Loyalty oaths in Kansas?

August 8, 2007

I can appreciate the fact that Kansas Republican Party is deeply divided between moderates and far-right activists. I can also understand the GOP’s desire to have Republican officials endorse other Republicans.

But loyalty oaths? Seriously? (via Kos)

The state Republican Party is forming a loyalty committee so that it can punish officers who endorse or contribute to Democrats. […]

The state committee’s actions struck a sour note for some Republicans, particularly moderates on issues such as abortion. Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist, suggested the loyalty committee could prove a “public relations disaster.”

“Ironically, it smacks most of the Communist Party,” Beatty said Monday. “That’s the kind of public irony that most parties try to avoid — the party of freedom telling people they have no freedom.”

Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh added, “It gives me pause for thought anytime someone requires a loyalty oath of anyone from any organization.” As well it should.

But Andy Wollen, president of the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority, a moderate group, mused about the GOP creating a “grand high inquisitor.”

“When you hear the term loyalty committee, what runs through your mind?” he said. “Joseph McCarthy. George Orwell.”

And in the past few years, the modern-day GOP.

Remember this gem from 2004?

The [Bush-Cheney] campaign goes to great lengths to ensure events are open only to the most loyal fans.

On Vice President Cheney’s recent trip to New Mexico, residents were allowed in to hear his Albuquerque speech only if they signed a loyalty oath swearing they “endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States. [sic]”

Or, how about this one, a few months later?

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — “I want you to stand, raise your right hands,” and recite “the Bush Pledge,” said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: “I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.”

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they’ve replaced the written oath with a verbal one.

“Party of freedom”? Please.

“When you hear the term loyalty committee, what runs through your mind?”

Well, for starters, Adolf Hitler, Nazis, Fascism.

  • “The state Republican Party is forming a loyalty committee so that it can punish officers who endorse or contribute to Democrats.”

    sounds to me like a great way to turn republicans into democrats. go republicans!

  • The party of :
    More freedom (except if you are sexually active, or disagree with us)
    Less govenment (except for the military and the parts we don’t want you to know about)
    Less Taxes (your kids & grandkids can pay the bills)

    Love, the drunken, deadbeat, bar brawlin’ daddy party.

  • “When you hear the term loyalty committee, what runs through your mind?”

    How about Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

    A word to the lobotomized lemmings that take these oaths- You’re as un-American as can be. You’re a bunch of brainwashed Nazi’s and you have to be stopped. Your president is a monster, a Caesar who will nail the righteous to a cross. A devil.

    When you take an oath to Bush, you sell your soul to Satan.

  • What y’all said.

    Also, who wants to bet that some “serious” centrist or conservative Democrat (no, Lieberman doesn’t count; he’s probably already got a WSJ op-ed written about this) won’t accuse us of doing the same thing?

  • How extensive was the problem of Republicans donating to Democrats? WHAT’S THE MATTER WHAT KANSAS? made it sound like the Cons had pretty much driven most Mods out of the government.

    Like you guys, I can understand the sentiment behind loyalty oaths, but I’m not sure why they are being used. Isn’t it easier to strip them of their committee assignments or something else, not that this is much better, just much less noticeable to the public?

  • I would hope the response would be “I am an American first, and my loyalty is to my country, not any particular party or politician.”

    Increasingly, though, it seems that “the country,” whose ideals and spirit and focus on the protection of individual freedoms are represented by the Constitution, is moving down on the list of too many Americans, and it is doing so at the insistence of people who seem to think that the only way to establish and prove your patriotism is to be a member of their party – the Republican party.

    This was a really bad idea on so many levels, not least because if you have to demand a loyalty oath from party officials, you must be mighty fearful that what your party represents is not, in and of itself, enough to engender loyalty.

    Desperate times call for desperate measures, so maybe we should take some consolation – some very small consolation – that things are so bad within the GOP that this is how far they have had to sink.

  • Sounds like those “Republicans for Voldemort” bumper stickers might have some scary truth behind them.

    Eh, Comrade? (a la Austin Powers).

  • “When you hear the term loyalty committee, what runs through your mind?”

    A party that looks to former KGB-agents to defend its President from scrutiny?

  • “…the party of freedom telling people they have no freedom.”

    Ye shall know them by their fruits. Matt 7:16.

  • Hardly “new” news (unfortunately). Richard Hofstadter wrote about this 40 years ago:

    ”It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions”

    “Their political reactions express rather a profound and largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence … The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows ‘conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness’ in his conscious thinking and ‘violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere…… The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.'”

  • This is why so many Republicans are defecting to the Dems in the Sunflower State. IIRC, about seven have switched in the past year or so.

    It’s been a pretty big issue politically here in the Kansas City area (although football season starts soon, so that’s all people will be talking about in a week or so). Talking heads and columnists have been discussing the reasons for weeks.

    It is good, though, that so many moderates are getting fed up, even in one of the largest bastions of GOP lunacy in the country. I guess you can only take it so far before folks start catching on.

    Kansas may be solidly red, but not all Kansans are solidly stupid.

  • Note to repubs: Godwin’s law has been repealed. If you don’t wish to be compared to Nazis, stop behaving like them.

  • The new motto of the Republican Party:

    “My Loyalty Is My Honor”

    And do the loyalty oaths start with “I swear to thee, George W. Bush…”?

  • I suppose if the party wants to drive moderates away from the party so that there are only a handful of “loyal” Republicans left, this would be a good way to do it.

  • Let me guess. Kool-aid was served at the Pt. Lucie event.

    But as others have already noted, if loyalty oaths drive out sensible supporters, I hope they keep it up. I hope they tell party members they have to sell all of their possessions and donate the funds to The Party. I hope they require party members to wear armbands (perhaps with some sort of cross). I hope they demand party members hang a portrait of Shrubya in every room of their house.

    Wouldn’t surprise me.

  • Anne: …if you have to demand a loyalty oath from party officials, you must be mighty fearful that what your party represents is not, in and of itself, enough to engender loyalty.

    … much like contracts for goods or services. The Corporate culture has completely infiltrated our government, and we will gobble it all up and deny the foul taste, like the mindless consumers we have become.

  • If the Republicans must have a loyalty oath, then I would suggest this as a prayer to open their meetings:

    Bu$h is my emperor, I shall not want. He layeth me down in fields of greenbacks, he leadeth me besides mercury and arsenic
    filled waters; he restoreth corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy, he leadeth me in paths of self-righteousness, greed, and intolerance of others;

    Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evildoers (all non-republicans), for he is with me; thy Rove and thy Rice protect me.

    Bu$h preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies (all non-republicans), he anointest my head with Iraqi oil and American blood; my Humvee’s gas tank runneth over. Surely wealth and piety shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the white house of Bu$h forever.

  • The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft,

    Were their arms straight, at roughly 45 degrees?
    Just curious.

  • What if the leadership changes, becomes a dictatorship and you violate the oath. What happened to a loyalty oath to the constitution? To “one nation under God”,…taking an oath to your political party voids all other oaths? God these people are sickening. One for even asking people to take an oath and then for an entire audience to stand and swear allegiance to a political candidate. Why can’t they see themselves, how absurd they have become. They’ve become republicans first, Americans second. Next they’ll be commanded to wear loyalty badges.

    I’ve never heard them referred to as the party of freedom… only the party of hypocrisy. Loyalty oaths mean they give up the freedom to change their minds or even to be open minded. The party will decide what they are to think

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