One is reduced to hysterical laughter to try to maintain a modicum of sanity.
Our Senate at work: Republican Mitch McConnell said (Dec 6) “Legislation that doesn’t include policy changes to secure our borders will not pass the Senate.” Republican Trump said (Feb 3) the Senate should not pass legislation that includes border security. Let P be the statement “Senate legislation should include border security.” and let Q be the statement “Senate should pass legislation.” Then we have the Republicans saying
(~P ⇒ ~Q) ˄ (P ⇒ ~Q)
Show that this is equivalent to ~Q, that is, “The Senate should not pass legislation.”—basically stop working.
It looks like the Republicans in the House are doing the same thing:
See Logical Dead End
Old Codger Rant, with Update (4/24/2024):
The main legislation being held hostage by the on-again-off-again border security demands of the Republicans (besides border security itself) is support for Ukraine (and Israel and Taiwan). The Republicans object to aid to Ukraine, since it would help stem the aggression of Vladimir Putin and that is not what Trump wants.
For someone like me growing up in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Cold War, this coddling of Russia is the most sanity-challenging aspect of the current Republican Party. We had continual drills in our schools over what to do when the Russians dropped the bomb (like today’s mass-shooter drills). Living in the Washington area meant we knew we were in a bulls-eye. The Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was filling the television screens with his dogged ferreting out of Communists in American society. We had television shows like “I Led 3 Lives” about trying to uncover Russian spies (who of course were everywhere). There was the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which bracketed the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. So the fears were real.
It was therefore with vast relief when the Republican President Ronald Reagan met the Russian Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, to begin dismantling the two countries’ mutual nuclear arsenals and bring about the eventual end of the Communist Soviet Union—thus freeing Ukraine from Soviet control. As part of the nuclear disarmament agreement the nuclear missiles in Ukraine would be removed and dismantled. The détente in the decade of the 90s was like a fairy tale.
And so it was, since the rise of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine have brought back the nightmare of the Cold War with all its overtones of nuclear annihilation. Only now, Ukraine is without a nuclear defense—thanks to us.
So for the stalwart anti-Communist Republicans of the Cold War to suddenly aid and abet the return of the “Russian menace” is beyond mind boggling—it is obscene (not to say the “t”-words).
(Update 4/24/2024) After months of delay, Biden just signed into law bipartisan legislation to provide desperately needed aid to Ukraine, but not the US border security that Trump had scuttled.