As 2021 crashed to a close amid alarming new numbers of omicron cases in the US, we wanted to take a step back and ask, how healthy is America’s democracy? Now that the anniversary of the January 6 storming of the Capitol is close at hand, we wanted to take a look at the year in terms of how the Republican Party is living up to its own boastful moniker as the party of family values. This was, after all, the year when a Republican president urged his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell”.
The oft-repeated phrase is that Republicans are pro-life only until birth. That accusation seemed justified when Republicans failed to vote in favour of the child tax credit and the child and dependent care tax credit in the stimulus package introduced by President Biden. This at a time when the United States ranks as one of the worst for child poverty among the world’s rich nations. American child poverty rates are worse than in Mexico and six times times those of Finland. Alas, Republicans seem more eager to act like children than to actually help them.
Family values, of course, have no real party affiliation and the majority of Americans believe that being good people, and treating people with dignity and kindness, still matters. Our children learn from our actions. So it has been particularly distressing to witness the many unseemly antics of many senior Republicans this year.
Representative Lauren Boebert, of Colorado, is a gun rights activist and adherent of Donald Trump. She has riffed on fellow Representative Ilhan Omar’s ethnicity — she was born in Mogadishu — and joked about a bomb in a backpack. For her part, Omar commented that Boebert “thinks bigotry gets her clout.” Boebert also refers to Covid vaccines as “Fauci Ouchies”, in a year where hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from Covid. Of course, the comment led to a whole line of “Fauci Ouchie” merchandise.
And can we ever forget Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (pictured above), and the video of her shouting harassing comments through the letter box of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional office? Greene challenged her to a debate, shouting that Cortez should put her “big girl diapers on”. This was almost as dignified as Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who posted a cartoon video of himself wielding a sword at President Joe Biden, and killing Ocasio-Cortez. READ MORE...
