Hypocrisy

Congressman Collins

Republican Congressman Doug Collins is famed for his rants and tantrums. We got to see them in the House Intelligence Committee impeachment hearings. Now he has crossed the moral line.  He’s running for Senate in Georgia. But currently he is polling second to the current Republican Senator Kelly Loefler in a “jungle” election this November.  He hasn’t made the “dent” in the Republican electorate he expected, so he’s taken an extreme view to get attention.  This was his tweet Saturday night after hearing that twenty-seven year veteran Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died:

“RIP to the more than 30 million innocent babies that have been murdered during the decades that Ruth Bader Ginsburg defended pro-abortion laws.  With Donald Trump nominating a replacement that values human life, generations of unborn children have a chance to live”.

Collins hopes to make a further dent in the “right-to-life” (right-to-birth) crowd by dishonoring Ginsburg. Obviously he doesn’t value her “life”.  He’s a class guy – not.

Senate “Principles”

But there is a whole lot more hypocrisy in the Republican Party then just “Preacher” Doug Collins.  The Senate under Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell created an all-new “Senate principle” when conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in early 2016.  Then-President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland and sent his name to the Senate. Under McConnell, they refused to have a vote or a hearing to determine whether Judge Garland was qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice.  In fact, McConnell and most Republican Senators refused to even give him a meeting.

McConnell made it clear that he thought that a President should not be able to nominate during an election year. He called it the “McConnell Rule”.  He demanded that they wait until the results of the vote in the November election.  His statement was, “Let the people decide”.  And that was ten months before the election.

Power Grab

Now Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died.  Her body hasn’t grown cold, and McConnell is preparing to schedule a vote, perhaps even before the American people decide between Trump and Biden.  And if Biden wins, it’s clear that McConnell will still vote on Trump’s nominee. In four years he’s gone from “let the people decide” to, “we’ve got the power and we’re going to use it”.  And he snickers as he says it.

McConnell is OK with being a hypocrite – it creates more power. And he is able to justify the action by agreeing with Doug Collins – a new Court majority might restrict or end abortion. But Donald Trump and the GOP’s dedication to the “right-to-life” is pretty hypocritical in itself. There is the obvious: the “right-to-life” didn’t extend to the more than 200,000 dead from COVID-19 in the past seven months. And it doesn’t extend to taking care of the health and welfare of children now; much less the 30 million that Doug Collins wish were born.

But the hypocrisy goes even farther than that. 

Republican Leadership

There are folks who truly believe that abortion is taking a human life.  For most of them, it is a matter of their faith.  But for some leaders of the Republican Party, those folks are just fodder to gain power at the Supreme Court. The leadership caters to the Evangelical Christians, convincing them that their religious freedom is infringed by allowing others to exercise their religious beliefs.  Enforcing “Christian” beliefs about abortion on the entire nation is only one of their goals.  The entire litany of “wedge” issues is included:  LGBTQ rights, public education, and even support of racism.

They really don’t give a damn about all that.  It’s all about money and power. The Party is much more concerned about reducing Federal authority over business, income, and government regulations so the rich get richer. They are fixated on lowering taxes on the wealthy and feeding more taxpayer dollars to the military, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and oil industries.  They are making money in private prisons and immigrant detention facilities, and they like it.

So if they have to pay lip service to the “right-to-life” (right-to-birth) crowd, then it’s worth it.  Those folks vote, donate, and are dedicated campaign volunteers.  And while I know many are sincere in their beliefs, they are being taken for a ride.  And that’s the worst kind of hypocrisy.

Donald Trump’s Dream

The election of 2020 is about the competency of Donald Trump in the COVID-19 crisis.  It’s not a pretty picture, 200,000 dead, almost 7 million infected, and a nation divided over the simplest ways to contain the spread.  That’s all at the feet of the President, who knew about the looming threat in January. As we now know from his own words, he intentionally ignored it.  And even after it could no longer be ignored, instead of taking charge in a national crisis, he determined to let the Governors “run” this pandemic in fifty-six different ways, and then attacked their decisions.

It’s as if Franklin Roosevelt let the Governors run World War II, with the Ohio Marines going to Guadalcanal while the New York Navy sailed against the Japanese Fleet at Midway.  It wouldn’t work, and neither did Trump’s “plan”. 

The only thing that can save Trump now is to change the subject.  He must do anything to get American minds off of the pandemic.  A good “old fashioned” political fight in the Senate over the familiar ground of these wedge issues is exactly what Trump 2020 needs.  

We will bury Justice Ginsburg this week. Then we will get buried in the “right-to-life” debate. Let us not forget that 1000 Americans are losing their lives daily from this President’s failure to lead.  

Their deaths are on his hands.