Tradition is dead.
Republicans have been killing it since Ronald Reagan got to skate away on the Iran-Contra affair. And to be fair, he took the blame, but his party largely escaped political penalties due for it. That should have made Watergate look like the blip it was compared to that large scale of lawbreaking and political ambition by the Republican party. That party left me after that bout of lawlessness. It was Wrong.
But Democrats traditionally did not make them pay much of a price where they could. I had none-the-less been impressed that a couple of journalists could be the leading domino in Watergate, yet the media became Reagan's lap dog. Nor did the Democratic party push back or took the media to task. We should have seen another round of antitrust on the media, doubling down on fairness doctrines for not breaking the story wide open before it went before congress.
In normal times it might be wrong for congress to force its weight on the press. But times were changing.
Newt Gingrich laid the foundation for Republican scorched Earth policy. Traditional political behavior on the part of the Republicans was over, drowned at a high water mark.
Bush, Cheney, never brought to the carpet for lying to congress, and Surprise! a president Trump is the next level. Tradition?
Traditional Washington has been dying for decades. If you think so, we need Washington to know we see it as such. At what point do Joe Biden and congressional leadership use the power the majority gave them? Even put new seats on the Supreme court, 2 for 1 as a penalty for the Garland and Comey Barrett hypocrisy. A break from the past. We don’t want what little time left we have squandered. When we only have 2 years to do much, much more. Avoiding a scheduled loss of congress in 2022 unless we do something different than tradition. To change history upcoming. Democrats in power need to be told to admit to, and be vocal about, that the Republican party has declared an end to how things have long been done. They have buried comity along with tradition.
Politics is the art of the possible, but political action sometimes need to be bold and earthshaking to make the possible happen. We must tell our party at all levels to take new steps in order to do the job they were elected to do. We need to have them realize what they don’t see, many steps removed from where they stand. What they miss about conservatives they deal with all the time.
That Ineffective traditions die. Let’s create some better ones.