Veteran conservative columnist George F. Will is openly advocating for Republican losses in the November midterms on the grounds that President Donald Trump has left a large part of the GOP unwilling to act without him.
In his opinion article in the Washington Post, Will stated that he hopes most of the Republican Party will be “smashed to atoms” on Election Day; he described the party as “trembling and embarrassed” and said that most Republican lawmakers had exchanged their independence for political survival under Trump.
Will, having written for The Post since 1974 and winning the Pulitzer Prize for his commentary in 1977, has for many years been one of the most well-known conservative writers in the country; his most recent criticism was not directed at conservative policy but at what he called the congressional Republicans’ failure to curb Trump’s power.
Will stated that “vast Republican carnage should not be entirely indiscriminate,” but makes an exception for two of the Republican Senate candidates to survive in the event of a Democratic wave.
Will praised Maine Senator Susan Collins, who is running for reelection, for her vote in 2018 to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice, on the grounds that she had carefully gone over Kavanaugh’s record and the claims of sexual assault made against him before deciding to back his nomination.
The second is Mike Rogers, a former member of Congress from Michigan who is now running for Senate against the surging Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. Rogers has positioned himself as a supporter of Trump and states on his campaign website that he will support the president, even though he has at the same time parted ways with Trump over some issues during the campaign.
Will’s main point was that setbacks suffered by the Republican Party might prompt it to reevaluate its position on Trump and lead to a more independent role for Congress. He stated that voters should judge the members of parliament who had allowed the president to carry on rather than concentrating solely on Trump.
As Will put it, “if there is no penalty for travesties, travesties will proliferate.”
He directed attention to voters’ anger about the high prices of gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer, as well as towards Trump’s trade policies, the immigration restrictions and the ongoing war with Iran. He also maintained that congressional Republicans have mostly given up their constitutional role by accepting presidential decisions instead of challenging them.
Will went a step further by stating that losses in Republican-held Senate seats, ranging from Alaska and Iowa to Texas and Ohio, could be forced upon the party to review its future direction and restore “legislative checks on the executive.”
He concluded plainly that Republicans needed enough lawmakers to act as an opposition and to have a presidential veto, but beyond that, voters had no reason to reward members of Congress who had made themselves politically irrelevant.