The Watcher’s Council

Every week on Monday morning, the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum with short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture or daily living. This week’s question: Is it Time To Replace The GOP? Would You Support A New Party?

The Noisy Room: I am very close to that pivot shift. The tipping point for me will be the nomination for 2016. If a true conservative does not clinch the nomination due to RINO machinations, then I will swing to a Third Party, consequences be damned. There will be those who say, if you do that, Hillary Clinton is assured the ascendency. My reply to that is if someone such as Jeb Bush is nominated, Hillary Clinton or the likes of Bernie Sanders will win anyway and we have nothing to lose anymore. I truly believe if a candidate such as Ted Cruz is forced to run on a Third Party ticket, he stands an excellent chance of winning – barring voter fraud and being assassinated by the powers-that-be.

I believe a new Civil Rights movement has just been born out of this week’s Supreme Court rulings. The end of our Constitutional government is upon us with lawless rulings from the bench and the dissolution of the three branches of government into one monstrously corrupt executive behemoth. Leaders will now rise in that movement and Ted Cruz will almost certainly be one of them. He is one of the few with the stones to stand and tell it like it is. He is also a master debater and won’t be silenced. I am joining with other Constitutionalists out there such as Trevor Loudon, James Simpson, Cliff Kincaid, Wild Bill, the Black Robe Regiment and many, many others calling for civil resistance. We will not comply. A third party could very well be at the forefront of the resistance. As Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish penned it, be the best saboteur you can be.

The Independent Sentinel: I always said that I would wait until 2016 to give up on Republicans and I would prefer to do that. They are our only hope and they haven’t had the majority they need to overrule Barack Obama on anything except those bills that liberals like.

Oddly, when the Democrats held power, they got what they wanted and now that they don’t hold power, they get what they want. The establishment refuses to use the power of the purse. It appears that the Republican establishment is too weak-willed to fight back, think keeping their jobs is the prime objective, or maybe they are just as liberal as the Democrats.

The establishment is now punishing Conservatives who do what their constituents want over their demands. We see Mitch McConnell ripping into the Confederate flag instead of telling people that flag was a creation of the Democratic party. The list of unappealing Republican establishment responses is endless.

If they don’t cut it out and if they shove a RINO down our throats, then I will join any reasonable movement to start a third party.

JoshuaPundit: I’ve done a lot of thinking about this one, especially as I saw the reaction from all sides to this weeks’ events.

I am by no means a die hard Republican, but I am loyal to certain principles they supposedly represent. I actually hoped that after they won control of congress, we would finally see them do as they promised and uphold those principles again. But we were simply lied to.

I no longer feel it is possible to hijack or take control of the GOP. My own feeling is that this Regime’s unprecedented NSA spying and secret data collection unearthed things certain congressmen, government figures and even perhaps a Supreme Court Justice or two desperately want hidden. After all, this president has used these tactics before, and that kind of leverage would certainly account for his aggressive attitude since the midterms. Whether it’s that or simple cowardice or avarice, it doesn’t matter.

I also no longer see waiting around until 2016 as an option. The time to organize is now, a year and a half before the elections so that cohesive principles can be agreed on, strategy plotted out and lines of communication opened. We need to act to secure the liberty of ourselves and our prosperity, rather than once again depending on the Republican Party (or the Democrats, for that matter) to do it for us.

Doing so gives us a much larger, united seat at the table. And it provides a framework for something new and badly, badly needed.

And another thing to consider… we may need that unity and that structure before 2016. These recent decisions have quite a bit of teeth in them and the way they’re certain to be enforced by the Obama Administration is pretty clear, at least to me.

Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason: Those of us who actually care enough about our country to follow politics have come to the realization that both the Democrat and Republican Party no longer represent the American people. Unfortunately, while we grew up, went to work, raised our families, and pursued our personal version of the American Dream, the “trusted servants” we elected to protect our rights and interests were pursuing their own agendas. When we finally realized what was happening we got involved and worked very hard to get professed “conservative” Republicans elected, only to be bitterly disappointed once they took office.

We now know that no one, or very few, of our elected officials are working and looking out for our interests. The Democrat Party has been infiltrated with progressives bent on destroying everything that has made America great, in particular the middle class. The Republicans are no better, beholden to big corporations and bankers, also at the expense of the middle class. The government has become a massive wealth redistribution machine through the confiscatory theft of our hard earned wages via numerous tax and regulatory policies.

