What have Republicans done for us?

Lately? Ever?

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds rapped Donald Trump in her endorsement of Ron DeSantis, “I believe [Trump] can’t win and I believe that Ron can. And that’s a big reason I got behind him.”

She’s not going for the best candidate. She is going for electability again. Just like McCain was more electable than Ron Paul and Romney was more electable than Newt Gingrich.

Her statement follows the warning back in April from New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who wrote in the New York Times, “Winnowing down the field of candidates is the single best chance to stop Mr. Trump. If Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee for president in 2024, Republicans will lose up and down the ballot.”

Reynolds and Sununu don’t get it. Trump supporters no longer care about the party. Why should we? The party hates us and has done everything it can to sabotage us. They ignore our issues to pursue their trivia.

I say this because I finally got fed up last week when the Deseret News reported, “On Wednesday, Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla., sponsored a proposal banning the words Latinx and Latin-x in federal paperwork. The proposal is an amendment to one of the House GOP’s 12 appropriations bills made annually. The vote was 222-198 with 215 Republicans and 7 Democrats voting for the amendment.

“Utah Reps. Blake Moore, John Curtis and Burgess Owens voted in favor of the proposal.

“House Democrats who voted in favor of the ban included four members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus: Reps. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, Yadira Caraveo D-Colo., Vicente Gonzalez D-Texas, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash. The other three were Reps. Jared Golden, D-Maine., Matt Cartwright D-Pa. and Mary Peltola, D-Alaska.”

Wow. MAGA Mike is showing his leadership by taking on words. Wow. Stopping the government from calling Hispanics the wrong name is his top priority.

Phooey. He’s McCarthy Lite. Look for Dylan Mulvaney’s endorsement soon.

Republicans went through 15 votes to find a House speaker in January and then went through a barrage of votes over 22 days in October to find his replacement. And what do Trump supporters get out of their efforts to get a real leader in the House?

Word games.

Nothing quite says out of touch like wringing your hands over what to label 80 million or so Americans. The actual problem is that our government still asks about race and ethnic background is an affront to the constitutional command that we not judge people by race or creed. The Republican answer is to duel with Democrats over what name to call them.

You say Latinx, I say Hispanics — let’s call the whole thing off.

Of course, that was the last straw. Let’s look at the bales beneath it. I will start with the question that sounds like the title of an Ashton Kutcher movie.

Dude, where’s my wall?

In 2016, Trump supporters took a lot of grief for daring to say build the wall. Never mind that a decade earlier, Congress passed a law to construct one, the media and Hillary blasted us as racist, xenophobic and backward for wanting a wall.

After all that grief — after delivering the White House and the 4,000 political appointments that go with it to Republicans — after keeping the majorities we gave them in Congress in 2014 — we never got a wall. Republicans laughed in our faces.

Gym rat Paul Ryan refused to support the party’s presidential nominee because — get this — Trump used the word pussy in a private conversation 11 years earlier.

Instead of punishing Ryan, the party kept him on as House speaker. And after two years of obstructing President Trump, Ryan quit and cashed in — landing a fat paycheck as a member of the Fox board of directors.

Have Republicans punished the FBI for spying on their 2016 presidential nominee? No, they have not. In fact, MAGA Mike just gave the FBI $375 million to build a new headquarters in Maryland. The FBI worked with the Capitol Police to frame Trump supporters as insurrectionists — and House Republicans let them.

But the bottom-most bale of the straws that broke the back of my Camel is still the Tea Party. They did the improbable and gained 63 seats for Republicans, taking back the House. And they also almost brought back the Senate with an incredible 7-seat gain.

Their reward? Ridicule and the continuation of Obamacare. More than a decade later, it fuels medical evil. Transgendered children butchered in 60 sex-surgery clinics suffered most because Obamacare enabled Obama to not only require health insurers to cover birth control, it empowered him to mandate transsexual plastic surgery.

Obamacare enabled the multi-million-dollar business of mutilating children and teens.

Electing Republicans failed to stop this atrocity. We put in Republican majorities and elected a Republican president and instead of delivering us from this evil, they kept Obamacare going.

But hey, they are using their power now to thwart the use of the words Latinx and Latin-X in government documents, aren’t they? Vote Republican. You can keep your federalization of health care but lose one of the 50 ethnic labels the government slaps on Americans.

Then there is abortion. In the aftermath of yet another victory-turned-into-defeat election, the Republican hierarchy blamed conservatives and not the poor management of the RNC. Oh, it is great at raising money but terrible at winning elections. The RNC blamed its failure in 2018, 2020 and 2022 on Donald Trump — the man who saved the nation from Hillary.

This year, RNC and their failed strategists blamed abortion. After decades of squeezing pro-lifers for donations, the RNC is upset that Roe v. Wade was overturned.

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, told Reuters, “It's a wake up call for Republicans to figure out what the right messaging and the right policy is on abortion because whatever they have now is not popular with voters.

“Republicans have to stop pushing policies that make people believe they are trying to ban abortion. They need to try and find a middle ground right now.”

Middle ground?

Did Republicans seek a middle ground on slavery after losing the 1856 presidential election?

But Republican strategist has become a synonym for Democrat, hasn’t it?

Conservatives have not cost the party a single election since 1964 and the Goldwater debacle. Even then, the Kennedy assassination pretty much locked that race in for Democrats. What has cost Republicans election after election is the moderate wing, which gave us Jerry Ford, George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

They were 1-4 in presidential elections. That win was courtesy of Ronald Reagan, whose popularity kept Bush 41 afloat in 1988.

Party loyalty is a joke. Besides rewarding Ryan for not helping the party’s presidential nominee get elected, the party failed to discipline Mitt Romney for being the first senator to vote to convict his party’s president in an impeachment.

He did it again a little over a year later. And lest we forget, House Republicans initially kept Liz Cheney as their No. 3 leader after she helped impeach Trump a second time.

What a ticket Republicans had in 2012: Benedict Romney and Mata Hari Ryan. They have not supported a Republican ticket since because the sad fact is they are imposters who posed as conservatives but worked for Obama, Hillary and now, Biden.

But I am supposed to worry about the Republican ticket down ballot because we must stop Democrats but for decades now, it has been vote Republican, get nothing.

No thank you. I am voting for Trump next year but I may leave the rest of my ballot blank because Republicans are not worthy of my support. It won’t be Donald Trump killing Republicans down ballot; it will be Republican indifference to the electorate that will cost them.