by Laurel Duggan
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said the old Republican Party is dead and must be replaced with a GOP that’s focused on working-class voters and the issues they care most about: work, family and culture.
The expected midterm red wave didn’t pan out for Republicans because the party can’t seem to win over working-class independents, Hawley argued in The Washington Post Friday, dismissing claims that turnout or candidate quality were behind the GOP’s faltering performance. The GOP can only make serious gains by reversing its recent policies on trade, crime, immigration and culture, he wrote.
“The old Republican Party is dead. It has been wasting away for years now, and this month’s midterm results are the finishing blow,” he wrote.
“For the past two years, the Republican establishment in Washington has capitulated on issue after issue, caving to Democrats on the Second Amendment and on the left’s radical climate agenda (‘infrastructure’). These Republican politicians sided with Big Pharma on insulin and advocated lowering tariffs on our competitors overseas,” Hawley wrote.
“No more talk of grand bargains that turbocharge illegal immigration. No more liberalizing the United States’ trade agenda, making us more dependent on foreign adversaries. No more fiddling with Social Security in the guise of ‘entitlement reform,’” Hawley wrote.
He also called for a renewed emphasis on cultural issues and suggested a parent tax credit for working families, a parents’ bill of rights and 100,000 new police officers to be deployed around the country so that families can feel safe.
In addition to leaving behind some of its old economic policies, the GOP needs to actively promote its domestic economy through tariffs, reshoring manufacturing jobs and “taking the shackles off” American energy producers, he wrote. He also called for breaking up Big Tech through an antitrust crackdown and for the relocation of federal agencies from the nation’s capital to middle America, where bureaucrats could “confront the real-world consequences of their decisions, economic or otherwise.”
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Laurel Duggan is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Josh Hawley” by Senator Josh Hawley. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Carol M. Highsmith.
