Neither Truth Nor Common Sense

As our country careens toward yet another unnecessary, manufactured crisis around the debt ceiling, we have yet another example of how one of our major parties is doing precisely the opposite of what it knows is right for the country. We’ve grown scarily accustomed to the GOP bending the truth, or even adopting complete falsehoods, in order to stoke its base and keep financial contributions flowing. But now we must face the reality that the GOP is not only untruthful but wholly willing to defy common sense, with catastrophic consequences even for itself. Here are some present examples. 

The Pandemic

The facts are not in dispute. The recent delta variant wave has struck primarily across the GOP-controlled Southern states and reached into the red Midwestern ones. It is, as many have noted, a pandemic of the unvaccinated. After months of untruths and conspiracies around the vaccines (from “they are more dangerous than the virus” to “they will magnetize you so you can be tracked”), the unfathomable price is now hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. 

These vaccine falsehoods defy common sense. But so do current GOP policies, touted by right-wing populist governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, which affirmatively forbid sensible things like mask mandates in schools. Ideology and political identity in the GOP now trumps the risk of outbreaks among children, the economic dislocation of widespread cases, and the hospitalization and deaths of huge swaths of their own voters.

The Election

Here again, the real facts are clear. Biden won the 2020 election, and there was no vote fraud. Every audit has confirmed this—even the sketchiest of private “audits” in Arizona. Moreover, after more than 60 lawsuits, no court anywhere has found any evidence of widespread election wrongdoing or mischief, and the lawyers who pressed these claims without basis are being sanctioned one after the other. Billion-dollar defamation suits are now pending against the media companies who helped spread the Big Lie, which bafflingly includes wild and universally debunked conspiracy theories from Venezuelan communist software to Italian servers.

And yet the Big Lie persists and is even amplified further today by GOP leaders, once again defying common sense. In a recent CNN poll, 78 percent of Republicans believe that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. They are at stark odds with the 63 percent of Americans who believe he did. In a perverted sense, the GOP now needs to demonstrate to its base that it is shoring up “election security” because it has so badly undermined faith in the system. But if losing politicians like Larry Elder and Donald Trump continue their sour grapes routines and sow deeper mistrust among the GOP base, this will depress GOP turnout just as it did in the Georgia Senate run-off elections. Common sense would argue that the GOP should immediately declare that elections are secure and its voters can and should show up to vote. But privately, GOP strategists are worried that the continued drumbeat could hurt them with voters. “What we see is ultimately Republicans, led by Trump, very willing to suppress their own vote by telling people the election could be stolen and therefore they may not even have to take part in it,” said former RNC spokesman Doug Heye recently. “That cost us the United States Senate and that’s something folks in the Senate are very mindful of.”

The Debt Ceiling

The facts around the debt ceiling crisis also are looking bad for the GOP, and Democrats are scoring political points. As the markets and Americans begin to focus more closely on what’s happening, it has become increasingly clear to voters that the GOP rang up a huge bill and now refuses to help pay for it. President Biden stepped into the fray earlier this week. “The reason we have to raise the debt limit is, in part, because of the reckless tax and spending policies under the previous Trump administration. In 4 years, they incurred nearly $8 trillion in additional debt,” he told reporters. But hardliners in the GOP refuse to cooperate and will filibuster any bill to raise the debt ceiling, hoping to force Democrats into scuttling their other priorities in order to address the fire that the GOP started.

Common sense and history would argue that holding the entire full faith and credit of the United States hostage is a reckless and self-serving move that will backfire. If the fire burns the economy down, it will be the GOP left holding the extinguisher it refused to use at the last minute. Moreover, the ones who will be most immediately impacted by the crisis—in the nature of a credit risk downgrade for the entire country, which occurred the last time the GOP played chicken with the debt ceiling in 2011—are the wealthy Wall Street traders and political donors on whom Mitch McConnell depends. Yet he and his party are willing to toy with brinksmanship anyway to score political points and guest spots on Fox News, even if it means erasing billions of dollars from supporters’ ledgers.

Abortion

The so-called “fetal heartbeat” law in Texas banning abortions beyond six weeks, which also empowers vigilantes to sue anyone who assists in a prohibited abortion and collect $10,000 bounties, isn’t based on actual science or reason. There is no “heart” beating after six weeks in an embryo, which is the size of a grain of rice. And most women don’t realize they are pregnant within that arbitrary and early six-week period. Further, a solid majority of Americans, of all races and genders, support reproductive rights and the legality of abortion in all or nearly all cases.

Common sense would caution against the GOP passing similar unpopular laws in other important states like Florida during an election year, yet they are racing to do just that. To add to this mix, the Supreme Court has decided, by unexpectedly accepting a case out of Mississippi, to review the entire right to abortion this December. A bad ruling against abortion could trigger immediate bans across GOP-controlled America. By some reports, 36 million women across 26 states could lose access to abortion if the Court overrules Roe v. Wade. Moderates within the GOP, who are fewer in number lately, appear incapable of stopping the train that is soon to crash straight into the GOP platform. Ideologues are now in charge of the party at the state level and in the Supreme Court, and come June of 2022 they may get their way. The political backlash, however, would be severe and consequential. It could even prove decisive in the next few elections, rallying women like no other issue could.

* * *

When a party has lost both its sense of truth and of common sense, it faces a choice: quit pandering to its already bewildered base and reach for the center, or double down and hope that the center moves to it. The problem here is that 2022 is an election year and the primaries are soon upon us. That means that the GOP must first satisfy its base (which is lost in a fog of death, conspiracy and unspecified rage) and then try to win the general election. The broken and gerrymandered system will reinforce extremism through GOP-drawn redistricting lines that guarantee Republican seats yet bring out the most radical candidates who can count on a solid base of far-right supporters. On top of this, the former president will make election fraud claims a litmus test, along with loyalty to him as he prepares to run in 2024.

This is why 2022 is actually a far more consequential midterm election year than any we have ever seen. The GOP appears ready to run as the party with no tether to either the truth or common sense. Democrats and independents must turn out in huge numbers to reject them resoundingly, or the nation will teeter into chaos.