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Writer's pictureDonald V. Watkins

GOP Forms a Circular Firing Squad; Dems Remain Weak

Updated: May 24, 2021

By: Donald V. Watkins

Copyrighted and Published on May 23, 2021


Thanks to former President Donald Trump, Republicans have formed a circular firing squad that is killing Republicans only (politically speaking). These killings are senseless and are occurring with the ruthlessness that has become the hallmark of Trump's brand of political terrorism.


Meanwhile, after more than 100 days in office, President Joe Biden's administration has lived up to the traditional political weaknesses that have defined modern-day Democrats since the days of Bill Clinton. Biden is trying to navigate in the post-Trump political paradigm by using pre-Trump political strategies, operational tactics, and leadership decorum. In the process, nothing of substance for Biden's core base of voters is getting done in Washington.


The GOP Firing Squad Appeases Trump's Ego While Destroying Mainstream Republicans


The National Republican Party is executing any Republican who (a) acknowledges that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election and (b) condemns the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol where Trump supporters trashed the Halls of Congress, paraded inside the Capitol with Confederate flags, smoked marijuana inside our National Capitol, caused a Capitol police officer and three others to die, injured other police officers, attempted to inflict bodily harm on Vice President Mike Pence, and attempted to stop the Senate's certification of the 2020 election results. A Republican Congressman from Georgia has described the tragic events of January 6th as a normal tourist visit of the Capitol.


In truth, Biden won the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes with a landslide victory in the Electoral College. Trump lost the election because he mishandled the COVID-19 public health crisis, which resulted in the needless deaths of more than 500,000 Americans on his watch.


Last week, Mike Pence's own brother, Indiana Republican Congressman Greg Pence, voted against a House resolution to form a bipartisan Congressional Commission to investigate the violent January insurrection and prevent it from happening again. The Commission proposed in the resolution is modeled after Congress' 9/11 Commission two decades earlier.


Also, House Republicans purged conservative Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her Party leadership position in Congress solely because she refused to peddle Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen from him. To this day, Trump's campaign has not produced one iota of credible evidence that the election's outcome was the result of widespread election fraud. In fact, more than 60 federal and state court judges have ruled against Trump's false claim that the election was stolen from him. Many of the federal judge's who ruled against Trump were his presidential judicial appointees, including all three of his U.S. Supreme Court nominees. Furthermore, Trump's own Departments of Justice and Homeland Security affirmed on the record that the 2020 election was free of massive voter fraud.


Additionally, Sidney Powell, Trump's high-profile election contest attorney, stated in court filings that no "reasonable" person would ever believe the hyperbole and false statements she made in the aftermath of the 2020 election about massive voter fraud and the election being stolen from Trump. By innuendo, Powell is actually claiming in court proceedings that any Trump supporter who believes the false election fraud narrative is not a "reasonable" person.


Lyn Wood, Trump's other high profile election contest attorney, had his mental capacity openly questioned by the Georgia Bar Association, which suggested in a Bar complaint against Wood after the election that he seek mental health counseling. Wood may face disbarment for his false and misleading judicial claims of election fraud.


Democrats Continue to Exhibit Weak Political Leadership


Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has allowed Trump loyalists to remain in key government positions where they continue to carryout Trump's political policies. One glaring example of their weak political leadership involves the Biden administration's continued employment of Michael Carjaval as the Director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Carvajal is former Attorney General William Barr's BOP flunky who lacks the objective qualifications for the job. Carvajal does not even hold a four-year college degree in the administration of correctional institutions let alone any post-graduate coursework in the field. In addition to hoodwinking the Democratically controlled Congress in April 2021 about the true conditions federal inmates experience within the BOP, another one of Carvajal's primary missions is the protection of the North Carolina-based Bob Barker Company's seventy-seven sole-source multi-million dollar product acquisition contracts that inject a steady stream of high-priced, cheap-quality, foreign-made products into the BOP's 122 correctional facilities each year. It should be noted that senior management employees and other significant stakeholders directly affiliated with the Bob Barker Company are major campaign contributors to the Republican Party, former president Donald Trump, and Trump's loyal political cronies in Congress.


