George Will Leaves the Republican Party; Calls for Defeat of Republicans

In my view America is at a point where each individual needs to make the decision as to whether or not they will support or be complicit in evil or instead work to oppose it. While his supporters may shun me or unfriend me, in my view, Donald Trump and the policies he is pursuing personifies evil, "childgate", if you will being only the most blatant example of the man's immorality.  I strongly reject Andrew Sullivan's argument that Democrats need to give Trump his border wall in order to address the irrational fears of his base that they are "losing their country" - a country stolen from Native Americans.  Appeasing irrational fears and outright racism and bigotry is not a solution.  Moreover, Trump's promised wall would likely never be completed given the decade or more of condemnation lawsuits that would be required to acquire the land on which it would be built. Thus, the true way to oppose the immorality of the Trump/Pence regime is to flee the GOP and work to defeat EVERY GOP candidate until the Party either rejects Trump and Trumpism or dies as a political force.  As Fortune reports, George Will - a long time GOP stalwart - has left the GOP and is calling for opposition to Trump.  He is not alone.  Here are article highlights:

George Will, a longtime political commentator and staunch defender of the conservative movement, chided the Republican Party Friday, citing the party’s support for Donald Trump in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Will mentioned that he had switched his voter registration from Republican to “unaffiliated” in the state of Maryland. He told the Washington Post, where he writes a column, that he made the change several weeks ago, after House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsed Trump for the 2020 election. The move follows the departure of other notable conservatives from the Republican Party, such as Mary Matalin, a longtime strategist for the party.

On Friday, Will published a column in the Washington Post that further explained his view, using the kind of excoriating language his columns are known for. The column, titled “Vote against the GOP this November,” argued that the number of Republicans in Congress “must be substantially reduced.”

Quoting from a variety of works, such as Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons and The Federalist Papers, Will also found caustic words of his own for Republican leaders, notably Ryan. The House Speaker, Will wrote, “sold his soul… for a tax cut” and had become one of “the president’s poodles.”

Although Will has been a vocal critic of President Trump in the past, his statements and actions on Friday surprised many political observers on social media.

Will was a contributor to Fox News between 2013 at 2017. In May 2017, he became a political contributor for NBC news and MSNBC. Previously, he served as editor of National Review and wrote a back-page column for Newsweekbetween 1976 and 2011.

Will's Washington Post piece is something I never thought I see come from him.  In the end, Will puts morality and decency ahead of party.  Here are excerpts:

Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans . . . . fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote. The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them. Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with [Trump] today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. . . . . Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut.
 Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it.  Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring , became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices. . . . But the Senate would not vote on it . . . .
 The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control. In today’s GOP, which is [Trump’s] the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. . . . And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.