Republican Party at a Turning Point

President Biden’s First 100 Days:

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

President Joe Biden addressed Congress and the American people on April 28, just one day short of the first 100 days of his presidency. He began his address with the grim reality, that “he inherited a nation in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War”.

President Biden has dealt with the virus and the economy with spectacular competency, using science-based policies. He has appointed a diverse cabinet, professionally experienced to handle the departments entrusted to them. Nary a crony or relative in sight!

I will list his achievements in the first 100 days later in this essay.

What he hasn’t been able to control is the continuing attack on our democracy, based on the Big Lie, that the 2020 presidential was stolen from Trump by a Democratic backed cabal. A Lie that has been rejected by district, federal and Supreme courts, which have thrown out 60 cases of election fraud brought by Trump lawyers for lack of a shred of evidence; by every election official and state legislature, Republican and Democratic; by Trump supporters, Attorney General, William Barr, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and even by the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, who stated during the January 6 insurrection that “Trump bore responsibility for inciting the insurrection”. He subsequently contradicted himself, in his inimitable sycophantic style a few days later, after visiting Mar a Lago and kissing the ring, stating that Trump was not responsible for the insurrection, which was not a big deal. And the election was indeed stolen from Trump.

There were only two leading Republicans who have refused to endorse the Big Lie of a stolen election, who condemned Trump for inciting an insurrection based on that Big Lie. They are the third-ranking Republican member of the House, Liz Cheney, and the 2012 presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Senator Mitt Romney. Their crime: daring to tell Republican voters that President Biden won the presidency in a legitimate election and exposing the Republicans’ effort to whitewash the January 6 storming of the Capitol, the seat of America’s democracy.

A week after the January 6 insurrection, Cheney stated, Trump “summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack”. She tweeted on May 3: “The 2020 election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system”.

In a Washington Post op-ed on May 5, Cheney, the Conservative of Conservatives who has a Republican voting record of 92%, wrote, The GOP must “steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality…. History is watching. The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution” over blind fealty to a criminal tyrant, whose lies may incite future attacks.

There is currently an effort coordinated by Kevin McCarthy to purge Liz Cheney from her leadership position as Conference Chair in the House, as early as May 12. A replacement for the Conference Chair is already in place: New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who has a terrible Republican voting record (34%). She had even been considered a liberal. But she passes the sole Republican litmus tests of today, of buying into the Big Lie of a stolen election, the whitewashing of the January 6 insurrection. And the ultimate test, the embrace of Donald Trump.

Cheney will go down fighting, but go down she will. Proving yet again that Trump still calls the shots in a party which refuses accept the results of a fair election, and whitewashes the January 6 violent assault against the Capitol, incited by Trump, as, at the worst, a mild protest.

A mild protest which left six people dead, hundreds wounded and the seat of American democracy vandalized and violated. And a beautiful and historic building forever marred by military-style barricades to protect the integrity of the Capitol and our elected lawmakers against white racist domestic terrorism.

Senator Mitt Romney was booed at a recent Republican Party conference in his home state of Utah when he stated that the election was not stolen, “that the Trump campaign had a chance to take their message to the courts, the courts laughed them out of court. I’ve seen no evidence that there has been widespread voter fraud…I was pulling for Donald Trump, but he lost fair and square”. When the booing subsided, and before he was escorted off the podium, he said: “Aren’t you embarrassed?”

No, there is no embarrassment in this Republican Party, the calling card of which is now the Big Lie. According to a May 3 CNN poll, 70% of all Republicans believe that the election was stolen from them. Against all evidence, including the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

The profound sadness is that America celebrated democracy in its finest form in November 2020 with an election in the midst of a pandemic, when more than 150 million Americans voted their choice; an election described by the nation’s senior election official as the fairest in its history. An election that is only rivaled in its integrity and courage of the electorate by the election of 1864, when Americans came out in record numbers to vote for incumbent President Lincoln in the middle of a Civil War.

The Civil War was about the perpetuation of slavery. The January 6 insurrection was about the perpetuation of white supremacy, an assault against the foundations of our democracy – free and fair elections. A proud, historic victory soiled by the delusional rantings of a desperate, defeated and disgraced president.

There is nothing so vicious as the fear of white supremacists losing their privileges. They will stop at nothing to preserve their supremacy, their whiteness. But remember Hitler and his quest for a blonde, blue-eyed Aryan nation? That did not work out well for the Nazis. The same fate awaits the Republican Party if it stays with the white racist leadership of the American alter ego of Hitler.

