By Georgia Earley
In the last four years under its new rules, the Idaho Republican Political Party has increasingly censored Republican lawmakers, labeling those who don’t “toe the party line” with their votes and their speech as “enemies.” The same is happening nationally. Since 2021 Republicans have censured as nearly as many lawmakers as had previously been censured since Andrew Jackson in 1834.
Our country’s Founding Fathers had warned about the power of political parties and of their potential to usurp constitutional law and set the stage for an overthrow of the will of the people. The following is an excerpt from George Washington’s Farewell Address on September 17, 1796.
“The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish Government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government.
“All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.
“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.
“However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”