Letter: GOP’s political courage is nonexistent 

Published 8:00 am Thursday, March 27, 2025

Recently, now that the Hunter Biden laptop crisis has abated, we’ve seen (like at the recent Rep. Cliff Bentz town hall) how vestigially unnecessary the “legislative” branch (twig?) has become. Even the smug Supreme Court majority (“I must have left my stare decisis in my other pants …”) seems superfluous, just putting their trained-seals of approval on the “unitary” executive wing(nuts) — the remaining (mal-)functioning branch.

Why pay for this black-robed rigamarole when we can DOGE our (once-)sacred constitutional obligations and send the saved bucks to presidential golf courses and hotels and tech-bro billionaire oligarchs (supplementing their additional tax cuts)? Social-nerd misfits, driving the “economic engines” in their democracy-demolition-derby, obviously need our support. We get to hope the trickle-downpour (“what, it’s raining on my leg, you say?”) doesn’t wash us away like some (climate hoax) hurricane.

The Republican Congress, though, could still do some work (between recesses and FOX “News” gigs), after gutting “entitlements” people paid for such as Social Security and Medicare, and wasteful junk like health research, airplane and food safety, pollution safeguards, etc. They could pass a law like, say, Germany’s Enabling Act of 1933.

Instead of inefficient individual rubber-stamping of “King”-ly (sic, indeed) dictates and decrees, Republicans could do them all at once, in advance — meek blanket acceptance and approval, no independent thought or deranged MAGA-blowback risks involved. We’d then have another shining example of GOP political courage, like those weak-kneed Weimar-anians, smoothing the way and greasing the skids for “The Course of Empire” (i.e., inevitable decline and fall).

Carl Merkle

Pendleton

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