The Price of Treason

Tuesday night, RINOs in the seven states that held primary elections were anxiously looking over their shoulders as the footsteps of the TEA Party and its candidates gain on them.  There is good reason for their fear.  They are guilty of treason, and they know it.  While the accusation is a very serious charge, the facts support its legitimacy.  Both the party, itself, and many of the politicians running under its banner have abandoned fundamental points of the Republican Party Platform.  Parties issue platforms for good reason.  A platform promotes a coherent political ideology.  It gives the voters something concrete on which to base their decisions, particularly when voting a straight ticket or when information on a particular candidate is scarce.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee had decided as of Tuesday night not to support O'Donnell.  This is a grave mistake that could end up being the death knell of the Republican Party as a major force in national politics.  The blatant hypocrisy of this decision is staggering.  For decades, Rockefeller-Republicans, pseudo-conservative pundits, and the NRC have lectured those of us who are Reagan-Republicans to "hold our nose" and demonstrate our party loyalty by voting for the "lesser of two evils".  Now that it is the "big-tent" Republicans' turn to reciprocate, we limited-government types are finding out just how big that tent really is. 

Ultimately, it boils down to the same issues I raised in a previous blog "Wasted Votes and Lessons Learned".  The lesser of two evils is still evil, and big government from the Republicans is still big government.  The whole point of democratic institutions, chief among these being regular elections, is to offer citizens a choice.  When the choice is limited to slightly different flavors of the same outcome (e.g. bigger government and higher deficits), what difference is there between us and a single-party system (i.e. communism)?  The GOP had better proceed with caution, lest it find itself in the same position as the Whig Party it replaced a century and a half ago.