Why Can’t Republicans Be More Like Democrats?

“Republicans,” wrote the late P. J. O’Rourke in his 1991 book, Parliament of Whores, “are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.” While some are blaming President Donald Trump for the midterm results, there is definitely plenty of blame to go around. A great deal of blame belongs to elected Republicans who seemed determined to provide evidence for O’Rourke’s assertion.

As in 2017-2018, Republicans held both houses of Congress and the presidency and did very little with it over the past two years. Their major accomplishment was signed in July of 2025. That was the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Can anyone name anything else? As in the first two years of Trump’s first term, Republicans in Congress seemed more like an opposition party.

Even now, with little time left with control, Senator John Thune, who was reelected leader of Senate Republicans and who professed himself ready to “make the most of the time we’ve got,” sent the Senate home this weekend.

Contrast that with the Democrats, who are already working to make their agenda a reality even before they take control.

Nobody wants Republicans to mimic the substance of Democrat lawmaking. But conservatives do want the GOP to mimic the zealousness and urgency with which Democrats pursue their agenda. A look at the second-biggest state in the Union gives us a chilling example.

Texas, where Democrats not only took a U.S. Senate seat and several House seats, but also the governorship, lieutenant governorship, and the Texas House as well, is now bracing for the deluge of bills and executive orders intended to turn Texas into California without the climate and natural paradise. If Democrats get their way, the Lone Star State will be unrecognizable by this time next year.

Texas Democrats have, for instance, filed at least 20 new gun control bills – most of them aimed at semi-automatic weapons. Yes, Democrats are absolutely coming after your AR-15 – and much more, if they can.

But gun control is only a taste of the 1,019 bills filed this week for the 2027 session. Democrats are also taking square aim at border security, doing everything they can to undermine the Trump administration’s historic success at securing the homeland. Proposed bills would end the required cooperation and partnerships Texas sheriffs have with ICE to remove illegal aliens; prohibit a border wall from being built in state parks; and pull back Operation Lone Star, by which Texas defended the border when the Biden administration refused to.

In economic foolishness, HB 270 would direct the Texas Department of Transportation to find a private company to create, maintain, and operate high-speed rail that links Dallas, Waco, Austin, and San Antonio along the I-35 corridor. Similarly, several bills demand that the minimum wage be raised to either $15 or $17. Several would expand Medicaid coverage in Texas. Others would repeal Texas’s new voucher system that empowers families (like my own) to choose education options that best fit their children.

These bills will fit nicely with the insanity of Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa’s pledges to raid the state’s Rainy Day fund to send each household $1,500 and to use emergency powers to enact an electricity rate freeze. Of the latter, even the Dallas Morning News labels this “bad economic policy.”

And of course, in keeping with far-left progressive orthodoxy, Texas Democrats are also working to make late-term abortion-on-demand the law of the land and pave the way for the chemical and surgical mutilation of confused children. HB 126 would repeal almost all of Texas’s abortion restrictions, including parental consent for minors and licensing for abortion facilities. It would also repeal the ban on doctors subjecting minors to gruesome transgender surgeries.

Texans can take comfort in the fact that the Texas Senate is still in the control of Republicans. Lots of badness will, God grant it, be blocked. Governor-elect Hinojosa will undoubtedly do immense damage, but most of her actions can be immediately reversed if Republicans find their way back to power in four years.

Regardless, one has to admire the boldness of Democrats in the state and in the nation at large. Democrats may be destructive; M. Stanton Evans called them “the evil party” in contrast to the Republicans being the “stupid party.” On a basic level, however, they show that when they get power, they know how to use it and are unafraid to do so. Not so for Republicans, whose leaders seem to relish being in the minority.

Lovers of classic musicals will recall Rex Harrison’s portrayal of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. In the song “A Hymn to Him,” Higgins sang, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” A true analysis of what’s wrong with the Republican Party will have to deal with the question of why, when it comes to governing, Republicans can’t be more like Democrats.

If Republicans are to survive as a party, they must learn to be just as bold and aggressive as their counterparts. Otherwise, what happened on November 3 will only become the norm.