While Biden's Department of Justice (DOJ) has flexed its muscle in high-profile state and local cases involving the use of excessive force by police officers, the DOJ continues to provide refuge for modern-day COINTELPRO prosecutors who were hired by the Trump administration and whose sole function is the harassment and persecution of innocent black civil rights activists and black business men and women. For example, Lloyd Peeples, who served as "de facto" U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2017 to 2020, is still employed in a position of influence in the Birmingham U.S. Attorney's office. Any competent background investigation of Peeples would have revealed the following: (a) Peeples was born and raised in a family that practiced racial discrimination against blacks on a regular basis, (b) Peeples attended private academies that were founded by southern white segregationists to accommodate white-flight from public school desegregation orders, (c) Peeples published comments in his college newspaper that attacked racial and gender diversity in his university's college admission program, (d) Peeples reportedly used racially derogatory language in private conversations with the whites he trusted, (e) Peeples despised Judge U.W. Clemon (who is black) when Clemon served as the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Alabama, and (f) Peeples failed to prosecute a white Hoover police officer for the 2018 fatal shooting of an unarmed and innocent black man in the crowded Galleria Mall in Hoover, Alabama.


Under the totality of circumstances, Lloyd Peeples fits the profile of the white federal law enforcement agents who attended the openly racist and now-disbanded "Good Ol' Boys Roundup" from 1980 to 1995. Yet, the Biden administration continues to employ Peeples as a federal prosecutor in Birmingham.


Biden has also failed to dismantle the only form of legalized slavery and involuntary servitude authorized in the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both of these inhumane conditions are practiced in 2021 on a daily basis within the federal government's prison system. Just because the pre-1865 institutions of slavery and involuntary servitude were preserved in the 13th Amendment for state and federal prison systems does not mean they should be practiced within Biden's Bureau of Prisons in the 21st century.


Republicans openly support the 13th Amendment's authorized penal slavery and involuntary servitude, while Democrats are seemingly indifferent to it. Biden's benign neglect on eradicating this practice of modern-day slavery and involuntary servitude, which adversely and disproportionately impacts Americans of color, speaks volumes about who he really is.


Finally, it appears that Biden is doing more for deceased blacks, particularly those unarmed blacks who are killed in confrontations with police officers, than he is for the living blacks who voted for him. For example, none of Biden's multi-trillion dollar economic stimulus proposals awards black Americans an equitable piece of the stimulus pies. Furthermore, qualified black businesses are still locked out of federal contracts that are awarded on a sole-source basis to tens of thousands of white contractors across all federal agencies. Yet, it was the black vote in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia that made it possible for Biden to be president.


Epilogue


For all intents and purposes, Trump functions like a political suicide bomber who has attached himself to Republicans around the nation. Trump has hijacked the Party's faithful and his political zealots will try to destroy the political viability of any Republican officeholder who does not worship Trump as his/her political god.


Meanwhile, Joe Biden will not be effective until and unless he purges the diehard Trump holdover appointees from his administration and changes his soft-shoe, back-slapping style of governance to the strong hand that is needed to lead in the post-Trump era of circular firing squads. So far, this has not happened.


Fortunately for Americans, Trump is not a deity. Like all egotistical maniacs and autocratic despots, Trump's political shelf-life will expire soon. He is a failed, one-term president who is out of office. Trump is also the ultimate sore loser.


I predict Rep. Liz Cheney will emerge as the new leader of the National Republican Party in 2022. Ms. Cheney is a solid conservative who showed courage within the Party's leadership ranks when courage counted. She placed our country over partisan politics, and she never backed down from doing so.


I also predict that Ms. Cheney will faceoff against Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. It will be the first presidential race in U.S. history where two highly qualified females are their parties' nominees, and they are battling for the presidency.



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