Category: Republican Party

LACKING ISSUES PEOPLE CARE ABOUT, THE GOP DECLARES WAR ON TRANS KIDS

Pity the poor Republicans. While a Democratic administration showers the country with vaccinations and stimulus checks, the GOP has been madly searching for an issue that might capture the hearts and minds of the American electorate.  

Hark, they think they found one: beating up on transgender kids.

So far this year, Republican lawmakers have introduced at least 117 bills in 33 state legislatures targeting the transgender community. The vast majority of them are aimed at adolescents. Arkansas just passed a law prohibiting medical professionals from providing gender-affirming health care for trans kids.  Similar bills have been introduced in 19 other states.  These are the same Republican wizards who tout liberty and the right to choose when it comes to wearing facemasks in a deadly pandemic. Their legislation slams the door on the liberty of parents and doctors to choose a course of treatment for transgender children.

Now comes Florida, always a contender in the arena of brazen legislative obnoxiousness. The state’s Republican-controlled House passed a measure that not only prohibits trans girls from playing girl sports, but also requires student athletes to undergo genitalia inspections in case of a “gender challenge.” 

This is political child abuse. It’s a repugnant assault on vulnerable kids who are struggling to be accepted for who they are, genitalia notwithstanding.  No need to take my word for it. All of the applicable professional organizations have unequivocally expressed their abhorrence with these bills:  American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, among many others.   

The people pushing this vile agenda have only one objective: to light a fire under the GOP’s far right base. This is being produced by the same folks who used the fear of gay marriage to turn out conservative Republican voters in 2004.  Remember that ditsy trope of “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve?”   

Turns out that Adam and Steve have been happily married for close to a decade, and there isn’t a locust in sight. So the party with no economic, environmental or health care plan, had to find another marginal group for the cultural warriors to take on.  Enter the transgender adolescents.

“This is the wedge issue that will bring suburban women back to the polls and increase their support for Republicans,” Penny Nance, one of the leaders of the anti-trans campaign, told Politico. “Republicans would be foolish not to lean into it.”

In what moral universe is it acceptable to inflict children with untold trauma and pain in order to raise campaign funds and win votes? Nance and her merry band of trans smashers are so singularly focused on the Machiavellian politics of their movement that they don’t, even for a minute, see the kids they are hurting. 

They recognize neither their humanity nor their fragility. Instead, they are using these young transgender folks as nothing more than pawns in their game. And as symbols of a “woke, leftist agenda” devoted to disrupting the natural order of life by turning boys into girls, and girls into boys. As their posters declare, “God made only two sexes: male and female.”  And neither the twain shall meet.

On the contrary, that twain has been meeting quite regularly for hundreds of years. Ancient Greek mythology is filled with references to female souls in male bodies.  The Roman poet, Ovid, wrote about a man named Tiresias who became a woman. An 18th century French politician, the Chevalier d’Eon, spent the first half of her life as a man and the second half as a woman. In this country, records document the lives of transgender people going back to the 1600s. 

This latest anti-trans mishegas is aimed at what pollsters (here and here) describe as a shrinking subset of conservatives who take personal offense with others who are substantially different than themselves. Over the decades, this is the cohort that opposed racial integration, affirmative action, immigration and marriage equality. Now they are gunning for transgender kids, convinced that gender transitioning is just another crazy phase some teens are going through, like lip piercings or playing Fortnite.

There isn’t room in this space to cite the voluminous medical evidence that establishes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this is not a trend. (If you want to dig deeper, you can do so here, here, here and here.)

A small sampling:

  • Gender dysphoria, is a medically recognized diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association. It refers to a “marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender, lasting at least six months.”  There are specific procedures and tests involved in reaching that diagnosis.
  • Puberty blocking medication can be prescribed to delay physical body changes associated with adolescence, allowing a patient time to decide if they want to transition. If they do make that decision, in consultation with parents and physicians, they can begin taking hormone therapy at the age of 16 or later. (These treatments would become illegal under Republican legislation.)
  • One study reported that 50 percent of untreated trans kids have seriously contemplated suicide. Another found that more than 50 percent of transgender males and 30 percent of trans females actually attempted to kill themselves. Many succeeded. The administration of puberty blockers and/or hormone treatments substantially reduced suicide attempts. 

