How to Unite the Republican Party

While the Democratic Party’s lack of unity has dominated the headlines as a result of the 2020 presidential primaries, it bears repeating that the Republican Party suffers from a sense of unity as well.  Considering the fact that both parties as established themselves as “big tent” parties, division within the parties should not come as that much of a surprise.  While the media often like to emphasize the divisions in the Republican Party, they may have unwittingly helped unite the party by embracing the impeachment farce that has deprived the American people of the ability to enjoy high-quality daytime and evening television over the past week.

Polling indicated that the Republican voters had united behind President Trump even before the impeachment inquiry began.  Polling has shown that the President enjoys approval ratings in the 80s and 90s among the members of his party.  In spite of President Trump’s high approval ratings among Republican voters, a handful of outspoken Trump critics thought they actually had a chance at mounting a serious challenge against the President in his quest to win the Republican nomination in 2020.  Two of the three candidates added little substance to the debate; instead electing to devote all of their time and energy to trashing President Trump and sucking up to the mainstream media.  The third primary challenger, Mark Sanford, actually focused on an issue of substance (the national debt) but his dislike of the President still loomed large. Sanford ended his campaign ahead of the filing deadlines for the early state primaries, citing impeachment as the reason why.

Despite the fact that the Republican voters scattered across the country appear to have embraced President Trump and the agenda items he stands for, many Republicans on Capitol Hill have yet to embrace the “America First” agenda. For instance, when President Trump announced his decision to withdraw troops from Syria, only 60 of the nearly 200 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a bill condemning the move; indicating a divide between not just globalist Republicans and America First Republicans but globalist Washington and Main Street, USA. 

Division on the issue of immigration also plagues the Republican Party.  Since Republicans have become the minority party in the House of Representatives, the division does not matter as much now but division between Republicans beholden to their donors who want cheap labor and Republicans concerned about the best interests of their constituents prevented the passage of America First immigration legislation during President Trump’s first two years in office when the GOP had a “trifecta” in the federal government.  Republicans had the opportunity to pass the “Securing America’s Future Act,” also known as the Goodlatte Bill. As I explained before, “provisions of the bill call for reducing overall immigration levels by 25 percent, ending chain migration and the diversity visas, authorizing construction of the border wall, mandating E-Verify, defunding sanctuary cities, and passing Kate’s Law.  The bill would allow the DACA recipients to stay in the country but does not give them a ‘fast track’ to a green card, making clear that “recipients may only make use of existing paths to green cards.’” 41 House Republicans voted against the Goodlatte Bill. Many of the same Republicans who voted against the Goodlatte Bill signed a letter to then-House Speaker Paul Ryan urging him to hold a floor vote on legislation that would give blanket amnesty to the DACA kids. 

Over the years, the Republican Party’s divisions over social issues have become less pronounced; with nearly all Congressional Republicans serving in the 116^th Congress identifying as pro-life.  However, eight House Republicans still supported the insanely stupid Equality Act that would allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports and further erode the religious liberty and conscience rights of Americans who have not bought into the warped social justice ideology surrounding gender and sexuality that the left wants every American to conform to.

I could keep going about all of the divisions within the Republican Party but these divisions have not borne out in one key area: impeachment.  Every single House Republican voted against the bill authorizing the impeachment inquiry and they have all emerged as strong defenders of the President; albeit, some more than others. Believe it or not, the only division on the issue of impeachment came within the Democratic Party; where two Democrats representing Trump-won districts sided with Republicans and voted against the impeachment inquiry.  While Justin Amash, who won re-election as a Republican Congressman from Michigan in 2018, voted for the impeachment inquiry, he has since left the Republican Party and become an independent so he does not count.

So far, it looks like the Republicans have remained remarkably united throughout the impeachment inquiry that basically functions as a taxpayer-funded opposition research campaign against President Trump; as partisan blowhard Adam Schiff invites critics of Trump to air their grievances against the President and more specifically, his foreign policy, in front of the American people.  Even retiring moderate Congressman Will Hurd, who has nothing to lose by voting in favor of impeachment, seems unconvinced by the left’s best efforts to convince him and every other Republican on Capitol Hill to support impeachment. According to Hurd, “an impeachable offense should be compelling, overwhelmingly clear, and unambiguous; and it’s not something to be rushed or taken lightly.” Hurd signaling that he would vote against impeachment indicates he does not believe that the President’s actions meet the criteria he laid out for an “impeachable offense.”

