The GOP has never been a Principled Conservative Party for even a day since 1856. Not a single day! During their post Civil War political ascendancy the GOP:
* appointed virtually every SC Justice who then crushed States Rights and advanced centralized power in DC by their rulings.
* promoted and ratified Amendments 14,15,16 and 17.
* supported and voted exorbitant tariffs (Smoot-Hawley being a catalyst for the great Depression) and later the imposition of corporate and individual taxation.
As for the rest of your post, yeah....
The GOP has never been a Principled Conservative Party for even a day since 1856. Not a single day! During their post Civil War political ascendancy the GOP:
- * appointed virtually every SC Justice who then crushed States Rights and advanced centralized power in DC by their rulings.
- * promoted and ratified Amendments 14,15,16 and 17.
- * supported and voted exorbitant tariffs (Smoot-Hawley being a catalyst for the great Depression) and later the imposition of corporate and individual taxation.
We're on the same page in general, but the second two need some clarification.
The Amendments need to be grouped properly as 13/14/15 and then 16/17/18. The first three were the anti-slavery Amendments and were righteous and astonishingly simple and narrow in scope ( though later abused by anti-American internationalists wanting to destroy America through anchor babies ). Considering the makeup of those Congresses and radical (R)epublicans during and after the Civil War, we were lucky that very good men sent these Amendments to the states and not something worse. That war caused much damage to the republic ( civil liberties, draft ) but the Amendments were not among them. Those three are in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence
Those latter three Amendments are the direct product of long term scheming of moralists, globalists, crony-capitalists, and elitist bureaucrats, and are the antithesis of the Declaration of Independence. What the 16th did was allow direct taxing of the income of individuals ( prohibited in the Constitution ) while backing off of Tariffs ( actually mentioned in the Constitution ), and Free Traitorship was born. The 17th removed the ability of States to select their own Senators. The 18th granted the FedGov monster control over people's drinking habits, created a booming organized crime, and worst of all set the precedent for all later prohibitions, except this time they simply skip the Amendment process entirely. The 18th was repealed ( though remains in effect for countless substances ) but it is the 16th Amendment that really needs to go ( along with its evil stepson, paycheck "withholding", started during World War II ). Repealing the 16th is the single quickest way to bring down the FedGov behemoth.
Levin, the unmasked fraud, has lately pushed the myth that Hoover was behind the depression, citing Smoot-Hawley, but don't fall for this nonsense. If it was this simple then FDR would have reversed the Depression in 1933, or 1934, or 1935, or 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941. That's nine full years of the Great Depression which stayed around until military spending finally began in 1942. As it turns out Smoot-Hawley came a year *after* the crash and is debatable what effect it had at all. The Crash and Depression occurred 7 months into Hoover's administration, and it was actually strongly correlated to the worldwide contraction post World War I that befell most of the entire planet. It just so happens that we had a large buffer here far removed from Europe, we were much more isolated ( and it was a good thing ), markets didn't impact each other overnight or instantly and we hadn't yet imported the world's workers and deported our industry. Today, we would be sunk instantly not delayed 10 years.
What you are seeing here is the knee-jerk religious belief of Levin and Rush who worship un-Constitutional taxes on American citizens over Constitutional tariffs on foreign imports since this strangles the ability of well-positioned elitists to offshore jobs and manufacturing and their ability to reap profits on their backs. It was the exchanging of Tariffs for Income Taxes that opened the door to the grand monopolies and crony-capitalists beginning post Civil War.
One other thing which I agree on is that the (R)epublican party is at the center of most of these issues. They were founded as a quasi-abolitionist party, but it shouldn't be overstated. Compared to Pierce/Buchanan (D)emocrats they were anti-slavery expansion, but also note that they were flanked by true abolitionists like John Brown who were outcast and despised by the new Republicans as much as Perot or Paul or Trump is today. The party was more 'Unionist' than anti-Slavery before and during the Civil War.
And then after winning the Civil War and after Lincoln's assassination they were instantly reborn as radical (R)epublicans, a spiteful and mostly evil party that had no love for the Constitution, decided they were morally superior and kickstarted the long slow path to FedGov dominance that we were already on.
Within a decade of this during Reconstruction, the uniparty was born late in the Grant Administration when deal-making became the norm, including deals that handed the South back to the (D)emocratic-Slavery party while they maintained the old (F)ederalist strongholds in the North. 1876 marked the clearest point that the modern paradigm was visible and machine politics took over. The next dozen politicians ( except Teddy ) built the bureaucracy we are trying to defeat even today. By the time FDR rolled around the (R)epublicrats were comfortable being in the minorty and mastered the art of loyal opposition in the GOPe wing of the uniparty. They proved it when they viciously attacked Joe McCarthy, like Reagan later, and Perot, and Paul, and Trump. They proudly wield their biggest weapons at their own but never against the (D)ummycrat enemy.
All the proof needed is the fact that at any single point in time the (D)emocrat-Slavery party could be destroyed if they only had the courage to call them what they are. It could be done today! Instead, they accuse Trump of those very smears that apply to (D)ummycrats to save their own asses from being dragged out of the District of Criminals! They are truly the (R)etard party.