At the end of the General Assembly’s regular session, MAGA super-majority House Republicans had fun ridiculing the super-minority Democrats by marking what looked like Bingo cards.
Anderson County pundit and essayist Teri Carter, a frequent Forward Kentucky contributor, lit into them on Facebook:
“This is a leadership problem, and it exists in both chambers. As another elected Republican in Frankfort told me in the fall of 2023: The bad thing about having such a huge supermajority is that we do really stupid stuff, because we can.
“They keep getting re-elected. Which is a voter problem.
“And voters seem to like the cruelty. Which is a basic human decency problem.
“I’m worried about us.”
There’s a solution to the problems: Vote them out. Every one of them.
That’s mission impossible on Nov. 3 because for the second straight election cycle, Team Blue couldn’t get anybody to run in most Republican state House and Senate districts. If you live where no Democrat is on the ballot, write one in. Show the Republicans that Democrats haven’t quite gone the way of dinosaurs.
I’ve been voting since 1968, and I’ve never cast a Republican ballot. But I sincerely regret the degeneration of the party of “Lincoln and Liberty” into a cult of cruelty led by a president who is an authoritarian at best, a fascist at worst. That decades-long descent from the noble party of The Great Emancipator to the gutter party of the Yankee George Wallace is one of the most lamentable tragedies in American history, a subject I taught for 24 years at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah.
“Many a truth is spoken in jest” is an old expression. There’s veracity in the joke that if Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, and Southern Democrat-turned-Confederate Jeff Davis rose from the dead, the former would be a Democrat; the latter, a Republican. Many of the forebears of the current GOP in the old Confederacy and in border states like Kentucky were white supremacist Democrats.
The MAGA GOP is the party of Trump and hate. The party of racism. Sexism. Misogyny. Nativism. Xenophobia. Anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Christian Nationalism. Militarism. Elitism. Greed.
Doubtless, Trump and his MAGA faithful would banish from the party as hated “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only) moderate and even liberal late 20th-century Republicans of my youth. Their numbers included U.S. Sen. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, who pleaded with his party to reject the right-wing extremism of groups like the John Birch Society, which claimed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist. Birchers and their ilk are mainstream MAGA..
MAGA politics includes unrelenting attacks on two pillars of democratic government: organized labor and public schools. Occasionally, a GOP lawmaker in Frankfort will vote for a bill that benefits to some extent organized labor or public schools. But with precious few exceptions, Kentucky Republicans are united behind the big union-busting and public school gutting bills – ”right to work” and private school vouchers come to mind. They are all in, too, on legislation that enriches the already rich, makes our workplaces and the products we consume less safe, denies a woman’s right to an abortion, breaches the constitutional wall that separates church and state, curbs LGBTQ, women’s and minority rights, curtails academic freedom, whitens history, and makes our gun happy state even gun happier.
“WE’RE NOT PERFECT, BUT THEY’RE NUTS,” says a novelty Democratic button, also along the lines of “many a truth …”
With nearly every Republican legislator in Washington and Frankfort cheering him on, Trump is helming the GOP toward a Christian nationalist theocracy and/or a trans-Atlantic version of Viktor Orban or Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy.
I’m a Democrat because my party in Frankfort (and Washington) supports unions and public schools consistently and because my party is also the party of human rights, human dignity, and human decency.
When it comes to organized labor, this old union retiree has never forgotten what the late J.R. Gray, a state representative, International Association of Machinists union official, and Kentucky labor secretary told me years ago: “History will tell you that the Democrats ramrodded every meaningful piece of legislation for the benefit of working people.”
Gray was a devout Democrat. But he got his history right.
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