“I am not a member of any organized political party,” Rogers deadpanned. “I am a Democrat.”
Rogers’ jibe was a gently savage takedown of Democrats’ tendency to eat their own. Even during the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt dominated the national political stage, the party of Jefferson and Jackson often found itself divided by nasty internal quarrels and spats.
If Rogers were alive today, though, he might shift his analysis—but not his allegiance because the cowboy comic was a committed New Dealer—to the Republican Party.
That’s because the Grand Old Party has decided to ignore Ronald Reagan’s famous “11th Commandment” to never speak ill of another Republican. Republicans now reserve and direct their harshest blows for and at each other.
Hoosiers have witnessed the edifying spectacle of Gov. Mike Braun and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith arguing about which one of them has the most casual relationship with the truth.
Thanks to superb reporting from Sydney Byerly of The Indiana Citizen, we know that Braun and Beckwith have offered markedly different accounts of President Donald Trump’s attempt to strongarm Hoosier Republicans into gerrymandering mid-decade the state’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. (Disclosure: The Indiana Citizen and The Statehouse File are partners and Byerly is a former student of mine.)
Beckwith says that the president threatened to eliminate all federal projects and end all federal spending if the Republican members of the Indiana Senate didn’t give Trump what he wanted. Braun said the president didn’t make such threats.
It’s hard to know who to believe in this instance.
On the one hand, Beckwith tries to sell more whoppers than Burger King—and his default reaction to any setback, be it stubbing his toe or learning that not every Hoosier wants to outsource his or her thinking to him, is to threaten to pull government funding, whether he has the authority to do so or not.
On the other, Braun did say when he first climbed on board the Trump redistricting bandwagon that he was doing so because he feared the president would visit hardship on Indiana if he didn’t.
But Braun also flinches like a frightened kitten every time the president glances sideways at him, so it’s possible that terror is his fallback response whenever he engages with Trump.
As fun as it is to speculate about whether Mike Braun or Micah Beckwith has greater contempt for veracity, that’s not the part of this story that interests me the most.
Braun and Beckwith hold the two highest offices in the executive branch of Indiana’s state government. It is their job—their responsibility, in fact—to put into action the policies adopted by the Indiana General Assembly and signed into law by the governor himself.
That means that the governor and the lieutenant governor should be functioning as cogs in the same expertly engineered machine. Their movements should be as precisely coordinated as those of the dancers in a world-class ballet troupe.
That’s sure not Braun and Beckwith.
These two guys not only aren’t on the same page, they’re not even reading from the same book. They may not even be in the same library.
Worse—from the GOP’s perspective, that is—is that each of them, whenever he feels angry, frustrated or thwarted, takes out his ire on his fellow Republicans. They’re both vowing to follow Trump’s lead and aid primary challenges to incumbent GOP lawmakers who didn’t support Trump’s attempts to rig the state’s maps.
That’s helpful to Democrats in two ways.
The first is that such a plan will force Republicans to spend a lot of time, energy and money fighting each other rather than their opponents on the other side of the aisle.
The second is that it giftwraps a message for Democrats who end up facing any challengers emerging victorious from that GOP family feud.
That message?
The Republican candidate’s first loyalty won’t be to the people who put him or her in office, but to the toddler in the White House.
Politics, the cliché goes, is about addition, about pulling enough people together to form a majority.
Braun and Beckwith, honoring Trump’s inspiration, now devote themselves to subtraction—to shrinking the Indiana GOP down to pocket size.
They’re not members of any organized political party.
They’re Republicans.
