The issue in this election: Are we still a democratic republic?

It’s hard for me to get too deep in the weeds on the issues in the local 2021 House races, with the Republicans running locally apparently not all that concerned about the threats to our democratic republic from Donald Trump.

My thinking here goes: the underpinnings of our democratic system are more important to me, and should be to you, than where the candidates stand on things like education, healthcare, transporation, the rest.

I’m out there as a progressive liberal Democrat – 100 percent for a gold-plated education system, universal healthcare, clean energy, equality of opportunity.

I’m also one of those weird people who think that things run better when more viewpoints are the table, to the point that I want to see a healthy, vibrant Republican Party challenging our ideas on how to solve our problems, because I think – I know – that neither side has a monopoly on the best way forward.

What’s holding us back from finding any way forward right now, in my view, is that the Republican Party is still allowing itself to be beholden to Trump’s incessant whining that the 2020 election was stolen from him, along with his threats to Republican officeholders and wannabe candidates for office to stream of consciousness statement them into oblivion if they stray from what’s important to him, which is, of course, him.

We’re now nine months into the post-Trump era, and the idiot-in-chief is still marionetting public discourse to dance around his petulance, which is just … tired.

Republicans are allowing themselves and the rest of us to be held hostage to Trump’s pity party, and the only way out of Groundhog Day is to punish the people who can’t seem to find their backbones to stand up to him at the polls.

I’m a two-party system guy more than most. That got me in trouble when I was a local Democratic Party chair, and I’d drop mention of friends who are Republicans, and discussions about issues where I could find agreement.

Partisans, on both sides, these days think the other side is the enemy, which, that’s sad.

Now, I don’t find much redeeming in the folks who overran the U.S. Capitol back on Jan. 6, seemingly intent on attacking members of Congress, their staffs, the vice president, but those folks are no more your average Republican than the thugs who set fire to the Reichstag were your average Germans.

Those who perpetrate violence in the guise of politics are fascists, no matter what they call themselves.

Candidates who kowtow to the fascists are not deserving of your vote, bottom line.

Story by Chris Graham