Presidential Race 2016

At the beginning of Clinton's second term, Newt Gingrich stated that "Bi-partisanship means helping the Democrat president succeed." From that point on, the position of the Republican party has been to thwart EVERYTHING the Democrats and their president want -- even down to providing health care for 9/11 first responders and legislating against insurance fraud in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

The thing is, our Constitution created a government that's built on compromise, on the opposing party finding a way to get a mutually desired result by negotiating with the other side. The best example of this was Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and his House counterpart Sam Rayburn getting together after the 1952 election and saying, "He's not our guy, but he's the guy we've got. Let's work with him." Which they did for Eisenhower's eight years. That's also when the phrase, "Partisanship ends at the water's edge" was coined -- meaning that the government shows a united front when dealing with the world.

Since Gingrich, that's all history -- for the Republicans. The GOP's "government is the problem, not the solution" mantra has gotten us a Congress filled with people who believe it's their job to hamstring government at every turn. It's why a US Senator can contrive with a foreign power to scuttle an international treaty and be lauded as a GOP hero in the process. We just finished eight years of "vote against anything that the president wants" as the "governing strategy" of the GOP. Contrast that with the congressional record of the Democratic Party in opposition to GHW Bush and GW Bush.

Trump? Trump doesn't scare me nearly as much as does Paul Ryan. I can give you several examples of how he strikes fear in me, but this is already getting long enough. What scares the the MOST, however, is what's going to happen when Trump's campaign rhetoric meets the reality of keeping the country moving. The "alt right" -- the Alex Jones/KKK/militia loonies -- have always been much more pissed at the GOP than the Democrats. They don't expect anything from the Dems so they aren't as likely to take to the streets after their lies, but they rallied around Trump from day one because they believed that he would actually do what he said he wanted to do.

Once they realize that there really are limits to what a president can do -- even one with an ego the size of the Rocky Mountains -- I think they just might decide that the government really IS the enemy, that the tree of liberty needs to be fed with the blood of patriots. They just might take themselves into the street and start gunning down the people they've been told over and over are the reason why this country needed to "be made great again." You know who those people are, of course ... folks with dark-colored skins, folks whose religion isn't Christian, those with college educations, those who speak with "funny" accents, those who weren't born here, those who fall in love with people of the same sex.

If this happens, NONE of this will be Trump's fault. If Trump is a Republican -- which is still arguable -- he's only been one since he won the nomination. No, this impending street violence will the the legacy of the GOP that decided in the early 80s to rid itself of its liberal wing and embrace the racist extremists that LBJ's new Democratic Party evicted. But most of all, it will be the fault of Newt Gingrich, who decided to throw our form of government under the bus just about 20 years ago.