The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

As a progressive, I'll probably receive some flak for this, but the Republican Party was once a great party. This is the party that brought to us the likes of Presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others. They were the anti-slavery party. They were the limited government party. In many ways, they were the progressive party. However, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end, and there is no greater example of this than the GOP (Grand Old Party), for the modern-day Republican Party has become the antithesis of what it stood for upon its inception, directly opposed to equality, small government, and progression. The Republican Party began losing its identity in 1964 when then President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Ironically, more Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted for the bill, but since Johnson, a Democrat, signed it, fairly or not, his party received the most praise for its passage. With this one swoop of a p...

There is a reason why when I write political satire, I typically focus on the Republican Party, and it's exactly the reason given by the centrist, bi-partisan, well-respected longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in a recent article. As was outlined in the tandem's book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism , "...The Republicans are worse..." Before going into further detail about the two men's commentary, allow me to give readers some brief background on them. Thomas Mann is a centrist who has worked for about three decades as a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution (also centrist). Norman Ornstein, who has worked at the American Enterprise Institute (conservative-leaning) and is also a congressional scholar - has worked with Mann on tracking Congress since 1978. So, no - these are not two left-wing ideologues looking to place the Republican Pa...