That’s the empirical approach to grasping this issue. There is another route, one centered more in the heart than in the brain. While we may be initially shocked, unsettled and confused when our nephew becomes our niece, it’s not about us. It’s about her. We don’t need to fully and immediately understand. We just need to keep on loving our niece, accepting her decision and supporting her on her own terms. That path will lead her to more happiness, authenticity and opportunity for a life well lived.

If only the Republicans don’t screw it up.

GOP LEADERS SEE TRUMP’S POWER THROUGH THE BLUR OF A REARVIEW MIRROR

The only thing that might save the Republican party from self-immolation is the warp-speed development of an anti-myopia vaccine.  Party leaders seem hell bent on crafting strategies for 2022 and 2024 with a vision that doesn’t extend past November of 2020. 

For the past four years, congressional Republicans showered an unhinged fool of a president with an obnoxious display of sycophancy.  They did this out of neither respect nor admiration. They did it out of fear. Donald Trump enjoyed consistently high approval ratings among GOP voters, not to mention a base that would literally go to war for him. And did. These legislators knew only too well from their fallen comrades that a binary choice awaited them: Either bow to the king or sacrifice your career. (Among the fallen: Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and Dean Heller.)

The issue then was about principled leadership. The goal for most Republican lawmakers was their own political survival, and that meant sacrificing their integrity for the electoral security afforded by Trump’s protection racket.  Although not exactly Profiles in Courage behavior, the choice was rational and understandable.  And it worked, until it didn’t.

The issue now is about how to steer the party in a post-Trump presidency, how to strategically craft an organizing principle that reaches beyond a warped reverence for a failed one-term demagog.  Sadly, for both the GOP and our democracy, this challenge is being badly blown. Stuck in pre-election and pre-riot mode, party strategists are forging ahead with a vintage 2017 litmus test: do no harm to Trump and his base.  

Smart, agile leaders don’t rely on the inertia of yesterday’s strategy to guide them through tomorrow’s challenges. Politics, like life, is dynamic, not static. Sure, Trump’s astronomically high polling levels among Republicans held for more than three years.  But that was yesterday. Today, his GOP approval rating has moved from the 80-to-90 percent range, to the 50s and 60s, according to the political polling site FiveThirtyEight.com.  National Public Radio reported last week that tens of thousands of recent Republican voters have changed their registration to either independent or to another party.

But that’s not all that has changed in the past few months.  Trump lost the election by more than 7 million votes, while Republicans did better than expected in down-ballot races. He lost his megaphone when Twitter permanently blocked him. Some 71 percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll, believe the former president was responsible for the deadly Capitol riot. He became the first president to be impeached twice. Now that he is out of office, he faces a barrage of criminal and civil investigations that could well hold his feet to the fire for the next four years. 

Yet, the vast majority of congressional Republicans continue to cling to the same old script, somehow believing that Donald Trump’s political omnipotence knows no end. By looking behind them, they lose the opportunity to adjust for what lies ahead of them. In so doing, they end up feeding the beast when they should be starving him. 

There is a scientific concept that captures this dynamic, at least metaphorically. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg shook up the world of quantum physics by positing that you can’t, at the same time, know both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. The act of isolating the particle in order to measure its position, means you can’t simultaneously know how fast it is moving. Heisenberg’s work came to be known as the “uncertainty principle.”  You may remember it from physics class or Breaking Bad.  

Although politics hardly operates with the precision of quantum physics, it has its own version of the uncertainty principle:  A position created in and for a given moment is subject to unmeasurable momentum and therefore may not be suitable for future moments. Many politicians have ignored the uncertainty principle at their peril.  Remember “Read my lips: No New Taxes” from George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign? It got him elected.  Two years later, the economy took a dive and Bush signed a tax hike bill. Angry voters denied him a second term.  

Poor John McCain took a position in his 2008 presidential campaign that was obliterated by momentum in far less than two years.  “The fundamentals of the economy are strong,” McCain said, despite an approaching recession. Hours later, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The recession was on, and McCain’s quest for the White House was, for all practical purposes, over. 

