The Making of a Great America Where the Church and the Founding Fathers Fell Short

The excerpts below are from the chapter entitled "Any Republican Will Do"

My first opportunity to vote was in 1984; I was 20 years old.  I remember being excited about the right to vote.  I voted for Ronald Reagan. Four years later, I voted for George H. W. Bush. Four years after that, I voted for him again. Four years later, I voted for Senator Bob Dole. Then I voted for George W. Bush twice, then Senator John McCain.

It wasn't until Mitt Romney received the nomination to be on the Republican ticket for President that I began to ask myself, "will any Republican do?" 

Mitt Romney didn't seem to be a bad guy. As a lifelong Republican voter, I didn't see how he fit in with Republicans that I had voted for in the past. I always have and always will admire George W. Bush. I admired the courage he displayed in banning partial-birth abortions and launching his faith-based initiatives. As a career military man, I also admired his stance on the conduct of the Gulf War and his response to the 9-11 attacks— it was in this light that I reviewed Mitt Romney's candidacy. 

From my perspective, Romney wasn't a very strong opponent of abortion, nor would he be considered a champion for the "religious right." He seemed to be just a wealthy businessman running for office and the only one with enough support to feasibly run against President Obama…

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed similar sentiments when he said:

"’The Republican Party has got to get a grip on itself. Right now, Republican leaders and members of the Congress, in both the Senate and in the House, are holding back because they're terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out,’ Powell said. ‘Will they lose a primary? I don't know why that's such a disaster, but will they lose a primary?” (Becker, 2019)

Republican leaders have lost their moral compass. When Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was a young politician, he called the Watergate affair "totally repugnant" and denounced the conduct of President Richard Nixon. (Rucker, 2019)

However, his most recent campaign ad shows him stoutly supporting President Trump, saying, "The way that impeachment stops is a Senate majority with me as majority leader." (Kaplan, 2019) How could a Republican leader who watched the corruption of Watergate unfurl, stand idly by as the President flaunts the fact that he invited a foreign government to interfere with our election process?...

We are all called to be subject to the governing authorities. Colin Powell's quote illustrates this point with a recent example of the President's behavior:

"And I see things happening that are hard to understand. A couple weeks ago the President put a circle around south east Alabama, saying it's going to get hit by a hurricane. He put it on top of the meteorological prediction," he said. "In my time, one of us would have gone to the president and said, 'Mr. President, you screwed up, so we've got to fix it, and we'll put out a correction.' You know what they did this time? They ordered the Commerce Department to go out and backup whatever the President mis-said. This is not the way the country's supposed to run, and Congress is one of the institutions that should be doing something about this."

Powell concluded, "The media has a role to play, we all have a role to play, you've got to remember that all these pieces are a part of our government. Executive branch, Congress, Supreme Court, and of the Fourth Estate, and we've got to remember that the Constitution started with, 'We the People,' not 'Me the President." (Colin Powell) (Becker, 2019)