Ask a mainstream journalist why President Donald Trump was elected, and you’ll probably get some version of the same answer: The 45th and 47th president was only elected because a lot of Republicans are rotten.
The media are right about the rotten part. But they’re accusing the wrong Republicans.
Trump captured, and still dominates, the hearts and minds of the party faithful because establishment Republicans refused to lead. For decades, the base elected politicians who promised to do one thing, then got to Washington and did something else — or nothing at all. These faithless politicians are still with us and still blocking the progress America needs, guaranteeing that Trump-style disruption is both here to stay and destined to intensify.
TRUMP SAYS HE WON’T SIGN OTHER BILLS UNTIL CONGRESS PASSES SAVE AMERICA ACT
In late February, a small group of Republican senators majorly delayed, and may have even killed, one of the Right’s top priorities — the SAVE Act. The bill would require that voters show valid identification before casting a ballot in federal elections. It would also require people to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Gallup polling shows that more than 4 out of 5 Americans support these reforms. Even people who dispute Trump’s assertions of widespread fraud still support these measures to protect the integrity of the ballot box. This is basic, even obvious, stuff.
But four Senate Republicans said no — not only to the president, but to their own voters as well as the vast majority of the nation. Using a procedural tactic, Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Curtis (R-UT) refused to allow an open debate on the Senate floor about the SAVE Act. Tillis is a co-sponsor of the SAVE Act, but now that it’s in the news and Trump is demanding action, the senator won’t even let his colleagues discuss it on the record. That’s right: The 53-member GOP Senate majority can’t bring its own bill up for a vote. It’s not clear when, or if, that will ever happen.
No wonder Republican primary voters are enraged at their party. No wonder they want a brash bulldozer of a disrupter such as Trump. They’re sick of electing Republican majorities that refuse to act like Republican majorities.
The base has been here too many times to count. They elected former President George W. Bush, then got enormous expansions to the entitlement state and budget-busting bailouts. They elected Republican majorities in 2010, then saw no meaningful cuts in unprecedented federal spending. They elected Republican majorities again in 2016 to support Trump, but when it came time to repeal and replace Obamacare, the GOP Congress couldn’t pass what the GOP president promised to sign. And for years, voters elected Republicans to get the southern border under control. But only Trump’s crackdown worked — a crackdown that Republicans in Congress had literally nothing to do with.
At every stage, many Republican leaders haven’t deserved to be called Republicans or leaders. They’ve effectively given the middle finger to the Americans who trusted them with their vote. To this day, huge numbers of GOP officials and donors are uncomfortable with the MAGA crowd. They should feel uncomfortable, but not because of MAGA. They deserve discomfort because they defy their supposed principles, to say nothing of representative democracy.
Trump has remade much of the GOP in the past decade. Yet the latest fiasco in the Senate shows that many Republicans still hold to the old ways, when elected officials could count on the base’s vote while ignoring the base’s views. Even if the president purges the GOP of every establishmentarian, Washington continually tempts politicians to accept the status quo, seek the media’s empty accolades, and forget why they were elected and who elected them. Republicans are always at risk of becoming part of the problem. But people — on the Right, the middle, and even some on the Left — vote for the GOP because they want solutions.
GOP SENATORS PUSH BACK AGAINST SCHUMER’S ‘JIM CROW 2.0’ DESCRIPTION OF SAVE ACT
Obviously, there are complicated realities to passing legislation, the filibuster chief among them. But somehow, Democrats don’t have as many problems passing their priorities: Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and former President Joe Biden’s multiple spending blowouts. They at least know how to bring big bills up for a vote. The GOP, even mostly transformed by Trump, still struggles to get that far.
The president isn’t the one standing in the way. It’s the lesser Republicans who never get tired of doing nothing, the wrong thing, or both. So long as they block even basic and wildly popular reforms such as voter identification, the base will demand the intensification of the MAGA revolution. Like so many other Republicans over the past decade, the current naysaying senators think they’re standing up to Trump. In fact, they’re empowering him and ensuring that voters elect more leaders like him.
John Tillman is CEO of the American Culture Project.