Republicans in Congress had a perfect opportunity to take full advantage of the rapid momentum of Donald Trump’s decline. They could have hastened it with a total reset of the master-servant relationship of the past four years. After all, their lives and our country’s democracy were on the line when the 45th president sent his rag-tag militia on a violent rampage of the Capitol.  That inflection point cried out for an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote to impeach and convict in the name of national unity. It was the perfect time for Republicans to have changed their position in light of the momentum of Trump’s declining power.

The argument against such a move was that the party needs the Trumpism faction in order to win future elections, although it didn’t seem to work that well for Trump himself last November. As the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle wrote last week, “There is no Trumpism. There is only Trump.”   The MAGA thugs who desecrated the Capitol didn’t urinate on the floor or throw fire extinguishers at cops out of a deep commitment to supply-side economics or the appointment of originalist judges. They wanted the system blown up, and Trump was their guy to do it. 

Their hero is now out of the White House and off of Twitter. He sits on a Mar-a-Lago balcony thinking up insults to toss at Mitch McConnell. Except nobody really cares, certainly not Mitch McConnell.  The imaginary revolution is over. The swamp wasn’t drained. The wall wasn’t built. The virus didn’t disappear.

For shellshocked Republicans, all that remains is to decide whether to, once again, become a party of ideas, or remain a delusional coalition of Q-Annon loonies, angry Proud Boys and other assorted red-hatted white supremacists.  Those who prefer the former need to let go of Trump, to cut the cord and move on.

 Until that happens, the Republican Party will be but a noisy bastion of ineffective uncertainty.

WILL A POST-TRUMP GOP RETURN TO ACTUAL BELIEFS & VALUES?

Here’s a history question to kick off our quadrennial political party conventions: Name the candidate whose nomination acceptance speech contained these five sentences:

  • “Everyone, from immigrant to entrepreneur, has an equal claim on this country’s promise.”
  • “Bigotry disfigures the heart.”
  • “Corporations are responsible to treat their workers fairly and to leave the air and waters clean.”
  • “Greatness does not rise or fall with the stock market.”
  • “True leadership is a process of addition, not an act of division.”

So, who spoke those words?  John Kennedy in 1960? Lyndon Johnson in 1964?  Hubert Humphrey in 1968? How about Barak Obama in 2008?   

Try George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes, those compassionate, caring  and inclusive thoughts came from the last Republican president prior to the dark and daunting dawn of Trumpism, an era that began with quite a different nomination acceptance speech:  “I alone can fix it.”  

It’s jarring to read Bush’s speech just as Trump prepares to accept the GOP nomination for four more years of chaos and corruption. Although only two decades have passed, it’s easy to forget that the Republican party once had actual values, that it stood for principles larger than electoral self-preservation.

Here’s how Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican operative, put it in a Washington Post op-ed: “Most Republicans would have said that the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today, it’s not that the Republican party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.”

Donald Trump not only owns this party, he has remade it in his own image.  Most historians mark the birth of Republicanism in 1854 when members of the Whig party broke away over the Whigs’ embrace of slavery.  Little did they know that, 166 years later, their anti-slavery movement would evolve into a white grievance party. 

This bizarre evolution, however, has less to do with conscious and deliberate policy changes, and everything to do with raw fear. It wasn’t as if Trump got congressional Republicans to alter their beliefs and values based on the strength and logic of his argument. Instead, it was that figurative gun he held to their heads, a weapon in the form of a single tweet that could end their political careers faster than a speeding bullet.

Focusing strictly on Trump’s merits back in 2016, many prominent Republicans rejected him. That rejection was a gift in disguise. He used it to fire up his base, to bond with them over their shared disdain and distrust for the elite political class.  This president’s fire power has always been his base, a passionate contingent of fed up white folks searching in vain for a rebirth of the 1950s. 

Here’s what some of the GOP stars were calling Trump before the 2016 election:  

Senator Lindsey Graham:  “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

Senator Ted Cruz:  “pathological liar, utterly amoral,  a sniveling coward.”

Former Congressman Mick Mulvaney:  “terrible human being.”

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry:  “a cancer on conservatism, a barking carnival act.”

