Where is this Republican handbasket taking us?

The Environmental Protection Agency sets standards for tailpipe emissions. States can apply for an exemption from those standards, but only to impose more stringent ones. California, due largely to the Los Angeles area’s historically bad smog problem, has for years had such an exemption. Under Scott Pruitt, the new head of the EPA—or, as the head of the Sierra Club has aptly described him, the arsonist in charge of the fire department—that exemption is likely to be revoked.

If it is, that revocation will be in keeping with one of the cardinal principles of the modern Republican Party: to favor the rights of states to regulate their own affairs free of oversight by the hated federal government—except when Republicans control the hated federal government, and then to hell with states’ rights.

There are of course exceptions, but by and large Republicans are remarkably consistent in this inconsistency. Whether the issue is imposing vehicle emissions standards in California, or drilling for oil off the coast of California, or recounting votes in Florida, or standardized testing of school kids, or sanctuary cities, or fracking, or smoking marijuana, big-government-bashing Republicans are generally just fine thank you with federal power when they’re the ones wielding it.

By a similar token they take a dim view of welfare but not when it comes in the form of crop subsidies to white farmers in red states. They’re all for religious liberty when that means allowing merchants to discriminate against gay customers, but when the religion in question is Islam, they clamor for immigration barriers and support spying on mosques. Many of the same Republicans who embraced the invasion of Iraq under transparently false pretenses fourteen years ago now embrace a president who says it was all a catastrophic blunder—a blunder, one might add, much of the cost of which the Bush administration declined to include in the Pentagon’s budget. They financed that war for almost six years largely through supplemental appropriations, not unlike teenagers with a credit card. And then at their 2012 convention the Republicans had the gall to display a pair of huge clocks tracking the deficit as if they themselves had had nothing to do with creating it.  

All of this hypocrisy leaves you wondering what the Republicans really do stand for. If you judge from the chanting at some of their more recent conventions, what they believe most fervently in and get most excited about is oil drilling and incarcerating Hillary Clinton.

Obviously, there’s more to core Republican values than they let on with their chanting. For one thing, there’s cutting taxes. That’s one thing they generally are entirely consistent about. They purport to put country first, but actually among their first priorities is finding ways to avoid footing the bill for it.

Another is a huge military. Other agencies of the government are bloated. The military, no matter how big it may be, is pretty much invariably undersized, and during every Democratic administration it either vanishes entirely or falls into such a state of disrepair it has to be rebuilt.

Another is gun rights, or, as Republicans like to say, Second Amendment rights, though in citing that amendment, they generally omit any reference to the introductory clause about a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state. Conservatives generally purport to be strict constructionalists, meaning they think the Constitution should be applied strictly in keeping with the intent of the men who wrote it. But in the matter of bearing arms, the obvious intent of those men in citing a well regulated militia gets no shrift at all. Excising half the sentence, we are left with an absolute those men obviously never intended. If any of them could be transported to 2017 and told his amendment made it unassailably legal for a nut case to walk down the street brandishing a hand-held nuclear weapon or juggling anthrax-laced water balloons, he might have a thing or two to tell the NRA and its legions of fawning Republican devotees. Like maybe where they could stick their preposterous mangling of the Second Amendment.

Still another is opposition to regulations. Obviously we do have some unnecessary, annoying, economically debilitating and generally obnoxious regulations. Just as obviously we need some regulations, some we have and some we don’t have but should. No, the government shouldn’t be able to tell me what color to paint my house, but neither should a mining firm be able to install a copper smelter next door. Nor should my neighbor’s kid be allowed to practice on his drums at 3 in the morning with his window open. The Republicans used to bill themselves as the party of law and order. That slogan still applies, but you don't hear it much anymore. They talk more these days about being against regulations. That's all well and good, but there’s a fine line between law and regulation. You can draw a distinction between the two, with the standard disparaging references to unelected bureaucrats, but you can’t logically endorse the one and forswear the other without at least taking the trouble to do that drawing. It’s just too glib and easy and hollow to make the law out to be sacred and regulation evil. It smacks of demagoguery. Obviously we need some rules. To hear a lot of Republicans railing against regulations, you’d think they were anarchists.

And then there are family values. Somehow the man the Republicans have chosen to lead their party and the nation seems an unlikely champion for a party that makes so much noise about family values. Or used to. Just as the Republicans, in embracing Southern white voters alienated from the Democratic Party over its embrace of the civil rights movement, have pretty much had to relinquish the banner of Abraham Lincoln, they have rather abruptly, in embracing Donald Trump, stopped making the case for family values. That’s a hard case to make when your top guy is a self-proclaimed molester of women and at least wannabe adulterer, each of whose three marriages has featured a prenup agreement.

I could go on. There’s free trade, on which their standard bearer takes a position very different from the traditional Republican one. There’s Russia, whose people Republican and Democratic Cold Warriors alike demonized for half a century or so after World War II and whose current leader, no less a thug than many of his Soviet predecessors, our current misleader seems so strangely smitten by. Amid all this contradiction and all the ugly know-nothing nativism that has engulfed the Republican Party recently, you can’t help but wonder, what does it mean to be a Republican these days, and just exactly where do the Republicans, under the bizarre schoolyard bully buffoon they’ve saddled us with, propose to take us?