I’d be lying to you if I said this year’s TPUSA’s AmericaFest had an air of victory about it. Despite the Republican Party’s gains, the unspoken mood that hung in the air felt more like frustration than anything else.
The question is figuring out what conservatives are frustrated about. Democrat? Yeah, but Democrats are going to do what Democrats do and the frustration Republicans feel when it comes to their ideological opponents is usually coupled with the gung-ho, happy warrior attitude the right typically takes in regard to the left.
Your enemy can frustrate you, but at the end of the day, you can rest on the fact that you’ll just bring your A-game against them next time after the proper amount of wound licking. So yeah, frustration against Democrats was there but it’s fulfilling to fight them because many conservatives know they’re actually fighting on the side of good.
No, the frustration seemed to center more around the Republicans themselves. Fighting an enemy is easy, fighting your own team is much harder. You don’t know who your allies and opponents are at any given time as one the moment a shift in the battle occurs your friend may suddenly become your enemy. Politics is filthy like that.
But Republicans should find themselves lucky because they can easily identify the people who are the problems, and just in case you were confused about who they were, then look no further than the omnibus bill vote that saw a handful of Republicans outright betray their voting base by agreeing to what is clearly a Democrat Christmas wish list.
BREAKING: Here are the 18 Republican senators who voted for the $1.7 trillion omnibus:
Blunt, Boozman, Capito, Collins, Cornyn, Cotton, Graham, Inhofe, McConnell, Moran, Murkowski, Portman, Romney, Rounds, Shelby, Thune, Wicker, Young.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 22, 2022
Just seeing any Republican vote for something so beneficial to Democrats isn’t just enraging, it’s demoralizing. I think my colleague Bonchie summed up the reaction to this vote best:
Why should I even care if the GOP controls the Senate at this point? It obviously doesn’t matter either way, especially when Lindsey Graham is rubber-stamping Biden’s judges anyway. And what makes this episode more infuriating is that it was so unnecessary. Republicans are days away from taking control of the House. The entire point of winning the last election was to regain control of the purse strings, and McConnell threw all that away, suggesting that he couldn’t trust his own party to govern. Shouldn’t he just become a Democrat, then?
Bonchie’s sentiment is one shared by many a Republican voter. If Republicans are just going to sign off on any document Democrats put in front of them and just be yes-men to their opponent’s worst excesses then what’s the point of a Republican Party? Moreover, why waste the time an effort to vote for them if all they’re going to do with their office is use it to empower the people you put them in office to resist and overcome?
To say we didn’t know that weak leadership was at the heart of the red wave being just a red trickle would be wrong, but it’s increasingly clear that when it comes to the Republican Party we have no leadership. The people that should be in charge of it are so close yet so far. They do what they can but they don’t have the necessary power to stop it all from happening.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to frustrate its own supporters. That frustration divides would-be voters and creates rifts. These rifts form into cliques and these cliques learn to hate each other. They refuse to show up for one another, and before you know it, the GOP is really just a minor inconvenience for the Democrat Party.
How or when this changes truly depends on the voters. We can pretend all day that the fault lies with the politicians but the truth is that the end of their careers are always just an election away.