Once Trump was elected, and his base displayed its steroidal bona fides, the Republican establishment caved, abandoning all remnants of beliefs, values and decency. Winning elections was all that mattered. That meant keeping The Donald happy and avoiding a demeaning tweet. So, Graham became Trump’s golf buddy, confidant and best friend in the Senate. Cruz sang his praises whenever possible. Mulvaney became his chief of staff. Perry joined the Trump Cabinet as Energy Secretary. 

Those few congressional Republicans who refused to march in lockstep with Trump either retired or were defeated for reelection. For the most part, their replacements have been sycophantically aligned with the president.

This is not at all how Republicans envisioned its future a mere seven years ago. In 2013, GOP leaders, ordered a probing and strategic evaluation of the party. It had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Many key states that had been considered Republican territory were increasingly voting Democratic. The result was an eye-opening reckoning with demographics. 

Here’s the upshot of that study: In a country where the Caucasian majority is on a steadily downward spiral to minority status, and where women and LGBTQ folks are both growing as a constituency and gravitating to the Democrats, the GOP needs a much larger tent.  In other words, white men alone will not save Republicans from extinction. Under the banner of the Growth and Opportunity Project, the party allocated $10 million to back comprehensive pro-immigration reform and outreach to women, Black, Asian, Latino and LGBTQ voters.

And then along came Donald Trump. As Stuart Stevens, the Republican political consultant, put it, Trump “didn’t hijack the GOP and bend it to his will.” Instead, he sensed correctly that there was no burning desire for big tent diversity in this party. So he, in Stevens’s words, “offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger.”  

What most of us saw as acts of compassion, caring and inclusion, Trump decried as political correctness. He encouraged division and white supremacy as the justifiable fruits of political incorrectness. “Trump didn’t make America more racist,” Stevens wrote, “he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. . .and let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.” 

Like everything Trumpian, this mind-boggling 2016 course correction – a reversal, actually – was rooted only in the moment it happened, with absolutely no thought of long-term strategy. Even in that moment, it just barely worked. Trump won with 46.1 percent of the vote. 

The GOP’s 2013 study is more germane than ever. A party tailored to the enmity of angry white men has no long-term future in a country that is growing more racially and ethnically diverse by the day. 

The only hope for Republicans is that Joe Biden scores an overwhelming victory in November. That might be enough for them to finally realize that the pro-slavery Whigs their party broke from 166 years ago was reincarnated into the Party of Donald Trump.  

They badly need to sever those bonds.

TURNED OFF BY TRUMP, CORPORATE AMERICA TRIES TO GOVERN ITSELF

Something quite bizarre and remarkable is happening to American capitalism. Our economic system has long been predicated on the laissez faire sacrament of tethering commerce only to what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market.  Roughly translated, that means those who own the means of production should be allowed to suck up all the profits they can, unencumbered by any duty to their workers, customers or communities.

However, as a dystopic sign of chronic congressional constipation, together with the companion malady of massive Trumpian deregulation, some corporate titans are taking unheard of steps to self-regulate for a broader public good, even if it means loss of revenue.  Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave.  

To be sure, as incredible as this shift appears, so far its scope is relatively small and limited.  It is not likely to win Hosannas from Democratic Socialists anytime soon. Yet, Its significance lies in the profundity of its message, namely that the federal government has grown so dysfunctional that some major corporate entities are taking a stab at public policy governance. 

What makes the role reversal even more bizarre is that the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have responded to this corporate usurpation of policy making by acting like lobbyists in an effort to influence the outcome of corporate legislating. It’s as if the regulators and the regulated simply switched places but carried on the old dance.

Take the issue of guns for example.  As of the first of this month, there have been 283 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. Yet, Congress has not passed any substantive gun control legislation in more than a generation.  Many business leaders are attempting to fill that regulatory void.  Walmart, on the heels of the murder of 22 customers in its El Paso store, banned the sale of assault weapons, hand guns and most ammunition in all of its locations. Dick’s Sporting Goods took similar action a year earlier. Responding to the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, Dick’s pulled all assault-style rifles and high capacity magazines from its stores at an annual revenue loss of $150 million.  

