This Republican Party — with only the rare dissenting voice — is launching a serious attack on our democracy. It’s a disservice to the nation to call them “friends.”
The whole nation needs to be awakened to the serious threat this Republican Party poses to what this nation has always valued about itself. Referring to Republicans as “friends” while they are violating our Constitution — that vital order they sook a sacred oath to protect and defend -- helps obscure from the people what it is the Democrats duty now to help them to see.
Democrats should make it clear that only those Republicans are friends who repudiate what the main body of their Party is doing in assaulting basic American values. It is not enough for them to be mute and passive while their party commits treason. They all took that oath, and it requires any person with any honor to do more than be mute.
Liz Cheney can be a friend. Despite disagreements, she has respected the truth, and put her oath of office ahead of political self-interest. Only Republicans willing to show similar integrity are worthy of being called friends by Democrats, to whom now falls the duty of protecting our heritage as citizens of a free society.
And while we’re at it, neither should the Democrats give the honorific title of “friend” to anyone who is not willing to use the power with which the people entrusted them to do their best to move the nation forward, to seek the best results possible by which people with different views cooperate to serve the American people well.
Across-the-board obstructionism is not a defensible way of conducting the people’s business. Abusing the filibuster to paralyze the nation at a time of multiple crises is an act of betrayal as flagrant as the attempt to overthrow a legitimate election.
The task of the Democrats in the months to come is to shine a bright light on both of these destructive ways the Republicans are conducting themselves.
- No true American patriot could regard as a friend any Republican who knowingly reinforces — or simply refuses to denounce — the Republicans’ Big Lie and all the terrible uses to which it has been put.
- Nor could such a patriot regard as a friend anyone who goes lockstop in cooperation with a leadership that has put as their priority the failure of the President even at the cost of the success of the nation.
And now, more that perhaps any time in our history, is when we need one of our political parties to come to the defense of the nation against the other, i.e. to be American patriots in the best senses of the term— standing for all that’s best in America.
It is tragic, but it’s true: there are enemies out there right now. and anyone worth calling “friends” will join in the fight against those enemies.
“Honor your oath, now that the battle is upon us,” the Democrats should demand, to discover which Republicans are worthy of being called friends. “And do what’s best for the nation, when there’s so much room for making things better.”
Not too much to ask of a friend in politics, as we deal with the urgent challenges of this time.