How Do Republicans Get Away With It?

Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” sheds light on the GOP’s head-spinning double standards

A telling look at the Republican coalition. Mike Pence and congressional Republicans, shortly after the 2016 election. Photo credit: Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers on Twitter (via Business Insider)

How do they get away with it?

We asked that question in 2016 when Republicans took the unprecedented step of refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, and chose instead to leave a vacant seat on the nation’s highest court for nearly a year.

We asked that question in 2017 when Republicans, who spent the entire Obama presidency hyperventilating that the federal deficit would drive America toward socialist collapse, took power and immediately passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy without giving a second thought to how they’d pay for it.

We’ve been asking that question for years, trying to understand how Republican politicians manage to keep a straight face as they righteously proclaim themselves warriors for limited government and individual liberty while lecturing women about what they can and cannot do with their bodies and allowing agents of the state to kill American citizens with impunity.

How do they get away with it? We’re asking that question yet again, as Republicans tie themselves in torturous rhetorical knots attempting to justify filling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat before November 3rd.

The “we” here isn’t just Democrats. The “we” is anyone who believes that democracy depends on individuals and institutions operating in good faith. And when not just a politician but an entire political party abandons even the pretense of acting in good faith, we have to wonder: How do they get away with it?

We could ask Republican politicians, but it doesn’t really matter what they say. They don’t actually believe the craven excuses they make to explain away their blatant hypocrisy and double standards. Their behavior is predicated entirely on consolidating and maintaining political power. The only thing they truly believe is that they can get away with it.

One of the lessons of modern American politics seems to be that they can. Many Americans, and not just Republican voters, have come to expect more decency, more productivity, more decorum, more common sense, more responsibility…