Dear America,
This morning I heard Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, interviewed about his new book on NPR. Toward the end of the interview, he was asked about the current Republican intention to confirm Trump's most recent Supreme Court nominee, submitted just weeks before a presidential election despite their denial to the Democrats of the opportunity to even have a hearing on their nominee during the last year of the Obama administration, claiming that the people should decide who appointed the next justice that November. Cruz is probably the most despised senator in Washington, even by his own party, and this morning he showed the reason in the answer he gave. He said that the difference between 2016 and 2020 is that now the Republicans have both the presidency and a senate majority, which the Democrats didn't have. He apparently thought that he could get away with what lawyers--and Cruz is a lawyer--refer to as "a distinction without a difference." What that means is, in layman's terms, so what! You see, when you distill his answer to its true meaning, unadorned by demagoguery and hypocrisy, it means, we could do it to you then, but you can't do it to us now. We misused the power of our majority in what is supposed to be the repose of wisdom and comity to thwart both. We had the power to be deceitful with impunity, so we did it and we're doing it again.
My point isn't to say something that everyone knows but that the only people who could change it don't care to even acknowledge. Rather, this is an appeal to any of you Americans who might be Republicans to ask yourselves if you want to be branded as someone who does things like this: someone who lies and then swears to it. I wrote a few days ago about the diminution in status of Republicans in my opinion, but I doubt that there will be any groundswell against the Republican scam just because I don't like it and it makes me wary of every Republican, not just those in Washington. But the fact is that I am not alone in my newly enriched scorn for Republican conservatism, which today is a euphemism for, "I'm more righteous than you so I am going to use any trick in the book to control what you do." This Supreme Court thing is a new nadir for the integrity, or more aptly the lack thereof, of Republicans as a political column, and it just may be that rank and file Republicans view it as a bridge too far, even if it's to achieve their goals. It may be that there are Republicans capable of thinking for themselves instead of robotically toeing the party line. It may be that for some Republicans, the fact that a national politician says something doesn't make it necessarily dispositive of all of the issue or all of the cognate considerations, like honor, probity and trustworthiness.
Now Ted Cruz is often deferred to because he putatively was a very effective litigator, especially in the Supreme Court. But given what he tried to fly regarding this most recent Republican transgression and some of the other palpably idiotic things he said thinking that no one would try to analyze them, it is demonstrable that Ted Cruz hasn't ever had an original idea. He is a follower just like Lyndsey Graham, who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mitch McConnell, who will drink any kind of KoolAid that Donald Trump pours for him in the name of partisan loyalty and self-aggrandizement regardless of what it costs the nation, and the minority leader in The House, Kevin McCarthy, who, when asked what qualified him to be Paul Ryan's successor as Speaker of The House when the Republicans still controlled it, said with pride that he had led his cronies in stopping Hillary Clinton by defaming her (isn't he half an idiot.) But regardless of intelligence or the lack thereof, they are all quislings. Quisling was the Hitler's puppet who ran Norway for the Nazis during World War II and sacrificed his own nation for personal gain. That sounds a lot like all those members of congress, and one other guy. Donald Trump has vacillated, dissembled and outright lied all toward the end of perpetuating his own power, which is coextensive with his ego. He is a vainglorious, preening bully who has confused opportunism with assiduity. And Graham, McConnell, McCarthy and all of the rest of the obsequious Republicans in Washington are kowtowing to him as Quisling did to Hitler. What does that make them? And if you vote for any of them, what does that make you?
So, in a gesture of flexibility as to my opinion, I am suggesting to you Republicans that it is not too late to redeem your good name. All you have to do is let the Trump toadies know that your loyalty to party is secondary to your loyalty to principle and rectitude, and it is at stake if they don't relent. As to the consequences if you don't, think about the analogy I just made.
Your friend,
Mike
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