One Congressional Republican who has supported just about every piece of legislation that I have criticized so far, Elise Stefanik, has done an incredible job throughout the impeachment inquiry.  As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Stefanik emerged as a key defender of the President and a staunch opponent of Adam Schiff. Her characterization of the impeachment inquiry as an act of “political desperation” appears to have rubbed the left the wrong way.  ABC’s resident Never-Trumper Matthew Dowd held up the New York Congresswoman as “a perfect example of why just electing someone because they are a woman or a millennial doesn’t necessarily get you the leaders we need.” By “leaders we need,” Dowd obviously means leaders that act like Jeff Flake, Joe Walsh, and Bill Weld; in other words, people who devote every breath to trashing President Trump. It did not take long for a doctored photo of Stefanik to begin circulating on the internet.  Twitter user Brian O’Malley shared a photoshopped picture of the Congresswoman flipping the bird, with the caption: “Stefanik posed for this picture as Ambassador Yovanovich was getting a loud standing ovation after giving testimony yesterday. NY21 deserves better than this childish loser.”

One of the most prominent faces of #TheResistance, George Conway, immediately retweeted the picture and proclaimed “This woman doesn’t deserve to hold public office” before urging people to “give what you can to her opponent.” After finding out the truth about the picture, Conway refused to apologize; instead electing to double down. Responding to a tweet announcing that the “picture of Elise Stefanik flipping the bird is fake,” Conway proclaimed “But the fact that she shamelessly and brazenly lied in a ridiculously trashy gaslighting stunt is indisputably real.”

Stefanik and the group, WinRed.com, appear to have taken her opposition to Schiff to the next level.  Typing in the words “fightschiff.com” will redirect visitors to Stefanik’s campaign website and ask for donations to her campaign and help “fight back against Schiff’s Regime of Secrecy!”  Stefanik should not have that much trouble winning re-election; President Trump carried her district with 54 percent of the vote in 2016 and she won re-election by double digits even as one of her fellow New York Republicans representing an even redder district lost re-election. 

Even though I find myself impressed by Stefanik’s decision to make fighting Adam Schiff the centerpiece of her re-election campaign, fighting back against Schiff’s “regime of secrecy” and his “regime” as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will require a lot more than Stefanik winning re-election.  It will take at least 20 Republicans flipping Democratic-held seats from blue to red in order for Republicans to retake control of the House of Representatives, maybe more if a new North Carolina Congressional map more favorable to Democrats goes into effect.  Perhaps the website “fightschiff.com” should instead redirect to the National Republican Congressional Committee’s homepage.

If 2020 ends up serving as a referendum on impeachment, the National Republican Congressional Committee could end up taking a lap of victory on election night as it watches many of the candidates it supported march to victory. It looks like Ann Coulter had it right when she predicted that “even voters skeptical of Trump will embrace him after two minutes, let alone two years, of watching Speaker Nancy Pelosi run the House, Rep. Maxine Waters chair the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler head the Judiciary Committee – and Rep. Adam Schiff run around issuing subpoenas all over town.” Nationwide, support for impeachment has fallen since the public impeachment hearings began. In Wisconsin, one of the states that carried President Trump to victory in 2016, a healthy majority of voters oppose the impeachment farce.  Even better, the most recent poll from the Marquette University School of Law shows the President beating all of the top four Democratic contenders in head-to-head matchups; even the supposedly electable Biden. 

Heading into 2020, the Republican Party still has a lot that divides it.  However, the Democrats’ continued fixation on going down the impeachment rabbit hole will do more to unite the Republican Party ahead of President Trump’s re-election bid than any other external factor.  In addition to helping unify the Republican Party, an impeachment trial in the Senate will end up hurting several Senate Democrats vying for the 2020 Presidential nomination.  After all, the trial will likely not begin until after the New Year.  By the time the calendar turns from 2019 to 2020, many of these Senators would rather spend their time on the campaign trail; fighting for every vote in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.  Instead, they will have to spend six days of the week holed up in Washington acting as jurors in the impeachment trial. 

Speaking of the Senate trial, nearly every Democratic politician on Capitol Hill knows full well that two-thirds of the Senate will vote to remove President Trump from office.  Even though Republican control of the Senate makes the President’s removal from office impossible even if every single Democrat votes to remove him, the far-left base of the Democratic Party will probably not appreciate the fact that impeachment failed to yield the result they desired. 

Nice going, Democrats.  You may have hoped that the impeachment would derail President Trump’s re-election bid and cause him to lose support among Republicans but it had precisely the opposite effect. The obsession with impeachment has already enabled different factions of the Republican Party to unite against a common enemy (Adam Schiff and the radical left), will almost certainly have a negative effect on the Senators seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination as well as the members of Congress representing districts carried by the President in 2016. If Republicans do end up winning control of all three branches of government in 2020, they will have to thank the Democrats for doing the one job that they have always seemed to have a hard time doing: uniting the Republican Party.