Shortly after arriving in Washington, D.C., 25 years ago, I learned something about the professional Republican class, the folks who made their money working for the party or its politicians.
While most congressional staffers were pretty conservative, there were plenty of people working as political professionals who didn’t really hold any beliefs very strongly at all. Advancing economic freedom, protecting gun owners’ rights, making the country more prosperous, or pushing a particular foreign policy — for a sizable portion of the political class, none of these things really mattered. Their job was to get Republicans elected.
BELTWAY CONFIDENTIAL: THE PERVASIVE, ENDURING ROT OF ROE V. WADE
Then there was a bigger group: The fiscal conservative/social moderate. Hundreds of these guys worked as professional Republicans, and at best, they did not care about the “social issues” and just wanted them to go away. Gay marriage, abortion, and religious liberty were “distractions” in their minds.
Over my first few years here, I learned how many full-time Republicans were ardently pro-choice.
Among pro-life conservatives, it was known: The party establishment doesn’t care about our issues. They don’t even agree with us. They just use us for our votes and then toss us to the curb.
That’s how Republicans could run as the pro-life party for 40 years and never overturn Roe v. Wade.
Since the Roe ruling in 1973, the GOP has been pro-life. Since 1976, the party platform has called for a constitutional amendment to protect the unborn. So if you were working as a Republican, you were, officially, working to end abortion.
In that light, consider this article by a Republican operative who quit the party on principle recently:
This former Republican writes: “WHAT FINALLY BROKE ME out of my comfortable cocoon had nothing to do with Trump or his grip on the Republican party. Rather, it was the rightward lurch of the Supreme Court and the lengths to which the right was willing to go to undermine established legal precedents and access to reproductive rights.”
The dude wasn’t driven out of the party by Trump’s dishonesty or self-dealing or effort to overturn his election loss.
EDITORIAL: OVERTURN ROE V. WADE
This man, who had drawn a salary from Republicans his whole life, was driven out because Trump delivered, partly, on the promise that Republicans had been making to their voters for 50 years.
Imagine the shock at finding the Republican Party actually delivering what it promised!