Leaving the Republican Party
I have reached the breaking point. I can no longer in good conscience identify myself as a registered Republican.
What has caused me to jump ship after many years of GOP registration and steadfast devotion? Where do I begin?
At the state level, we have House Speaker Mike Turzai telling a group of Republican partisans that “Voter ID” would enable Mitt Romney to capture Pennsylvania. The Speaker explained that his words were “taken out of context,” of course. House State Government Committee Chairman Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler) believes that when one wishes to advocate for gay rights or imposing sensible restrictions on possession of firearms, that you either preclude them from speaking or you drown them out by yelling, serving to emasculate them.
My State Representative, John Maher, voted for the 2001 legislative, rank and file, and public school teacher pension sweetener which helped to spawn our current $50 billion plus deficit calamity, for which taxpayers will foot the bill indefinitely. He voted for the 2005 middle-of-the -night legislative pay grab. He demonstrates no interest in eliminating ruinous property taxes or reining in reckless school boards which play fast and loose with taxpayer dollars.
Expenditures that have broken my community bring no condemnation from the Upper St. Clair Republican Committee, which serves to say to our elected officials, “Go right ahead and spend whatever you like. You will get no push-back from us.”
The Republican Party was willing to bring us to the brink of a partial shutdown of the vital Department of Homeland Security, choosing that battleground to fight President Obama’s Executive Order, which is intended to shield illegal immigrants from prosecution or deportation.
The GOP brought us President George W. Bush, a man unqualified to be the leader of the free world, a fake fiscal conservative who exploded spending and debt, passing a massive prescription drug plan with no way to pay for it. Bush also got us into a poorly managed war in Afghanistan and a disastrous and wholly unnecessary war in Iraq, destabilizing that country and the world, causing the loss of thousands of soldiers and injury to myriad others, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and inflicting expense that will reverberate through our economy indefinitely.
The party continues to allow Loretta Lynch, a reasonable, highly-qualified candidate for attorney general, to twist in the wind, demanding that legislation on its terms be approved if it is to grant her an up or down vote. Tradition and history have dictated that a president is generally entitled to appoint an attorney general of his choice unless there is some glaring flaw, something which does not exist with Lynch, but today, ideology and partisanship trump tradition and history, so the candidate becomes a pawn in a reckless game. The irony is that the unwillingness of the GOP to give her a vote causes the reviled Attorney General Eric Holder to remain in office, cutting off one’s nose to spite their face.
Although both parties are under the control of the National Rifle Association, which refuses to allow any common sense regulation or restriction on gun ownership to be enacted, it is the Republicans that are to the greatest extent lock, stock and barrel in the camp of this powerful and detrimental lobbying arm of gun manufacturers.
The GOP is the party which in Alabama recreates George Wallace’s barring of entry to black students at its state university by fighting tooth and nail against the issuance of marriage licenses to gay men and women. Will federal troops have to be sent in to enforce an order?
Republican State Senators in Idaho boycotted a legislative session opening prayer because it was delivered by a Hindu chaplain, a man who had the “audacity” to speak of selflessness and peace. The “good Christians” in the Senate cannot accept such a message from a “non-believer.”
Likely repeat Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum tells us that there is no right to privacy and as he demonstrated through his shameful involvement in the “life” of Terry Schiavo, that there is no right to die.
Who can forget failed Missouri Republican U. S. Senate candidate Todd Akin’s Neanderthal-style assertion that women who are “legitimately raped” cannot become pregnant? He and a like-minded band of offensive candidates from other states helped to sink Republican hopes to capture control of the Senate in 2012.
House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner is an undistinguished, coarse, crude, vulgar man. In 1995, he was caught distributing checks from tobacco company lobbyists on the floor of the House. He speaks of legislation from the opposite side of the aisle as “chicken crap,” he tells the Democrats to “get off their ass” to pass his version of Department of Homeland Security funding legislation, and taking a page out of the playbook of another GOP embarrassment, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Boehner goes to the Senate Democratic leader to say, “Go — yourself.” In an effort to show up the president, Boehner invites Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress two weeks before Israeli elections. This is our House “leader,” the man who is seen as the voice of our country? He does not speak for me and he is a profound embarrassment to individuals of dignity and refinement.
Finally, the straw that broke the camel’s back for me: The Senate “Gang of 47” took the unprecedented, stunning and offensive action to involve itself in the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear capability, serving to humiliate not only President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, but all Americans, as they set themselves up as having authority that is superior to that of the Commander in Chief. We are now understandably seen as a country deeply and bitterly divided down the middle, a nation which even in the area of foreign policy does not speak with one voice.
In elections to come, I will be a member of neither major political party. I will have no vote in primary elections, but I can hold my head high, being true to myself and my beliefs. I continue to revere and cherish traditional Republican tenets while harboring disdain and disgust for those who lead the party. I have not left the party; it has left me. Goodbye and good riddance, GOP. I will not miss you in the least.
Oren Spiegler is a resident of Upper St. Clair.