Politics: Is a RINO just a Bipartisan Republican?

Maybe you’ve heard of this term before or maybe you have not. RINO is slang for a Republican in name only. Basically, a person labeled this is considered to not be a real Republican. Sure, they may call themselves that, but they are not a real Republican. Or are they?

We tend to hear a lot about moderates in some way. Moderates could just be what Republicans labeled as RINOs are in reality. I might have to do a post on why moderates tend to be hated on both sides. But bipartisanship is sparingly rare nowadays. Whether or not they are moderates in the end might be a different matter entirely.

John McCain normally sided with Republicans most of the time. By the end of his life, he had done a lot to help the Democratic side of the aisle. He was a key vote in the failure to repeal the Affordable Care act. He was labeled a RINO. But was that only because he worked with those in the other party?

The problem might actually be there being pro-choice (or anti-life, if pro-life is now called anti-choice) Republicans in the senate and elsewhere in office. These people are easily labeled as being RINOs as they go against one of the core pieces of being a Republican nowadays. Why we don’t see (as far as I know) Democrats who are pro-life being DINOs (the same slur applying to Democrats) is unknown to be.

Still, the slur comes up often enough that it seems kind of bad that any Republican that works with Democrats is seen as abandoning their party and are voted out of office. Mark Kirk was not a bad politician by any means (outside of being a known liar like many are), but he still lost by a lot when he came up for reelection. Many voted for every Republican but him. I saw more signs for Gary Johnson that election than I did for Mark Kirk. What was his problem? As far as I can tell, it wasn’t that he abandoned Republican ideas. He simply worked with the other party.

It makes you wonder, in a way. Was the only problem of RINOs, at least nowadays, the fact that they work with the other party? Lots of people still do work with the other party today, but it does not make the news and you can only learn about it through emails from them. These bills are just not as important as others. All I know is that bipartisanship needs to happen in order to get a good government that works. We need it. We don’t need any bipartisan person getting voted out in favor of more partisan people. We have far too many of them nowadays and we don’t need any of them at all. We still need people who will work with the other people from the other party. And we need them to stay around.