The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was an attempt to deal with a problem that threatened to rip America apart, slavery. Although it didn’t address the underlying institution itself, it banned new states north of Missouri’s southern border from joining the union as slave states.
The delicate balance lasted until repealed by the Kansas
Nebraska Act of 1854.
Although not explicit, the Act potentially opened up all of
the west to slavery. For the north this was simply untenable and the result was
the creation of the Republican Party, which formed in 1854 in the midst of the
debate.
Of course, both were basically band aids over the real
trauma that was destroying the nation, slavery.
The Republican Party was essentially the
combination of the remnants of the Whig Party and elements of other peripheral
parties. Six years later Abraham Lincoln would be elected the nation’s first
Republican president. The party would go on to dominate much of American
politics for the next half century.
In 1854 the Republican party came about as
the result of America finally having to face a cancer that had been gnawing at
it’s core since its foundation. In 2025 it should die for the same reason.
The cancer today is not slavery in the
literal sense, but it is slavery nonetheless. In this case it isn’t blacks
being held in bondage because of the color of their skin, but rather citizens
being held in financial bondage by politicians who have no problem entombing
them in a debtor’s prison from which escape is impossible.
The Republicans had a perfect storm of
opportunity in 2025. They had just taken back the Senate, they held the House
and on January 20th they took control of the White House. Not only
that, they had perhaps the most motivated electorate in a century or more. The
tens of millions of Americans who watched as the 2020
election was stolen and then suffered through four years of anti American
and anti-common sense policies were ready to take back their country. And they
did.
What’s more, this highly motivated
electorate spent the first two months of the new administration watching as the
Elon Musk led DOGE revealed the billions and perhaps trillions of dollars of
waste fraud and abuse everywhere from the Treasury
Department to USAID
to the Pentagon
and elsewhere.
With the new sheriff in town these voters
expected that things were going to be different.
Not so much…
While we’re being told the One Big
Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) is a good deal and it cuts spending, that’s simply
a lie. Indeed it increases spending and adds
trillions to the national debt.
In what seems like record time the
Republican party has gone from the party leading America in a new direction to
the Go Along to Get Along party. Indeed, coming to power with promises to cut
spending, get the federal government under control and to slash deficits, they’re
doing virtually none of that. America took the red pill and discovered that it
was really a blue pill dipped in food coloring.
The BBB is nothing less than treasonous. It
does nothing to address America’s existential threat: Federal spending and
deficits. Today America’s national debt stands at over $36 trillion, or
over 120% of GDP, the highest level on record. Of that $36 trillion, $29
trillion has accumulated since 2000, 24 years during which the GOP held the presidency
for 12 years, the House for 16, the Senate for 10, and all three for 6. Regardless,
the spending seems to always go up and the deficits continue to grow until
today where every single American, from baby to centenarian, is on the hook for
$102,000. That, in a nation where the average household income is $80,000.
And yet the Republicans, the party that’s
supposed to represent financial responsibility has presented America with a
budget that basically spends like a drunken sailor.
To put this in perspective, one merely
needs to recognize that the Republicans had as their number one cheerleader for
the last year the world’s richest and most successful man but with the
presentation of this “disgusting abomination” they have made a literal enemy
out of him. Addressing the Republican treachery head on, Musk suggested “In
November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.”
Simply put, the Grand Old Party is grand no
more. It is simply Democrat lite and should therefore sent to the dustbin of
history.
Of course as we learned with Teddy
Roosevelt and H. Ross Perot, third parties don’t work in the United States. The
reality is, a new party doesn’t need to be started from scratch. Just as the
GOP was built on the remnants of the Whig Party, a new party could be carved
out of the decomposing husk of the GOP. Just look to how
well that treacherous John Cornyn is doing down in Texas to understand how
it’s possible to send swamp rats out to pasture.
And Elon Musk should lead this charge. Although currently on the outs with President
Trump, in reality the two have far in common than not. He should spearhead the
creation of this new party, one where financial discipline is, if not the raison
d'etre, is a core element beyond compromise.
And the DOGE team has given them more than enough to work with. Much like Newt Gingrich did in 1994 with his
Contract with America, Musk et. al. should build on the DOGE recommendations and
put together a new Contract of items that most Americans can agree on and use
that to eviscerate the RINO wing of the GOP.
Most Americans don’t like thousand page
omnibus bills that no one can read and fewer can understand. This new Contract should promise single
department bills written in plain English.
Americans don’t like seeing budgets that go up year to year with
seemingly zero correlation to the agency’s success or failure. This new Contract should propose zero based
budgeting so that agencies and departments have to make the case for their
spending every year or every other year.
These and other no-nonsense policies will
no doubt raise the ire of virtually the entire Democrat party, most of the
bureaucracy and of course the swamp Republicans. But they would likely resonate not only with average
Republican voters, but they would likely appeal to many of the non-deranged elements
of the Democrat party who are simply exhausted with the status quo of dysfunction. And now is the time, before it’s too late.
One hundred and thirty five years ago slavery
was an existential threat to the survival of the United States and it took a
war and 600,000 lives to defeat. Debt figures on an accounting sheet might not
sound like an existential threat, but make no mistake, they are. Whether Zimbabwe
or the Weimar Republic or third century Rome, spending matters, deficits
matter, numbers on an accounting sheet can eventually turn deadly. When this
debt bubble bursts America will come apart at the seams and it will make the
collapse of Venezuela look like a walk in the park.
But it doesn’t have to be. History doesn’t
often pair a highly motivated public with the world’s richest man on the same
side of an issue so clearly in need of fixing. It has now and we should seize
the opportunity and take what little good that remains of the GOP and build
upon it a new party that puts the needs of America above those of grifting,
power obsessed politicians. That’s the kind of change Americans voted for.
Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA
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