Republican Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake have gotten a lot of press lately for speaking out against President Donald Trump.
And they should get a lot of press because it’s a big story. But it may end up not being as big as the pundits want you to think it is.
Corker and Flake deserve credit for showing some backbone in a party pretty much devoid of any type of political courage, but it’s fair to say they found their strongest voices about the time they decided not to run for re-election.
To be fair, Flake and Corker have spoken out to varying degrees before announcing they won’t be on the ballot in 2018. To be just as fair, Flake and Corker have given Trump every vote he’s asked for, including for all the members of his clown car cabinet, the GOP attempts to take health care from millions of people and, most recently, cutting consumer protections for people ripped off by financial institutions.
In other words, they can say what they want but they’ve never leveraged their beliefs into acts to buck the president when it comes to his despicable behavior or the GOP’s pro-rich anti-poor agenda.
So while it makes for good reading and soundbites and analysis by the cable news pundits it may not amount to a hill of beans in the end, because a few senators sounding off isn’t going to make a bit of difference when the vast majority of their colleagues continue to drink the Trump Kool-Aid.
That would be folks like my state’s walking invertebrates Sen. Pat Toomey and Rep. Mike Kelly. Here’s Toomey’s statement on Flake from his website:
"Senator Jeff Flake has served the people of Arizona with integrity and honor in both the U.S. House and Senate. He is a friend of immeasurable decency and has provided a principled, conservative voice to civil debate. His presence will be missed by his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I look forward to working with Senator Flake through the rest of his term."
Of course, it would have been more impressive if he wasn’t in the fetal position, cowering from a possible Trump tweet, when he said it.
Toomey and Kelly are symbolic of how the GOP, sensing an almost limitless opportunity to screw the middle class and poor in this country, are simply going to keep propping Trump up in the hope they can pass enough bad legislation before Trump gets impeached, they’re voted out of office or a nuclear war starts, whichever comes first.
And it shows once again that it will be up to Democrats to take back the government on our own merit, instead of waiting for the GOP to hand it back to us.
Not that the Right isn’t trying, with Steve Bannon out to destroy the party and line up a collection of kooks, crooks and idiots to primary any Republican who’s even a quarter-inch left of batshit crazy.
In the long run that will help, as long as the idiot vote remains low enough to be beaten by those with common sense and common decency. But sometimes it seems the racist idiot portion of our country is growing. I don’t know if it has or it’s just been emboldened by the rise of the most corrupt and incompetent president in our history.
Either way, the Democratic Party will have no one to blame but itself if it doesn’t hold at least one house of Congress by 2020, with the hope that can happen in 2018, and wins back the White House in three years.
How do we do that? It starts with recruiting outstanding candidates, followed by solid, professional primaries in which they clearly articulate their positions and let the voters decide who’s the best choice.
And that has to be followed by smart aggressive campaigns and a unified effort with people from the Left of the party and those who are more centrists putting their big boy pants on and understanding that, while their man or women may have not made it to the general election, we all lose if we fail to back our primary winner to the hilt.
I’m not interested in symbolic votes and protest votes because so far those have gotten you only one thing: Trump as president.
We need to get involved. Find the candidates running in our areas and do what we can. Then we can win this thing one seat at a time.
Corker and Flake are like weathervanes spinning on the roof of a house, I’m taking about the foundation and structure that helps keep the house upright when the storm comes.
Hopefully, we can blow out some Republicans in the process.
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