RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the more interesting news items this week was the revelation that Arizona Democrats were considering a censure vote against Senator Kyrsten Sinema for being too pro-Trump.

Apparently, voting against the president 81% of the time constitutes being a raging right-wing reprobate in today’s liberal hive mind.

It is worth noting that the most anti-Obama senator in his last year in office was Richard Shelby, who voted against President Barack Obama 63.9% of the time.  That made the most anti-Obama senator far friendlier to the Democrat president than a Democrat who is being threatened with censure for her apostasy.

Shelby supported Obama almost 40% of the time.  On average, Senate Republicans opposed Obama’s position less than half the time in 2016.  Bipartisanship was very much alive and well.

Sinema is not even close to being a moderate, unless you define moderation against how far to the left the Democratic Party has swung.  Sinema’s sin is voting for David Bernhardt for secretary of the interior, a name unlikely familiar to 99% of Americans.  She also voted for William Barr for attorney general and opposes the Democrats’ “net neutrality” internet scheme.

But, in today’s resistance-minded Democrat party, any sign of compromise is treated as a cardinal sin.

No doubt, Democrats expect Sinema’s opposition to be at 100% despite representing an Arizona electorate that still leans Republican.

Those who complain about the lack of compromise in Washington would do well to study the contrast in these 81% and 64% numbers.  Another data point: the average Republican voted against six of the first 91 judges Obama appointed, which was six times friendlier than Democrats have been to Trump-appointed judges.

This isn’t some moral equivalency silliness where everyone is equally at fault.  Instead, this was a homicide.  Bipartisanship is dead.  Democrats killed it.  And it will likely remain buried.

Polls show that nearly 80% of the electorate is unhappy with congressional dysfunction.  But when anyone complains about dysfunction in Washington and lack of bipartisan compromise, what he is really complaining about is dysfunction in the Democratic Party.

Democrats refused to cooperate with Republicans for years.  Republicans compromised all the time, almost by reflex.  When even the most anti-Obama senator is voting with a Democrat president nearly 40% of the time, there is a whole lot of compromising going on.

Frankly, in a healthy republic, there should be compromise, since many of these votes are on routine matters.  There should also be a certain respectful deference given to an elected president.  But this is no longer a healthy republic, and attempting to lead by example is not going to work.

This is one reason why Senator Mitch McConnell’s bold decision to hold the Supreme Court vacancy open was so amazing and surprising.  He forced Democrats to live by their own rules, something that was long overdue.

There are two primary reasons for Democrat dysfunction in Washington.  The first is the corrosive role of the media.  The failed estate treats any Republican who doesn’t fully support a Democrat president as an enemy of the people.  When Rush Limbaugh suggested he didn’t want to see President Obama succeed at remaking America, the media were apoplectic and naturally called him an unpatriotic racist.

They endlessly vilify any legislator who does not back the Democrat president in an attempt to bully such people into submission.  The racist charge is always deployed, no matter how absurd the context.

The media play the exact opposite role with Democrats, as Sinema is finding out.  They bully any Democrat who does not completely toe the liberal line and try to force that Democrat back on the ideological plantation.

Democrats are expected never to compromise with Republicans since, in the media’s mind, they are on the side of the angels they don’t believe in.  They are rewarded for full resistance to Republicans, which is on clear display right now.

The leading candidates in the race for the presidency are a handful of the most liberal senators in America (Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris) and a former vice president who wants in on that action, claiming he was one of the most liberal senators in America.

The other dynamic at play is an even bigger factor.  The power base of the Democratic Party truly despises Republicans, which makes it very hard for Democrat politicians to compromise on anything.

This is the result of decades of telling the American people that all Republicans are racist, sexist, greedy imperialist monsters.  Democrats have been so successful in creating a bonfire of hatred that they have essentially boxed themselves into a corner.  At this point, they serve the monster they created, a monster personified in the Squad.

This increasingly Marxist monster is an evolution of the class and race warfare language that has been employed over the last couple of decades.  If you trumpet that your opponents are white supremacists who want to round up gay people while pushing Grandma over the climate-threatened cliff, it should come as no surprise when your adherents start to really hate their opponents, particularly when many liberals rarely come in contact with somebody not in their ideological bubble.

This creates cognitive dissonance when liberals discover that they like a conservative colleague or classmate and then feel guilty about it.

Democrats and their media enablers are trying to justify their descent into madness by pretending President Trump is somehow a special kind of evil.  This is one of the biggest Democrat lies of all.

Every current Republican president or national candidate will always be viewed as the world’s most evil person until he is out of office.  Liberals hated Ronald Reagan.  They hated the compromising and not particularly conservative George W. Bush.  They absolutely despised Sarah Palin and still do.

They hated each one a little more than the one who came before.  Should Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, or Ted Cruz become president in 2024, they will hate any of them even worse than they hate Trump today.

But Trump does represent something different.  He fights back, and his first allegiance is to his voters and not to compromising with a corrupt Democrat establishment.  But that’s not why they hate him.

The fact that voting with the president 19% of the time is considered such an outrage in Democrat circles that the offender should be censured shows where we are headed.  If President Trump holds the White House and the Republicans lose the Senate, the president will be lucky to get a single reasonable justice confirmed.  Even red-state Democrats will demand a significant price for their votes.

Democrats have long pushed compromise for thee, but not for me.  The next time a Democrat is elected president, Republicans should apply the same Democrat standard.  If the Democrats nominate someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, particularly in light of their primary promises, what room is there for any real compromise?

The truth is that bipartisanship is dead and it has been for some time.  Democrats destroyed it.  This threatened censure vote against Sinema, now delayed until January, is one more piece of evidence that it is not coming back any time soon.  Republicans should leave it buried and ignore the media’s howls of protest.

Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.