I’m officially leaving the Republican Party. Or rather, as cliché as it sounds, they’ve officially left me.

The reason is pretty straight forward: they’ve finally stopped pretending to care about conservative principles and values. The once-great party of Reagan has completely abandoned the principles upon which it used to stand. The nomination of Donald Trump, a vulgar and know-nothing leftist, nearly pushed me out fully and forced me to abstain from voting for either major party presidential candidate for the first time in my life. I’ve been willing to vote for non-ideal Republican candidates because I was convinced that even the worst Republican is better than a Democrat. Maybe that used to be true. However, the Budget Bill is the straw that broke this camel’s back. I used to think that while we knew Trump wasn’t really Republican, the now Republican-dominated Congress would surely be able to accomplish what they were elected to do. Any hope that I had was shattered with the passing of the Budget Bill that would make Barack Obama proud. So. Let’s just briefly talk through what Hillary Clinton’s Donald Trump’s $1.1 trillion budget plan does and does not do. It does keep funding for: Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, the Iran Deal, the EPA, the NEA, every other alphabet agency, and sanctuary cities. It does not fund: The Great Wall of Trump we’ve been hearing about every day for the last two years (In case you haven’t been paying attention: First, Mexico would be paying for it. Then, taxpayers would be paying for it. Now, no one is paying for it). But at least we raised military spending, right?! MAGA!

Yes, it’s a complete surrender to the left, yet the Republicans are celebrating a “yuuuuge” victory because they were able to slightly increase the military budget. This is completely par for the course.

Cowardly Republicans have caved yet again. They told the American people that in order to defund all those things they just agreed to keep funding they needed the House, so we gave you a House majority. They told the American people that to get good things done they needed the Senate, so we gave you a Senate majority. Finally, they told the American people that they needed a Republican president, so the American people gave you a “Republican” president. There is nothing left for us to give you, and you are still too spineless to actually fulfill the promises you ran upon. Why should we continue to show this useless party allegiance?

Big government is becoming more and more the desire of many Americans as millennials come of age. Why handle anything on your own if daddy government will handle it for you? When everything you want is a right, you’re happy to surrender your freedom for the sake of those “rights.” In the past, Republican response to the dangerous and slippery slope to tyranny that is big government was a Ronald Reagan presidency. Now, the Republican response to big government is… more big government.

As I said at the time of the election: I understood voting for Trump because anything was better than Hillary and the destructive ideology of leftism that she brought with her. Unfortunately, as was the case at the time, many on the right became willfully ignorant or hold their tongues regarding the abominations that hold office for “their” party all for the sake of not letting “the other guys” win. This has allowed Trump and his cronies to completely take over the formerly dominant small-government ideologies in exchange for Trumpism, which shall not be questioned.

You’ll hear on the news that there is “much infighting” in the Republican Party. This is because the actual conservatives, who stand for the principles that used to matter, are now openly waging war against the Trumpian/nationalist/populist movement that has become the mainstream of the party. Again I’ll ask: Why continue to vote for a party that represents nothing? Why do we continue to put power into the hands of incompetents who will do nothing? Because they’re less statist than the Democrats? Sorry. That just doesn’t cut it for me anymore.

Neither mainstream party represents this country’s founding values, and the obvious response to that seems to be the introduction of a legitimate third party. I can’t be alone in the desire for a major party that actually defends the Constitution, that keeps the very small government away from the free market, that believes in individual justice over social justice, and that stands for low taxation for all. I want a party that wants to severely roll back welfare programs and re-incentivize hard work, that fights for Second Amendment rights, that believes that the government has no authority to control what free individuals do with their bodies, that understands that a strong foreign policy is important to keep us safe, and that understands that we need to control our borders and limit immigration for the sake of our physical and economic security.

The party that comes the closest to all this is the Libertarian Party, and it’s there that I’ll be making my home. The next question that arises when talking about third parties is why they never gain much support. This is rooted in a system that encourages people to follow parties rather than principles. Many Republicans and Democrats are fed up with their own party, but aren’t willing to defect. They are met with resistance from the group they are trying to escape, and are usually convinced that the “other side” will win without all the votes. This idea only furthers the problem. If everyone who hates being “forced” to vote Republican or Democrat jumped ship, I find it hard to believe that additional parties wouldn’t stand a chance.

Now, none of this is to say that I’ll never vote Republican again or agree with some things done by the Republican Party. There are some lines of thought still in there with which I agree. However, I am finished linking myself to that group of useless, spineless cowards. If we ever want to have a hope of returning to our founding principles and values, those few of us left are going to have to shake up the system by doing something completely radical: convincing conservatives to have principles.