While there are dim bulbs in both parties, a special lighting area should be designed for Alabama Senator and former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville. Shortly after he was elected in 2020, Tuberville actually mangled the identity of the three branches of government, which is not exactly the civics-book version of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Since February, Tuberville has single-handedly blocked Senate approval of more than 300 non-controversial military promotions in a maddening protest of Pentagon support for abortion rights.
For a political party that has made a fetish out of portraying the Democrats as weak on national security, the Republicans will be hard pressed to shout, “Support the troops,” when a government shutdown means that 2 million military personnel will receive delayed paychecks.
Meanwhile, on the oft-chance that you haven’t noticed, the Republicans seem determined to become the first major party in American history to nominate a wildly unpopular presidential candidate facing four separate criminal indictments. A rational political party, challenging an 80-year-old incumbent with low approval ratings, would be tempted to roll the dice with a younger fresh face such as Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, neither of whom are under investigation by prosecutors anywhere. Instead, the Republicans are likely to bet the presidency on the nutcase notion that swing voters will be attracted to the spectacle of the former president in the dock. While trial schedules are difficult to predict, it would be fitting if the Republican Convention in Milwaukee climaxed with a Trump guilty verdict. In any case, it is possible that the man leading the Republican ticket in 2024 will head into the final weeks of the campaign having been convicted of, at least, one felony.