GOP Falling Apart Is Not Just Trump, It's Ideological Too

The disintegration of the Republican party continues. And it’s not just Donald Trump’s campaign that’s doing the damage, although two other sitting Republican House members, Charlie Dent and Adam Kinzinger have joined Richard Hanna in saying they will not vote for Trump. It is also increasingly looking like Republican voters have finally had enough of the hard-core ideological right wing of the party if the primary votes in Kansas are any indication. Tea party favorite Representative Tim Huelskamp badly lost his primary battle against Roger Marshall, primarily because Huelskamp’s demands for ideological purity antagonized party leaders so much that he lost his seat on the Agriculture Committee. He compounded that by then voting against a major farm bill, citing his conservative purity once again. That proved to be political suicide when representing a farm district. On the state level, eleven conservative supporters of Governor Sam Brownback lost their primaries to more moderate Republicans and there were a handful more races that were still undecided but leaning toward the moderates.

Kansas may be a unique situation as Governor Brownback’s dedication to supply-side tax cuts had decimated Kansas, creating massive budget deficits which resulted in sever budget cuts to schools, road maintenance, and cut other state agency budgets by 4%. He had promised a “red state model” that was supposed to create more jobs and increased revenue by cutting taxes, just as supply-side theory maintains. The reality, of course, is quite different. The tax cuts fueled huge deficits resulting in massive budget deficits and then massive budget cuts. And the jobs never materialized, perhaps because not many businesses want to move into an economy that’s collapsing. That has always been the fate of every implementation of the supply-side theory but this time, thanks to Brownback’s insistence of ideological purity and continuing with his plan in the face of its failure, the theory should be put in the dustbin of history once and for all. And it appears that even Republicans in Kansas have come to that conclusion.