The Promise and the Roll Calls, 1981 to 2011
From 1981 to 2024, the roll calls, tallies and budget scores show where the Republican Party's promises on spending and liberty parted ways with how it actually voted.
Where did the Republican Party lose its way? Understanding, not hate.
From 1981 to 2024, the roll calls, tallies and budget scores show where the Republican Party's promises on spending and liberty parted ways with how it actually voted.
Each episode reconstructs one real event from the photographs, documents and records it left behind.
In 1964 the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, carried the Civil Rights Act with Northern votes. Seventeen years later a Republican operative, Lee Atwater, explained on tape how to win the white South. In 2005 the Republican Party's own chairman, Ken Mehlman, told the NAACP: we were wrong.
In the weeks after January 6, 2021, the two Republican leaders in Congress, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), said on the record that Donald Trump (R) bore responsibility for the attack. Then they voted, scheduled and endorsed the other way, and a year later the Republican National Committee censured the only two Republicans investigating it.
In 1990 Republican president George H.W. Bush broke his 'no new taxes' pledge to cut the deficit, most House Republicans voted against him twice, and two years later he called the deal his mistake; the government's own debt tables show what came after.