Hypocrisy, thy name is politics. I am becoming totally confused as to what the driving principles of republican party are since the November election. I believed that the republicans were the party of "self-deportation" and absolute border security. They were absolutely against the Dream Act. Now we hear that the republican party is welcoming immigration reform, softening their border security stance, and passing the Dream Act. Now this pleases me. I just wonder if the republicans were hypocrites before the election or are they being hypocrites now. That frightens me a bit, because if the political winds shift, will they become the self-deportation party again?
The same thing has to do with the slight, but definite movement toward acceptance of some gun control legislation. Background checks will probably pass the senate. Today, there was the announcement of a bi-partisan bill in the house to criminalize straw purchases and to make illegal gun sales a federal crime with penalties up to 20 years in jail. These are small, but significant changes in what was just a few weeks ago, a solid wall of opposition among republicans. I hope that this is a harbinger of sensible legislation and not only a reaction to the 26 deaths in Newtown. I just hope that these republicans that are making these small steps realize that this is good legislation, not reactive politics and might just save a number of lives across this nation each year. A vote out of conviction rather than hypocrisy will be much appreciated by the American people.
You can see the same movement in the VAWA. The act passed with just 6 negative republican votes in the senate. This represents a move toward a sane policy against female directed violence by the republican. Now it can only be hoped that the republican party in the house of representatives finds the same sense of sanity in voting for the VAWA because it is right, not because it might get them a couple of votes.
Even Eric Cantor began to sound like a political pragmatist today. He spoke about ideas that were in line with democratic ideals. If one closed their eyes and didn't know who was speaking, the listener could have thought that he or she was listening to a democratic surrogate, not the republican majority leader.
We even see it in the new republican faces that are being paraded nationally. We see Bobby Jindal talking about not being the party of stupid. We see Karl Rove working to moderate his tone and elect more moderate republican candidates. We see Chris Christie as the new, more personable face of the party. It's important that these changes are more than cosmetic. The party, if they are to compete on a national basis, can't be hypocrites. They have to leave radicalism behind and move back to a party that actually wants to govern. Then, possibly, we will see a republican party of conviction rather than one of hypocrisy.