The giant e-commerce software company, Salesforce.com, stopped doing business with clients that sell military-style weapons.  A number of banks, including Citigroup and Bank of America, adopted prohibitions against lending money to gun dealers who sell assault rifles, and required them to submit background checks on all other gun buyers. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, set up a new line of investment funds that exclude gun manufacturers and retailers.

Amazingly, these sensible gun regulations – stuff that Congress has been unable to legislate – have managed to push Republican officials into action mode. Unfortunately, the action is aimed at maintaining the sacred status of gun sales.  Yes, the party of free enterprise has suddenly turned to its former arch enemy of regulation as a cudgel to protect the free flow of assault weapons. Republican senators, led by Louisiana’s John Kennedy, are pushing legislation that would prohibit banks from “discriminating” against gun buyers.  Kennedy has also asked federal agencies to stop lending institutions from effectively restricting gun sales by adopting their own regulations.

Some of the Republican lobbying techniques against this new self-regulation by businesses trying to reduce gun violence have been even more Draconian.  The country’s biggest credit card issuers, led by Citigroup, decided to take steps that would either restrict or monitor gun sales purchased with a credit card.  This was not without precedent. Smaller companies like PayPal, Stripe, Square and Apple Pay already had explicit policies against transacting online sales of guns and related merchandise.  If big banks took a similar move, it could inflict a substantial dent in gun trafficking.

As reported on a recent episode of the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, senior bank executives went into a meeting with officials from the Security Exchange Commission, ostensibly about some unrelated and arcane financial reporting regulations.  During that session, however, an SEC commissioner made it very clear that the agency would not take kindly to any bank that came out against guns.  That shut down the gun sales credit card gambit, at least temporarily.

 This new corporate resolve to look for ways to push back on a combination of paralysis in some areas, and excessive deregulation in others, has surfaced in a number of other ways.  For example, the Trump administration’s move to roll back rules on methane-emissions was initially seen as a boon for big oil companies. Quite the contrary, most of those corporations – including Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell – were critical of Trump’s move and have said they will stick with the stricter Obama limits out of a desire to be seen as supportive of climate change remedies.

Meanwhile, automakers are balking at Trump’s plan to give them relief from Obama-era rules on fuel efficiency standards.  Here again, the president thought he was doing the companies a favor by rolling back environmental regulations.  But Ford, BMW, Volkswagen and Honda have said they will adopt standards slightly reduced from the Obama rules but much stricter than those Trump is trying to enact.  Other car manufacturers appear headed in the same direction, away from the president’s huge reduction in fuel efficiency rules.  

Mostly, this has to do with California and other states whose fuel standards exceed those pushed by Trump.  But they are also sensitive about being seen as ignoring environmental concerns, a stigma that has never kept the Donald from getting a good night’s sleep.   As a result, Trump is now threatening to hit car companies with anti-trust charges on the basis that they have conspired against him to make cars that don’t pollute enough.  He is also talking about prohibiting states from having stricter environmental standards.

Clearly, the GOP, once the party of big business and states’ rights, has morphed into a demented and unrecognizable entity. It is taking rights away from states, and it is beating up on God-fearing capitalists for trying to do what the government has failed miserably at: making this country a better place.  If this is what MAGA means, someone with a red hat needs to file a consumer fraud complaint. 

WHEN IT COMES TO WOMEN, THE GOP ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Once upon a time, in a land now unimaginable, the Republican Party was a hotbed of women activists hellbent on fighting for human rights.  Really.  Republican women led the antislavery movement in the 19thcentury and catapulted from there into their own battle for suffrage.  Ida B. Wells, an iconic African American journalist and militant civil rights crusader, was a prominent Republican who saw the party of the late 1800s as the best conduit for hope and change.

Unfortunately, those aspirations did not live forever.  Far from a bastion of human rights advocacy, today’s GOP might as well be called the Grand Old Patriarchy. Out of 535 members in Congress, there are only 20 Republican women.  The party’s gender divide in the House breaks down to 187 men and 13 women, while Democrats in that body have 146 men and 89 women.   At the state level, you can count the number of GOP women governors on one hand, with two fingers left over.  

