The Republican Party Is Desperate

     Tear gas rained downed as a few hundred officers faced off against a mob nearly three times their size. Barricades were thrown about and priceless antiques significant to American democracy were stained with blood as officers continued to fall, being stabbed with American flags, Confederate flags, and "Blue Lives Matter" flags, having their bodies crushed between people and property alike, and being sent into medical emergencies in attempted lynchings with their own weapons. A scene one might expect in Baghdad or Benghazi, not at the cradle of democracy in the Western world.

     Still, in spite of the deniers and conspiracy theorists refusing to shut up, the insurrection of January 6th, 2021, happened, and it was the result of a man's injured pride and the scared legions of lawmakers who decided disillusioning the entire nation with their democratic process was better than losing an election that anyone who paid attention to reasonable people predicted he would lose.

     How did it come to this? The answer is quite simple: the Republican Party is desperate. Were it not for two institutions-- the Electoral College and the Senate-- the GOP would not exist at a national level. The past two Republican presidents came into office in spite of losing the popular vote: Clinton won both of his elections in 1992 and 1996, Obama his in 2008 and 2012, and Biden his first in 2020. The election of 2000 was marred by Southern voter suppression that resulted in Al Gore winning the popular vote and bringing his case before the Supreme Court, which handed George W. Bush the presidency. Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. In spite of becoming the fifth Republican president to lose the popular vote but have the election handed to him by a technicality, his ego was hurt enough for him to launch a two-year study into voter fraud, which confirmed that he had lost the popular vote. 

     The Senate was designed to preserve power for slaveholding states, and it seems to work well for Jim Crow Republicans. Wyoming has as much of a voice as California in spite of having a population a small percentage of the size of Los Angeles alone. These rural states tend to lean conservative, and snakes like Mitch McConnell get to do what they do best: obstruct. The only modern Republican president considered passable by even the most conservative-leaning presidential scholars is Ronald Reagan, who also happened to be the first. The solution that worked well in 1980: cutting corporate taxes, was not supposed to be a formula for an entire political party to repeat in 2001 and 2017. The corporate income tax rates are at 21 percent, down from a high of 60 percent and on par with the nations in Europe. Republicans have no more room to cut corporate taxes, and their whining about the deficit isn't helping their cause, either.

     The Republican Party is desperate: without a platform, backed into a corner, offering nothing but obstruction.