Party before country

In 1994 Republican Newt Gingrich put out a contract on America, which he euphemistically called the Contract with America. The contract was a wrapper for Newt's vison of an America dominated by a single party.

Decades of increasingly hysterical rhetoric churned out to inflame a declining voter base set the stage for 2016 when the GOP's overarching self-serving nature combined with the abject cowardice of its members to allow Donald Trump the nomination for president. He went on to carry the election that same year.

Over the next four years it became increasingly clear that the Contract with America had been a Faustian deal by which the Republican Party had sold its soul.

Nominally a legislative agenda, the contract was the thin edge of a wedge which drove in an era of polarized, no-prisoners politics and the transformation of the Republican Party into a confederacy of fundamentally dishonest, self-serving career politicos. It's single item platform is the coddling of the very wealthy at the expense of the rest of America.

Everything else it says and does is smoke.

In support of that platform and in recognition of ever declining support in the electorate, Republicans are engaged in an ongoing and accelerating program of voter suppression. No lie is too big or harmful to tell and retell, no consequence to the American people too great for them to endure.

Many of those politicos are themselves ignorant of their own place in the grand design, laser focused on parroting party lies for no higher cause than the furthering of their own duplicitous careers: Party before country, me before party. One need look no further than their relentless defense of Trump to understand honor and integrity in the Republican Party teeter on the edge of extinction.

#GQP