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News / Opinion / Columns

Ambrose: GOP must take on Dems

By Jay Ambrose

Published: October 10, 2023, 6:01am

Holding hands with their ideological kin, Democrats have lately been doing everything unimaginable to wreck America — turning a helter-skelter border crisis into a national crisis through laxity, encouraging death, theft and destruction through unattended crime outbursts and putting knotty psychology ahead of education in public schools, for instance.

Now, Republicans have decided it’s their turn to be the bad guys.

Actually, that’s not fair. We’re talking about some Republicans. A majority of Democrats, with eight Republicans providing assistance, were responsible lately for ousting Kevin McCarthy from being the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives despite his self-stability and trouncing of crises amidst activist impulses.

Looking to both the left and the right, he found compromises that could lead to better answers. Just recently, he stopped a government shutdown that could have led to potential casualties all over the place.

Democrats controlling the Senate said “well, OK, darn it,” to his compromise legislation easing debt destruction, and Republicans in control of the House concurred with House Democrats in going along with the plan.

Despite flaws and things left undone, the plan includes room for other decisions over a stretch of weeks.

The trouble is that eight extremist GOP losers said “no” to the compromise and apparently want to set the House on fire. They were easily able, under House rules, to get a vote on ousting McCarthy, embarrassingly guilty of failing to deliver the impossible, and they joined with the 208 House Democrats to defeat 210 Republican votes in achieving the chaotic senselessness of replacing him.

Yes, it’s going to be a mess, this transition and the battles instigated by these eight Republicans who can join with the Democrats in votes to defeat the majority Republicans if it suits their pride.

Some of those forever scanning the electoral landscape believe the Democrats are in for a national boost and it will be interesting to see what happens in selecting a new House speaker.

Two interesting candidates are out there already. One is Steve Scalise, an intelligent, soft-spoken conservative gentleman who happens to have cancer. The Republicans should go instead for Jim Jordan, who has probably done more than any other recent Republican to expose Democratic malfeasance and was a two-time NCAA Division I wrestling champ in college.

This conservative got a law degree and could have aimed for courtroom confrontations but instead used his master’s degree in education to become a college teacher.

He is a good friend of former President Donald Trump, and nevertheless enormously likeable. Could he be as good as McCarthy? Maybe not, but maybe better.

The very, very sad truth of the matter is that our beloved country needs rescue from the multiple forces now throwing old norms out the window in the name of philosophies bending toward ultra-centralized, unbelievably powerful, rights-diminishing government and an oppressive, anti-capitalist, socialistically inclined economy.

Even if you buy into the reasoning, look at the results, our country right now looking like one of the biggest failures on the map. We can’t control our borders. We aren’t punishing crime. Our public school students do worse on international tests than those in other developed countries.

Today’s Republicans are hardly heroes one and all, but they constitute the most reliable machine we now have to deal with the Democrats, who themselves are hardly demons one and all even if the party has evolved into something more than a little frightening. Too many followers are nodding to idiocy.

Right now, the Republicans in Washington and throughout the nation must try endlessly to be their best, playing always by constitutional rules, clinging to our rights and trying to serve others.

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