This is what True Conservatives stand for: Cutting Taxes to starve the government of spending while balancing the budget with spending cuts that curtail financial support of the working poor and poor, harming education pushing in favor of those whose parents can afford private school, reducing the actions of public health again placing the poor at greater risk of being contaminated with insidious viruses and spending big bucks on national defense. We know this because this is what has happened in Kansas with their tax cuts and legislative actions to remain financially solvent.
In contrast the Democrats stand for government doing its jobs and protecting public safety, including public health. Thus, we have a proposal from President Obama to fund anti-Zika activities, but the GOP Congress refuses to bring the bill up. Mosquito season has already started in the South, the Virus is in Puerto Rico, and I guess the GOP is hoping a sufficient number of poor people die so they win the election in Florida in November.
This is not unlike their attitude toward health insurance. Their view is access to affordable health insurance is not a right. If you make bad decisions or have bad luck, and are unlucky enough to not have employer paid health insurance or the financial resources to afford health insurance, then too bad. The healthy should not have to subsidize your health insurance. The world was a cruel place for centuries and why should it change now when it will be a cost to people with money.
The irony in all this is that True Conservatives frequently site their beliefs in the models of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp: Supply Side Economics with a reliance on individual responsibility. I don't deny an element of truth in all that, it is just severe disagreement on where you draw the lines on individual responsibility and what a maximum tax rate should be. And of course, as a Conservative Democrat, I believe in balancing the budget when we are near full employment as we are today. Government has to work, it cannot be shut down or starved of revenues. When it is starved of revenues, infrastructure deteriorates, the environment deteriorates, and public health is at risk.
Yet, as conservative pundits remind us, both Reagan and Kent cared about the less wealthy. They believed society has a role to play in making society fair for the less wealthy, while encouraging them to be individually responsible. And they both believed in legitimizing undocumented immigrants and integrating them into society, which is what really made America great. Donald Trump is not a Reagan/Kemp conservative, as they would not evict 11 mm hard working people who want to live in the U.S.A.
So before I turn this over to James Hohmann of the Washington Post, let me tell you what disappoints me so far about the GOP Establishment. They have taken no insight into the public's absolute disgust with a singular focus on partisanship, and actively working to reduce the effectiveness of government. That is what is driving the rejection of the GOP. There are no RINO's left in the GOP, but when their were, the party was competitive in almost every state of the union, and that rejection of moderation of the message is what has been rejected by the rise of Donald Trump who as I have previously written is completely unqualified to be President, not to mention some of his proposed policies are awful.
"Jeffrey Frank recalls covering Kemp for a Buffalo newspaper in the early 1980s. “Kemp was a cheerful, generous man, but what most deserves recognition, in what’s left of the Republican Party, is less his fascination with such byways as the ‘Laffer Curve’ … and more his persistent voice on behalf of lifting up the needy, the jobless, the disenfranchised—take your pick among the shorthand expressions used to describe America’s poor,” Frank writes for The New Yorker. “His commitment to bettering the lives of African-Americans was passionate and genuine.” The distance between Kemp and Trump, Frank explains, “is a distance to be measured not only in degrees of ideology … but in the appeal … to the nation’s better angels. In this long season, that seems as distant as Jack Kemp’s stubborn inclination to do the decent thing.”
Conservative Post columnist Michael Gerson, who worked for Kemp early in his career before becoming George W. Bush’s speechwriter, recalls his courage. “In 1994, California Gov. Pete Wilson (along with many other Republicans) supported Proposition 187, which denied public services to illegal immigrants, including schooling for their children. In one of his finest hours, Kemp came out strongly against the measure, which he said would imply ‘an ugly antipathy toward all immigrants,’” Gerson wrote in a column last fall. “This stand probably hurt Kemp’s own presidential prospects.”
"The New York Times’ conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, admits to underestimating how unprincipled elected Republican leadership would become once Trump secured the nomination. To acquiesce to Trump as the nominee is to gamble recklessly with the party’s responsibilities to the republic, he argues today: “It is possible that a dishonorable, cowardly, unprincipled course will yield the result that many in both G.O.P. factions clearly crave: Trump defeated in the general election, his ideas left without a champion, and then a reversion to the party’s status quo ante, to the comforts of a tactically narrow ‘wacko birds versus RINOs’ family feud. But then again it’s possible that the establishment and the Tea Party are more like Byzantium and Sassanid Persia in the seventh century A.D., and Trumpism is the Arab-Muslim invasion that put an end to their long-running rivalry, destroyed the Sassanid Dynasty outright, and ushered in a very different age. No doubt many thought at first that those invaders were a temporary problem, an alien force that would wreak havoc and then withdraw, dissolve, retreat. But a new religion had arrived to stay.”
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