The Republican Party took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in January. Instead of actually governing, the party seems determined to play meaningless, revenge politics that accomplishes nothing, other than serving red meat to their base.
Brian Fitzpatrick played a pivotal role in the election of the Trump-appeasing Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. However, despite the influence he must have accrued for his efforts, our congressman has not had any moderating influence on the party’s focused descent into shallow grandstanding.
McCarthy has yet to bring an important vote to the floor, but he has brought forward divisive, time-wasting resolutions. A painful example of this approach was House Resolution 9. Without defining socialism, the poorly worded resolution threw every evil action in the world into the bucket of socialism.
The final words of the resolution are: Resolved: That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.
Democrats fought to have the meaningless resolution modified, if not withdrawn entirely. However, the Republicans pressed on, and eventually it passed, including wording linking all forms of socialism to mass murder.
Democratic Congresswoman, Betsy McCollum of Minnesota, correctly described this resolution:
Mr. Speaker, let’s be clear about what this resolution is. A complete waste of time. This resolution is not about Stalin. It is not about Mao. It is not about Castro. It is not even about condemning the human rights abuses that many communist dictators throughout history have committed. Instead, the Republican majority has thrown together a poorly written, ill-conceived resolution so sloppy that it condemns socialism in all its forms.
Congresswoman McCollum went on to point out that many of our allies have mainstream socialist parties in their parliaments, and such a resolution accomplishes nothing, while potentially alienating some allies. California Congresswoman Maxine Waters added that the Republicans conveniently failed to mention Hitler and the Nazis in their litany of evil leaders.
It is becoming clearer by the day that the modern shell of the former Republican Party is dead set on dismantling as much of the federal government as possible, and HR 9 is just another portal toward that goal. They will scream “socialism” in response to every important federal program that can improve the lives of all Americans. We have been here before with Republicans. President Harry Truman called them out in 1952: Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
We need to build an effective, efficient federal government that can help us address undeniable and disastrous climate change, meet the vast infrastructure needs in this nation, fight back against the military aggression of Russia, and confront a host of other challenges that include too many American children going to bed hungry.
The problem that Brian Fitzpatrick has is not that he fails to make some bipartisan efforts in Congress, but that he is a member of the Republican Party and does not have the power or the personal commitment to affect its fundamental unfocused, wasteful misuse of power.
Tom Taft is a resident of Chalfont and the great-grandson of Republican President and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft.
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