Where Have The Honorable GOP Members Gone?

By Donald A. Collins | 29 June 2023
Church and State

(Photo: Dreamstime.com)

My 1953 Yale classmate Lowell Weicker just died.

I wish I had known him because at that time I was a Republican, but subsequently badly shaken and depressed by the Nixon scandal which Weicker so bravely and successfully assisted in helping cause the ignominious Nixon’s exit.

Weicker’s obituary in the June 29 Washington Post deserves your careful reading as it describes a career of honorable and—better yet—successful governing which left a lasting impact on Connecticut and on our federal government which exists to this day.

Read his obituary here.

What happened to his party is partly described in his obituary with the arrival of the Reagan Presidency.

You recall Reagan’s signature position as featured in his January 20, 1981 Inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to the problem: government is the problem’, Inaugural Address, 1981.

Read his full address here.

The GOP’s greedy ideological path downhill from there can be directly traced to Trump as our government is now bought and paid for by the corporations who decided they wanted it all and took it!

After Trump’s two Impeachments, the Senate had no guts and couldn’t save us from Trump, whose behavior had become an international embarrassment.

You can read again my June 26th op ed here which argues about how our presence in a second Gilded Age was evolved over time and now fully consummated by the undermining of reasonable government oversight by the rejection of the protective laws such as of Glass Steagall and Citizens United and thus consigning 60 percent of voters to paycheck to paycheck working lives.

Then you need to understand that Critical Race Theory so often in the news means a common misunderstanding of the term:

Critical race theory, or CRT, is an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society — from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Critical race theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. According to CRT, societal issues like Black Americans’ higher mortality rate, outsized exposure to police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and the rates of the death of Black women in childbirth are not unrelated anomalies. Critical Race Theory FAQs (NAACP Legal Defense Fund)

CRT does not focus on interpersonal bias or whether any individual person is racist. CRT helps us understand how laws and policies, even the ones that aren’t explicitly about race or racism (e.g., housing, health care, voting rights) can cause or worsen racial disparities. By focusing on laws, policies and systems, CRT helps us understand how and why racial injustice continues to persist in the U.S. despite the progress that has been made towards raciaequity.

Read the full article on CRT here.

Being against CRT is pushed by the demographically declining whites fear of replacement by minorities!

Present attempts by far-right conservatives to make Christianity our national religion is ably abetted by a right-wing Catholic majority on our Supreme Court which killed Roe Casey on June 24th last year and threw our highest court and our democracy into dangerous disrespect by most Americans.

Are there any Lowell Weicker’s left in the GOP? None are currently running for President.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us” and “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”.

Former CT Governor Lowell Weicker dies at 92

Ronald Reagan’s Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

Critical race theory: Experts break down what it actually means

‘Captured court’: Hayes on Leonard Leo’s two-fold plan to form this Supreme Court

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