WHERE IS THE BOTTOM WITH THE GOP?

 

I'm old enough to remember that way back in 1987, Douglas H. Ginsburg, then President Ronald Reagan's choice to be on the Supreme court,  had to withdraw himself from that appointment.  Why?  Because he admitted that he smoked marijuana years earlier.  Today we live in a world where Robert F Kennedy JR will admit to being a heroin addict and recently said that he once snorted cocaine off a toilet seat, and nobody seems to mind that he's in the Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Obviously, the pendulum has swung a long way.

This brings us to the upcoming mid term election, in which two Republican candidates have been accused of shameful behavior and yet are staying in the race.  The first is Ken Paxton, who is running for the Senate in Texas.  Paxton's history of corruption is stunning: in 2023 while he was serving as Attorney General, the Texas House of Representatives investigated him and  produced a 20 point list of impeachable offenses.  He was impeached by a landslide vote in the  majority Republican Texas House, and he was only the third state government official to be impeached in Texas history, and the first in this century.   Sadly,  the Texas Senate failed to vote to remove him from office.  It should be pointed out that much of this investigation came from information brought by whistleblowers in Paxton's own office, making them hardly partisan.  Despite this, Paxton has barreled on with his campaign for the Senate, shrugging off all the charges and making false claims about his opponent, James Talarico.

And then there's Representative Max Miller from Ohio.  He has been accused of physical violence in the past by three different women; his ex wife claims that he once held a loaded gun to her head and fractured a bone  in their two year daughter.  Perhaps the most damning statement made about Miller came from a man who is both his former father in law and a fellow Republican Congressman,  Senator Bernie Moreno, who has said that Miller should retire from congress, adding that he showed “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior.” Sadly, few Republican members of the House of Representatives have called for Miller to step down, and he appears determined to continue running, dismissing all of the allegations and calling all of his accusers liars.

It's obvious that the rot here starts at the top; both men are clearly hoping that the same way that Donald Trump shrugged aside two impeachments and 34 felony counts to eventually re win the White House  will also allow them to glide to victory.  The level to which Donald Trump has brought down the standards of the GOP in the past ten years is sickening, with decent people in the party either falling in line behind him or leaving outright like Mitt Romney.  While the Democrats are far from perfect, when similar charges were made against congressional candidate Graham Platner recently, he eventually withdrew from the race.  But now the Republican party seems to believe that just ignoring corruption or sexual misconduct charges and calling them partisan is all that's needed to win.  Just look at Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who have all done the same.

The one silver lining here is that it appears that both Paxton and Miller may lose their campaigns, especially Miller, who even the Trump administration has been reluctant to endorse publicly.  Still, the mere fact that two such corrupt men are even running for congress is a stain on the Republican party and the nation in general.  Undeniably, the last decade of Trump has severely damaged this country.