We're not just testing for COVID

It's not just COVID we Americans are testing for these days. It's courage, integrity, and hope.

Bill Kristol herein proposes three tests for whether there ought to be a future for the Republican Party. The examination will be held in the three months between now and the November election.

The first is whether congressional Republicans will work together with Democrats despite the erratic and usually destructive input of Donald Fredovich to pass a responsible coronavirus package, or whether they will continue to cower in fear of his wrath while Americans die and the economy withers.

The second is whether any appreciable number of Republican legislators are willing to come right out and say that they will not vote for a second term for Donald Trump- a manifestly incompetent, unstable, and unfit president- in November.

And the third is whether,  at a time at which simply going to the polls is an act of physical courage, Republican congressional leaders will break with Mr. Trump's efforts to suppress the vote and pass legislation enabling reasonable, fair, and responsible voting by mail.

I wish I could say that I had much hope that the GOP would pass any one of them. And Kristol is right: if it doesn't, it deserves to go the way of the Whigs.

America has no need for the dry husk of a party, sucked dry of principle, and devoted only to the greater glory of an incompetent and self-absorbed fraud. And history has no time for one.

This might be the most consequential three months the Republican Party has faced since the Civil War. And not just the Republican Party. In nominating Joe Biden and keeping its finger in the hole in the dam that's holding back the crazy left, the Democrats have given reasonable Americans a place to stand- however uncomfortably- this year. But 2020 is probably the 2012 of the Democratic Party, and Biden the Democratic Mitt Romney. After Joe, the deluge.

America needs to have a responsible alternative to the Democrats in place before 2024. Either the Republican Party comes to its senses, recovers its integrity, and grows a moral backbone before then, or a new party will have to emerge to pick up the banner it has laid down at the feet of the Orange Man. And if neither of those things happens, it won't be merely the future of a political party that will be at stake. The Republic itself will be in big, big trouble.

Now, at a moment at which it appears that Donald Trump will become a lame duck in three short months and is already a political liability,  and the consequences would probably be a net gain for them, is the time for any congressional Republicans with a scrap of integrity or honor to dust it off. Unless they do, I can't see any reason to hope that it hasn't all evaporated in the last four sorry years.