The race and ethnicity picture is just as bleak. Almost 90 percent of Republicans are white. There are only two African American Republicans in Congress, and one of them – Will Hurd of Texas – just announced he will not run again. Yet, Lindsey Graham, in a rare moment of candor back in the pre-Trump days of 2012, worried that, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” We should be so lucky.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in anthropology to understand why the Republican culture has fed and sustained the party’s demographics.  All you really need to grasp this dynamic can be found in the Archie Bunker theme song:  “Guys like us, we had it made. Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

Take South Carolina’s 3rdCongressional District for example.  In the wake of the Republican’s 2018 midterm disaster, which left the party with the lowest number of female House members in more than 25 years, an opportunity to mitigate those losses emerged earlier this year.  An incumbent’s death triggered a special election in this predominately red district.  The party’s female leaders at every level – from Rep. Susan Brooks, the outgoing co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, to Sarah Palin – poured every available resource into supporting a female candidate, who seemed almost perfect for this district. 

Pediatrician Dr. Joan Perry was seen by even her detractors as a smart, personable candidate who rang the bell on virtually every conservative issue, from abortion and immigration to the sanctity of Donald Trump.  Yet her male opponent in last month’s primary election trounced her by 20 percentage points.  

According to the New York Times, Perry’s chief liability was her gender.  The paper quoted a typical voter, a 68-year-old man, saying that Perry was right on all the issues but that, “women, as you well know, sometimes get to be kind of emotional.”  Tapping into that sentiment was the virtually all-male House Freedom Caucus and its leader Rep. Mark Meadows, who endorsed Perry’s opponent on the basis that you “need a strong backbone” to stand up to the liberals. One of its TV spots portrayed Perry as “another lying Nancy Pelosi liberal.”

Research has shown that GOP women fare the worst as candidates in deeply Republican districts simply because of the dominance of Archie-Bunker-like gender stereotyping.    Hartwick College’s Laurel Elder found that the party itself, “and its increasingly conservative ideology . . . is the biggest barrier to women’s representation within the party.”  The real culprit, she said, is the deeply patriarchal culture in which Republican women play a subservient role to male leaders.

When it comes to gender equality issues, polling has demonstrated a gigantic perceptual gap among women in both parties.  For example, only 30 percent of Republican women see sex discrimination as a serious problem.  Among Democratic and Independent women, however, the vast majority see it as an extremely urgent concern.  Similarly, only 26 percent of Republican women  said there was a problem of unequal pay between men and women performing similar work.  

In a country where women make 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, and one that lags far behind other nations in terms of workplace gender equality, it’s not hard to understand the party’s lack of appeal to women.  Add to that the toxic masculinity of a Republican president who has rarely met a woman he doesn’t bully or abuse. Not to mention his policy portfolio totally void of any respect for human rights.  There is no mystery about the GOP’s estrogen deficit.  

Yet, the male leaders of this party (excuse the redundancy) still don’t get it. New York Congresswoman Elsie Stefanik resigned from the party’s congressional campaign committee, saying she wanted to devote her energies to recruiting female candidates and helping them win.  “We need to be elevating women’s voices,” Stefanik said, “not suppressing them.”  Amazingly, her words provoked a stern reprimand from her colleague, Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the GOP’s congressional campaign.  He accused Stefanik of playing identity politics instead of “looking for the best candidate” regardless of gender, race or religion.  In other words, stick with the pipeline of angry white guys.  

Emmer’s position, of course, is hardly new. The “best person” juggernaut has been used for time immemorial by white men to keep folks who don’t look like them out of the power structure.  Way too slowly, however, that insular approach of the white brotherhood has gradually dissipated in most group cultures.  Diversity and inclusiveness are now commonly seen as essential ingredients for organizational effectiveness.  The memo, however, obviously escaped the Republican leadership. Out of the party’s 200 House members, there are 13 women and one African American.  Yet, leaders like Emmer see no value in diversifying.  

Back in 1920, Republican women led the fight for suffrage and obtained the right to vote for the men who would speak for them.  You’d think that the next step in the process would have been for the party to fill at least a substantial number of elected offices with women who could then speak for themselves.  Sadly, that hasn’t happened in 100 years and is unlikely to do so anytime soon.