It is a sad commentary on the Republican Party that they have given over their party to bigotry, ignorance and fear.

Now the bigotry came in the 1960s after the passage of the civil rights legislation that LBJ passed. That is when all of the Dixiecrats, ie. southern Democrats, abdicated their party and went over to the Republican Party.

It has been known for many years that they like their voters uneducated and ignorant because those are the people who have kept them in power. Unfortunately, this has led to the fact that a small portion of their representatives actually are these people — ignorant, fearful and bigoted. And now, even though they are a relatively small portion of the party they are wielding an enormous amount of power in the house of representatives forcing speaker McCarthy to bend to their demands.

They are threatening, for the second time in recent history, to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. The last time this happened, by the Republicans then too, our country lost its triple A credit rating and we have yet to get it back. This time could be far worse, it could cost the country millions of jobs and cause other hardships for more millions of our citizens.

We are heading down a very dangerous road right now, passing more and more laws restricting freedoms for education, healthcare and LGBTQ people all over our country. Serious efforts are being waged in many states to ban books and restrict the things being taught in our schools. Critical Race Theory, (CRT) is basically the real and unabridged history of our country, warts and all but too many people are uncomfortable with their children knowing how dark our past really was. They not only want to restrict what they are being taught, they don’t want to take any chance that their kids might discover things on their own by reading certain books that they find objectionable so they want to ban them also.

The Republicans main candidate — besides Trump — Ron Desantis seems to be trying to “out-Trump” Trump with all of the restrictions he and his Republican legislators have been placing on just about everyone and everything they find objectionable in the state of Florida.

I’m still not clear why he thinks this will play in the rest of the country, I sure hope he is dead wrong. We must not forget that 74 million people voted for Trump in the last election so we must keep trying to open the eyes of as many people as we can to the dangers we are facing from the Republicans. Just sayin’.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw