Is Reagan turning over in his grave?
For decades the Republican Party has tried to ride Ronald Reagan’s coattails, forever hailing the former president as a small-government, low-taxes conservative who was unfailingly patriotic and optimistic.
One person, though, who believes the modern-day GOP has forfeited the right to evoke her father’s legacy is his daughter Patti Davis.
In a scathing op-ed column published this week in The Washington Post, Davis says the silence of most Republican leaders to the abusiveness and the abuses of President Trump would horrify her father.
Davis, of course, is no friend to the GOP, and wasn’t when her father was president. Still, even if her Democratic sympathies are obvious, what she says should not be dismissed lightly by those who are on the opposite side of the political aisle.
In an open letter to the Republican Party, she chastises its members for enabling Trump, whom Davis describes as a “sneering, irreverent man who traffics in bullying and dishonesty.”
“You stay silent,” she writes to Republicans, “when President Trump speaks of immigrants as trash, rips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages. ...
“You stayed silent when this president fawned over Kim Jong Un and took Vladimir Putin’s word over America’s security experts. You stood mutely by when one of his spokesmen, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said there is nothing wrong with getting information from Russians. And now you do not act when Trump openly defies legitimate requests from Congress, showing his utter contempt for one of the branches of our government.
“Most egregiously, you remained silent when Trump said there were ‘very fine people’ among the neo-Nazis who marched through an American city with tiki torches chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us.’”
The former actress is being a bit melodramatic, however, when she claims that four more years of Trump, if he is re-elected in 2020, would cause a complete dismantling of America as the shining beacon of democracy her father often touted. This nation has survived bad presidents in the past, and it will survive this one. Our Constitution is written to ensure that when any one branch of government goes too far askew, the others rein it in.
Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that while Trump and Reagan share some similarities — converts to the GOP, pro-business, anti-regulation, conservative on judicial appointments — the character of the current occupant of the White House may be more like Bill Clinton’s.
Clinton got in trouble for behavior unbecoming a president when he had an affair with a White House intern. He hurt himself by lying under oath about the affair, an offense that while not criminally prosecuted was enough to convince Congress to impeach him but not enough to remove him from office, in part because the public wasn’t clamoring for it.
Trump’s marital indiscretions happened before his election, but his lies about them and most anything else have become almost farcical. He would have sunk himself during the independent counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election had White House underlings not defied their boss. Impeachment in the House remains a possibility for Trump, but it’s a foregone conclusion that the Senate will not vote to remove him, again because most Americans don’t support such a dramatic step.
As with Clinton, Trump’s time in power will end soon enough. Whether it happens in 2020 or 2024, the pendulum will eventually swing back. That’s one thing about which Patti Davis is most certainly wrong.
Tim Kalich
Editor and Publisher
Greenwood Commonwealth
Sanction Barr
Attorney General William Barr has decided he is not subject to congressional oversight, an imperial attitude that cannot be left unchallenged.
Barr refused to appear on Thursday before a House panel led by Democrats because he didn’t like its rules of questioning. He ignored that same committee’s request for an unredacted version of Robert Mueller’s report on the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Barr’s defiance runs contrary to the longstanding principle in our government that the executive branch is accountable to the people through their representatives in the legislative branch.
Congress should hold him in contempt.
