Richard Hanna, the GOP representative from New York’s 22nd Congressional District, has endorsed Hilary Clinton for president. Since he has already announced that he will retire from office this year, the gesture will cost him nothing politically. He is rightly identified as one of the top leftist Republicans in the U.S. House. So it’s easy to accept the line that his endorsement should come as no surprise. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be gained by pondering what his action signifies.
Despite being challenged in the GOP primary in 2014 Richard Hanna won re-election to a seat in Congress from a district so conservative that the Democrats didn’t bother to field a candidate against him in the 2014. Using the 80-20 rubric former GOP Chairman Michael Steele was fond of citing, one might be tempted to conclude that GOP voters in that District did well to nominate Hanna in the 2014 primary, instead of his more conservative opponent, Claudia Tenney. After all, in the 113th Congress (2013-2014) Hanna voted with the GOP majority 85 percent of the time. He’s a good Republican, right?
The fact is, however, that Hanna’s GOP vote percentage is more than reversed when it comes to votes involving the abortion or the legalized coercion of conscience demanded by the enforcers of the LBGT agenda. Hanna is the sort of “Republican” the GOP’s quisling leaders prefer.
I talked about this predilection in an article I wrote in 2009, when GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava withdrew from contention in the special election in NY’s 23rd Congressional District, and endorsed her Democrat opponent. She did so to thwart a conservative candidate whose 3rd party challenge posed a likely threat to both the so-called “major” party candidates. Her withdrawal came after Newt Gingrich’s endorsement failed to discourage GOP conservatives from rejecting her on account of her left leaning habits as a State legislator. In my article I noted that Gingrich’s endorsement, “cited her stands on the money issues… warning conservative activists that their support for a third-party candidate … is a ‘mistake’”:
Former U.S. House speaker Gingrich wants to make it crystal clear that conservative stands on issues of moral principle are not an essential part of the Republican identity. So long as a candidate is right on the issues of money and power, that’s all that matters. In a CNN interview the present Minority Leader in the House, John Boehner, took pains to make a similar point. “Clearly she would be on the left side of our party,” said Boehner, who had financially supported the campaign of the New York assemblywoman. “…We accept moderates in our party and we want moderates in our party.” He then went on to reject the notion that Scozzafava’s failure had anything to do with “pressure by the conservative “Tea Party” movement, citing his participation at rallies in Bakersfield, Calif., and Ohio…. I’ve work with these people, and what they’re concerned about is the growing size of government. They want someone who’s really going to actively reduce spending and reduce control here in Washington.”
The present Republican party has, in practice, entirely repudiated real dedication to the principles of God-endowed right, including life and liberty, with which it began. Since the end of the Reagan era the GOP has simply been overpowered by the temptation that has dogged its heels since the era of Reconstruction after the Civil War. It has irreversibly ceased to be the Party of Lincoln.
This is the main reason was prey to being hijacked by someone like Donald Trump. Unmoored by any reliable attachment to just moral principles, Donald Trump is an exaggerated caricature of the successful businessman the GOP quislings prefer to see in politics. Mr. Trump’s cynical, self-satisfying pursuit of money and power is, like their own, flexibly indifferent to any obligation to serve the public good. As I wrote in 2009 of the GOP quislings preference for Scozzafava:
Even as their nominee falls prey to… revulsion caused by her denial of the moral principles of liberty…GOP leaders want to pretend that the angry uprising cause by the Obama faction’s betrayal of American values has nothing to do with moral concerns. They desperately want the votes and power that angry uprising may deliver. But they don’t want to represent Americans who know in their hearts that the Obama threat isn’t just about money or the usual Washington power grab. It represents a profound destruction of the whole American way of life, destruction rooted in … rejection of the moral idea of God-given individual rights, and constitutional government based on the consent of the people. The battle with the Obama faction is in the end a struggle to determine whether this moral concept of humanity will continue as the basis for American government.
Liberty doesn’t matter. Justice doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but survival in power and material success. Their lip-service to the contrary notwithstanding, this rejection of the moral premises of America’s identity as a nation is what the two so-called major Parties have in common. As I point out in an article published earlier this week, their nominees’ acceptance speeches give evidence of this common ground.
The most glaring evidence is not just in what each nominee said. It’s in what both nominees neglected to say, or even mention, except expediently at the very end of their remarks. Read the article mentioned. See for yourself their glaring omission. It has to do with what is the very foundation of the sovereign authority with which the America people rightly claim to govern themselves. Without it, every effort to sustain, defend and better ourselves is utterly demoralized. So it raises the serious specter of a future in which, as a free people, we cease to exist.