

They're so busy defending Trump, they're making strategic political errors

When was the last time you heard a Republican pounding on their perennial “law and order” drum?  Not since January 6, I’ll bet.

How can they?  Forty-five Republican senators voted yesterday to support the man who incited the attack on the United States Capitol that killed one cop and left “dozens” injured, according to the Washington Post. “I’ve talked to officers who have done two tours in Iraq, who said this was scarier to them than their time in combat,” acting D.C. police chief Robert J. Contee III told the Post after talking to one of his officers who was hit with a stun gun wielded by one of the rioters.  Another cop was hit with a bat, another was clobbered with a wrench, and a third was beaten with a flagpole flying the American flag.

In addition to the Capitol policeman who was killed, 81 officers from the Capitol police force and 58 metropolitan D.C. police were injured in the attack on the Capitol by rioters supporting Donald Trump, according to a justice department document filed in court two days ago.  Footage of the riot shows the mob dragging police officers down the Capitol steps, and another cop being crushed by a door in an assault on him inside the building.

How will Republicans get up on their high horses and complain about Democrats wanting to “defund the police” after the assault on the Capitol incited by their putative leader, Donald Trump?  More than 120 house Republicans voted to support Trump’s lie that Arizona’s election was somehow stolen from him, and 138 of them voted against certifying the electoral ballots of Pennsylvania.  As the Republicans were voting to support Trump’s lies, police injured during the riot were being treated in area hospitals nearby, and other cops were out on the streets trying to identify rioters and arrest them.  The house chamber and the Capitol building itself had been secured from the rioters only a few hours before.

Law and order, you say, Republicans? Can you imagine how they would be squealing if it had been Black Lives Matter protesters who assaulted the Capitol and beat up cops, not to mention killing one of them by pounding him in the head with a metal fire extinguisher?  Three weeks later, it seems to have been erased from their memories that it was Trump supporters who assaulted and killed a cop on the grounds of the Capitol. 

I haven’t heard a peep from the 45 Republican senators who just voted against holding an impeachment trial in the senate, and I haven’t heard a squeak from the 138 house Republicans who voted to affirm Trump’s lies about how a fraudulent election was stolen from him in the states of Arizona and Pennsylvania. 

They are ceding the law and order issue to the Democrats by failing to aggressively condemn the Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, assaulted cops and killed one of them.

That’s not the only issue they’re surrendering.  Yesterday Democrats seized the issue of national security, long a favorite of Republicans, when news of President Biden’s aggressive phone call with Russian president Putin was revealed.  Biden went after Putin for all the things that the Republican’s Dear Leader Trump had been silent on for four years.  He criticized Putin for his jailing of opposition leader Alexi Navalny and questioned him about the results of the investigation into his poisoning, then he expressed this country’s opposition to his suppression of protests in favor of Navalny. He also confronted Putin about the bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and after all of that, he apparently made a deal with him to extend the new START nuclear arms treaty which limits the number of nuclear warheads deployed by both Russia and the U.S. 

Trump spent four years endorsing by his silence every single outrage Putin committed on the international stage, including waging the war in eastern Ukraine and continuing the seizure and occupation of Crimea.  From the Republican Party on these vital issues of national security?  Not a peep.  Now it’s a Democratic issue.

On a less crucial, yet still important note, Republicans appear to have ceded the issue of supporting American business interests to Democrats.  I mean, when the Chamber of Commerce comes out and announces that it will withhold its financial support of politicians who have railed against the validity of Biden’s election victory, the proverbial ground has shifted beneath the proverbial American political system. 

It’s not just the Chamber.  CNN has reported that multiple U.S. corporations will stop donating  to politicians who voted against certifying Biden’s electoral college victory.  All of them are Republicans, every single one.  Companies refusing to donate to these Republicans include American Express, Marriot hotels, AT&T, Commerce Bank, Comcast, Disney, Dow Chemical, Verizon, Walmart, Mastercard, and there are others.  No more big checks to Republican campaigns, no more invitations to give lucrative speeches to corporate conclaves, no more big fat steak lunches at the Palm for you, Cruz, Hawley, McCarthy, Jordan and the rest of you.

So let’s review: Republicans are no longer the party of law and order, they’re no longer in favor of a robust national defense, they’re no longer the party of big business…hmmm…then just what are they the party of?

Oh!  I remember!  They’re the party of Donald Trump! 

Republicans may refuse on constitutional grounds to hold Trump accountable for his incitement of the riot that drove them from the floor of the house and the senate, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they defend voting in favor of the man who inspired and sanctioned beating cops.