After last week’s Supreme Court decisions, it has become even more apparent that activist judges allow their political leanings to color their decisions instead of considering the cases before them with strict scrutiny and interpretation of the Constitution. We are no longer a nation that follows the rule of law or respects the will of the people or state’s rights.

We do need a third party and I would support one. The question is do we have enough time to turn everything around, and who would stand for us and be our voice.

Bookworm Room: To put it bluntly, I think that the Republican Party sucks eggs. It does not represent conservatives. Instead, as James Taranto long-ago said, it represents Leftists who have a slight edge on Democrats when it comes to fiscal conservativism. The GOPers are on board with every single Progressive idea — they just think that we ought to be a little more responsible about paying as we travel down The Road to Serfdom.

Having said that, I think true conservatives lack the critical mass to create a meaningful third party, especially with a pivotal election less than a year and a half away. Moreover, in this technologically driven age, the Republican Party has the infrastructure, and that’s something that can’t quickly be replicated either.

What I’d like to see is a coup without the Republican Party. Not having previously been of a revolutionary frame of mind, I’m not quite sure how to go about doing this, but I would certainly begin with fighting vigorously in the Republican primaries to destroy every RINO, starting with Boehner and McConnell.

Interestingly, an idea that has been picking up more and more traction in the comments section at my own blog is the feeling that, true to his Chicago roots, Obama has been blackmailing people like Boehner, Roberts, and McConnell. Indeed, my readers feel that the prosecution against Hastert was a little warning to all three of them to toe the Obama line with both the trade deal and the Obamacare ruling.

I have to admit that this idea, crazy though it is, seems more and more feasible lately. It certainly explains a lot of the insanity going on at the highest level of Republican governance, including Trey Gowdy’s peculiar inept and slow Benghazi investigation.

It was Sherlock Holmes who said when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Either that, or I’m getting even more crazy than the Leftists.

The Glittering Eye: In political science there’s something called “Duverger’s law”. That’s the observed tendency of all non-proportional representation, “first past the post” representative democracies to become two party systems. The implication is that any third party is strictly a temporary phenomenon–it won’t be able to stay around long enough to gain any real influence. Add to that the reality that when the electorate is closely divided between the two surviving parties a third party tends to throw elections towards the party it is least like and you’ve got a pretty substantial argument against a third party.

Forty-five years ago I read a very interesting history of the New York State Conservative Party that outlined the circumstances peculiar to New York that made its creation a sensible move and articulated the party’s role: to nudge the Republican Party, in New York at the time very much more liberal than it is now (remember John Lindsay?), in a direction more to its liking. Unless and until we go to a proportional representation system that’s the role I’d see for any third party and I think the Tea Party is filling that role pretty effectively for the Republicans.

Don Surber: Meh.

Ask Marion: It is absolutely time for the GOP to go, as did the Whig party, whom they replaced!

The GOP leadership has stabbed their base, as well as the American people in general, in the back and has sold out to the ruling elite, as have the Democrats. For anyone who doubts that or does not keep up with the day to day treachery in Washington, D.C. please read: The Time For Changing Is Now. The time for change ”is” now, and in order to save America and what freedoms we have left, the change must take place swiftly in the form of not a 3rd party but rather a new replacement party, nullifying the GOP.

The creation of a 3rd party while leaving the GOP in place would just weaken the ability of average Americans to fight for and win back what the Constitution gives us. A new party must replace the Republican party. It is something I have fought supporting for a long time, but the past couple of weeks have proven that we cannot wait any longer.

As Sarah Palin said when she was asked this same question. “;I do not wish to leave the Republican Party, but if they leave me…?!?” Well their leadership seems to be leaving all of us, leaving me no choice but to support a new party to replace them!

Wolf Howling: It is time for a lot of things. One is a complete restructuring of our completely out of control courts. Two is a requirement that no regulation pass into effect until voted on by our elected representatives As to time for a third party, under normal circumstance, the answer would be a resounding yes. The Republican hierarchy are leading the way in enacting Obama’s second term agenda. Having voted Republicans into office in what was a historic wave election, they promptly rolled over and played dead. It is long past time for a third party. Our current crop of Republican congresscritters, as currently constituted, are a fifth column.

That said, we are on the knife’s edge of being so far transformed by Obama and the left, that to support a third party now would be to kiss America – the America envisioned by our Founders and written into our Constitution – goodbye forever. We need to vote for the most conservative candidate – and that appears to me to be either Ted Cruz or Carly Fiorina. We then have to hope against hope that it actually makes a difference in the direction our country is headed.

Well, there you have it.

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