Here’s a scenario we won’t be seeing, but it really needs to be seen.
In addition to retiring Republican Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker leveling unprecedented criticism at their party’s incumbent president, it’s time for some prominent Republicans who are not retiring to do the same. Then it would be impossible for the White House and Sean Hannity to undermine their credibility by saying they’re out-of-touch losers who couldn’t be re-elected anyhow.
Imagine if, say, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan were to go all country-first and play the “Florker” card on behalf of their ultimate constituency: the people of the United States. Something like this:
“Thank you all for being here today. The Speaker and I, as you well know, do not call joint press conferences. But neither do we intend to continue to stand by and merely say and do just enough to go along as if this were politics and partisanship as usual. It’s not. Would that it were. We’re staring at an unprecedented, parallel universe with ever-ratcheting, existential implications for this country, this democracy and, frankly, this planet.
“First, we apologize for our actions over the last year and a half. We enabled Donald Trump because he was, well, the nominee of our party. Not the party of Lincoln but of George Lincoln Rockwell, you would think. And we’ve been running scared from tax-blinder, Tea Party ideologues, hypocritical evangelicals and generically angry whites. Not a constituency anyone should want to court, let alone show allegiance to.
“And we apologize for voting for all of Trump’s cabinet nominees. Without exception.
“And that obviously includes the Energy secretary who wanted to abolish the department. Yes, Rick Perry is a fool. Our bad. But worse yet is the fossil-fuel advocating, climate-change denying EPA Director Scott Pruitt, Dow Chemical’s guardian angel. Our regulatory apparatus is there for a reason: It’s not anti-business bureaucracy. It’s common-sense, public-health proactivity. Some things are not for sale or lobby. Take that American Chemistry Council.
“We also apologize for countenancing a president so blatantly unprepared, so morally bereft, so temperamentally unhinged, so pathologically narcissistic and so flat-out dangerous that we’ve withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, opted out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, mandated critical infrastructure priorities include an obscenely obsolete border wall, insulted friends and allies from Germany to Australia and engaged in school-yard name calling with the other half of the world’s nuclear-hair trigger tandem. We’re all imperiled.
“Trump’s not making America great again. He’s making America grating to the rest of the world, including those who share our democratic ideals. How dare he.
“To quote a Congressional colleague, Sen. Jeff Flake, ‘The longer we wait, the greater the damage, the harsher the judge of history. … There is a sickness in our system and it’s contagious.’ Well, the contagion stops here.
“To quote another Congressional colleague, Sen. Bob Corker, this president ‘debases our nation’ and raises the unconscionable specter of ‘World War III.’ The senator also urged us to be ‘unafraid to stand up and speak out as if our country depends on it, because it does.’ Does it ever.
“This can no longer be about party. This can no longer be about political careers. This is about service to country–not disingenuous, gutless self-service. We’re embarrassed to have to actually articulate that, but that’s where we are.
“We don’t think we can wait three years and pretend to back this unqualified, Oval Office oaf and then crank out the usual partisan stuff about Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker or whomever the Democrats put up. This has to be about enlightened foreign policy that doesn’t incite a nuclear exchange, about security that doesn’t conflate national defense with immigrant animus, about pragmatic, real-world free trade, about affordable, necessary health care, about a country, including its military, that accepts all Americans regardless of race, religion and sexual orientation, about a nation that is respected–not ridiculed or reviled.
“We want our country back, and we hold this president accountable. If he doesn’t change–and if past is prologue, he can’t–we’ll need to go to our constitutional tool box for something other than gun rights rationales. We also need to remember what warrants impeachment and what prompts the 25th Amendment. It’s that dire.
“Thank you. God bless America. More than ever.”