DAYTONA BEACH SHORES, Fla. -- If the polls are right the American people are about to elect a career criminal to the White House. A complete list of Hillary’s legal and ethical transgressions would overwhelm this article.
Suffice it to say that this blatantly corrupt serial failure has promised to maintain the destructive policies of the Obama Administration.
Should Hillary deliver on her campaign promises the United States will be moved closer to total collapse. But as she lies almost constantly, we the people cannot be sure what her policies will be, except in that they will be policies which best serve her own demonstrably corrupt self-interest. So, the best we can hope for is that, from time to time, she will be bribed to support policies which actually benefit the country.
While I do believe that our criminal class is entitled to political representation, electing the most prominent member of that class to national leadership is a bit much.
I’m sorry to say that a goodly share of the blame for the horrifying results of this election lies with the Republican Party. Hillary was eminently beatable. But by the largest margins in primary history the GOP nominated a politically inexperienced candidate who could not discipline himself to avoid the PR traps set for him by the Clinton campaign and its many media supporters. Trump’s flaws and stumbles became the focus, rather than his policies which are, by and large, the right ones for the country. He should have won but he blew the election himself.
Trump’s missteps were magnified by the refusal of so much of the Republican establishment to back him and that will have a serious post-electoral impact on the Party and its role in resisting the initiatives of a Clinton Administration.
And that is what concerns me. Where will the country and the Republican Party go from here? What I see as the most likely direction is not pretty.
I fear that Washington is about to return to a situation similar to a portion of Obama’s rule, when the Dems held the White House and the Senate while the Republicans had control of the House and used that to block many of the worst of Obama’s heinous proposals. This time, however, the GOP majority in the House is likely to be smaller and the rift in the Party between the conservatives and Trump supporters versus the traditional Party leadership will be more pronounced and more significant.
The Trump supporters will seek to blame the establishment for Trump’s loss, arguing with some justification that the Party cannot win when so much of its leadership refuses to support him for fear of losing their own privileged positions. They are likely to demand that House Republicans reject compromise with Clinton policies and take far more conservative positions on issues and bills than what the traditional leadership would be willing to countenance.
The Trump supporters will seek to blame the establishment for Trump’s loss, arguing with some justification that the Party cannot win when so much of its leadership refuses to support him for fear of losing their own privileged positions. They are likely to demand that House Republicans reject compromise with Clinton policies and take far more conservative positions on issues and bills than what the traditional leadership would be willing to countenance.
The establishment will seek to discredit the Trump supporters as having lost the election and marginalize them within the House. The leadership will not regard Clinton’s election as having sealed the leftward direction of America but rather as just another contest, the meaning of which will be made clear through political activity and compromise in Washington. Hoping to show that the Party is able to achieve gains through compromise and later hoping to take credit for those gains to broaden the GOP base, House Republican leadership is likely to work with the Clinton Administration to try to make progress.
We may well see a number of cases in which bills are passed by a combined majority of Democrats and the Republican leadership to the outrage of conservatives.
Given the bad blood which already exists between the GOP leaders and their conservative Party brethren, the current divide within the GOP could well broaden rather than heal. In such a case I would not be surprised to see the emergence of a third party movement from within the right wing of the Republican Party.
Whether things reach that extreme or not, anything other than unity within what will be a diminished Republican voice in Washington, especially after Hillary’s anticipated appointment of liberal/progressive justices to the Supreme Court, will simply open the floodgates to further Leftist/Democrat excesses and the continued transformation of our once vibrant, powerful, self-reliant nation into a weakened, non-productive, government-dependent wreck. And Hillary Clinton will become the wealthiest woman in the world.
As I come to the end of my life I am very unhappy with the future I see for America.