The past four years of the criminally incompetent Trump administration have been largely responsible for all these crises. Trump started his presidency with his first Big Lie, that he inherited an economy in shambles from the Obama administration. The “shambles” of 72 straight months of a growing economy, and the lowest unemployment numbers in decades.

Then the pandemic hit in January 2020. Trump’s downplaying of the virus, which resulted in over 500,000 preventable deaths and brought the economy to a standstill, is legendary in its criminal negligence.

The frightening fact is that had the pandemic, a global tragedy, not struck and exposed Trump’s self-serving incompetence, he would almost certainly have lied his way into winning the 2020 presidency. Which would have meant the destruction of American democracy and the establishment of a white supremacist oligarchy in the United States of America. A president for life who would have continued the elimination of an already fast-disappearing middle class. Frighteningly, Trump would have been cruel and dictatorial enough to carry out a Final Solution to America’s Brown Invasion.

President Biden’s move to the White House brought a deep sigh of relief from not just America but the whole world, that normality and decency had finally obliterated the vulgar stench the People’s House had exuded for the past four years. Church bells rang all over the world, especially in Europe. People of all free nations took to the streets, dancing in celebration. Why? Because they all knew that Americans had pulled themselves out of a future that had plagued Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Belarus and other totalitarian regimes. Europeans knew, better than the American voter, that once right-wing dictators seize power, they use that power to ensconce themselves and perpetuate their totalitarian, often racist ideology by all means, including military, available to them.

President Biden took swift and science-based action to combat Covid-19 and to revive the economy. His major achievements:

The signing of the Covid-19 Rescue bill, a $1.9 trillion package into law within two months, designed to help the unemployed and the needy, support small businesses and help schools reopen safely.

Covid-19 case, hospitalization and death totals are now one-fifth of what they were during the last months of the Trump administration, and diminishing by the day. Biden has exceeded the milestone of 220 million vaccinations delivered by the end of his first 100 days; at least 70% of all Americans will be fully vaccinated by July and the vaccine is now available to everyone over 16 years of age.

The economy has grown by an unbelievable 6.4% during the first quarter of 2021, and is well on the way to complete recovery. Unemployment is falling and currently is at a pandemic low, with 196,000 new jobs added during his presidency – he pitches his jobs plan as a Blueprint to Rebuild America; and schools are re-opening for in-person learning, bringing a semblance of normal life to families.

All these achievements with no whining, no bragging, no self-adulation, no bible wielding that we had been tortured with through four terrible years.

President Biden has also used his executive powers to reject many of the reactionary actions of the Trump administration. He has rejoined the Paris Climate Accord; re-engaged with the World Health Organization (WHO); revoked the presidential permit granted to the Keystone XL pipeline, which native Americans and environmentalists have been fighting against over a decade; revoked the harshest and cruelest of Trump’s anti-immigration bills; and revoked many of Trump’s laws which allowed pollution and fracking in sacred and historically protected areas.

Most importantly, he has stood up to Russia’s Putin, and has imposed a raft of sanctions for Russian interference in the 2020 elections, recent cyber-attacks and other hostile acts. Putin has woken up to the fact that he is no longer dealing with a sniveling, corrupt American president, completely beholden to the Russian dictator.

President Biden has made less progress in his efforts at restoring bipartisanship and unity. Not one Republican voted for his Covid-19 Rescue bill, and Republicans are opposed to the next major item of Biden’s agenda, the massive infrastructure bill of $2 trillion, aimed at fixing America’s damaged roads and bridges, and a list of other projects “intended to create millions of jobs in the short run and strengthen American competitiveness in the long run”.

Republican Senate Minority Leader, McConnell said “that 100% of his focus will be on stopping Biden’s policies”. As he did in 2009, when he blocked President Obama at every turn. So much for bipartisanship.

The costs of these ambitious projects will be met by the closing of tax loopholes used by corporations and super-wealthy to hide their wealth in offshore accounts. And higher taxes on these corporations and the super-wealthy, to ensure they pay their fair share in projects of development that will serve the nation and revive the middle class. It’s a good start.

President Biden has only been a huge disappointment to comedians and satirists, who were expecting an old man pottering around in the Oval Office in his pajama bottoms, looking for his car keys, and stuttering his regular gaffes on TV.

The president we see today is a confident man determined to rescue and develop the nation with or without bipartisan support. A man who is not whining and heaping blame on the administration he inherited, but taking immediate and decisive steps to reverse its often corrupt and illegal acts. Biden has armed himself with a program that is seen as the logical progression of the New Deal of FDR, which planted the seeds of compassionate capitalism in the United States after World War II, combined with infrastructure development on a scale reminiscent of Eisenhower.

The United States has regained universal respect and is once again the undisputed leader of the free world. In just 100 days.