Republicans have done it again. If you voted for Republican candidates back in November 2014 and allowed them to have majorities in the House and the Senate, you should know one thing: They’ve fallen short of fulfilling their campaign promises. They campaigned on defunding or defeating the Affordable Care Act and doing all manner of other things that simply have not happened. They campaigned on fears and insecurities, people voted, they made no real effort to stand by their promises, and that’s how the game is played. Before we get started, though, I should say I don’t support any of the candidates at all in either party.
What’s interesting now is the crazed frenzy by the Republican establishment to defeat Trump at all costs. Many times, we’ve heard or read about people exclaiming we must “save the Republican party!” I suppose they don’t realize that a majority of Republican voters have chosen Trump as their nominee, so when party leaders speak openly about preventing a Trump nomination by any means necessary, they are plainly talking about denying the majority of their own party’s voters a voice in the primaries.
There is one popular theory at the moment for how this will happen. If Kasich and Cruz campaign hard enough to prevent Trump from reaching 1,237 delegates in the primary elections, we will enter into what is known as a contested or brokered convention. If this happens, many of the delegates who were once bound by the votes of citizens all across the country will be free to vote for whomever they wish. Unfortunately, for the majority of Republicans who are disgusted at how their own elected officials have willfully neglected them over the past seven years, this will most likely result in the establishment maintaining power without voter support.
We’re witnessing the true face of the establishment. Trump is in the lead because he has campaigned against them in similar fashion to Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, and because of this, he is the target of the single most united effort on the part of the Republican leadership against a common enemy in a while. To many Republican voters, however, it would have been nice to see this effort applied when the Affordable Care Act was on the table or perhaps against the continued implementation of the National Defense Authorization Act sections 1021-1022, which grants the executive branch the authority to detain anyone indefinitely without a trial, but instead, Republican leaders have joined forces against the nominee chosen by the majority of their own voters.
However, for Republicans, it gets worse. There is another way the establishment could remain in power. You’ve probably heard rumors that they have considered launching a third party candidate’s campaign for the presidency as a way to splinter the party’s voters. This is to ensure that if they can’t secure the candidacy at the contested convention, the third party candidate will win enough votes from Trump to grant Clinton a cakewalk coronation instead of a fair fight.
How can this be? Why would the Republican establishment want Hillary Clinton to win the presidency? It actually makes sense if we keep in mind how docile Republicans have been in Congress over the past seven years. Sure, they may throw a wrench in the gears every once in a while, but they very rarely do anything to successfully advance a conservative agenda. Democrats really have more in common with the Republican establishment than anyone would admit, but that’s a topic for a different discussion.
In a nutshell, the establishment will not allow an anti-establishment candidate to win, especially when they have the power to hijack their own primary elections. I hope for the sake of the democratic process that none of these schemes are brought to fruition, but the fact that Republican leaders are talking about them should be proof enough of the value carried by your vote in their eyes.
For any Democrats who may be enjoying the death of the Republican Party from a distance, just imagine if Bernie Sanders had been your frontrunner. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that situation had been handled in the same way.
