Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas announced on Friday that he will not seek reelection. This came as no surprise to me. Just last week I highlighted his extreme displeasure with the current status of his work environment. He compared having to endure Trump’s government shutdown to being a jackass in a hail storm. He has to just stand there and take the discomfort and indignity. After the Senate voted unanimously to keep the government open just prior to the holiday break, there are dozens of Republican senators who are feeling the same way.
Chief among them is Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Richard Shelby of Alabama who is lamenting the fact that all his work is going for naught. For now, he’s being a good soldier backing up President Trump’s threat to keep the government partially shuttered. for months or years if he doesn’t get money from American taxpayers for his border wall. But if you want to know what he really thinks, you can look at his comments from December 30: “I found out long ago working in the Senate on the Appropriations Committee, that we’ve got to find out what do the Democrats really want here. When do they want it. And can we work with them to at least meet them halfway.” He also said, “It’s not a question of who wins or loses. Nobody’s gonna win this kind of game. Nobody wins in a shutdown. We all lose and we kind of look silly.”
Right now, reporting abounds of Republican senators and representatives privately expressing their ire at the president. Even as some questioned the motive or timing Mitt Romney’s diatribe against Trump’s character and performance in office, off the record it was widely acknowledged that everything Romney said was true. Even the pro-Trump Washington Examiner acknowledges this:
A Republican establishment impatient with President Trump but uninterested in fomenting an intraparty crackup ahead of 2020 is questioning Mitt Romney’s motivation for issuing a scathing takedown of the president.
These Republican insiders weren’t necessarily disputing Romney’s attention-grabbing Washington Post op-ed — that Trump is unfit for the presidency and driving U.S. foreign policy into a ditch. But they argued with the timing, saying it suggests the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee is all about self-promotion…
…“Everything he said is 100 percent true but the timing makes the remarks seem gratuitous,” a Republican congressman added.
So far, the public splits have been slow in coming but two vulnerable Republicans up for reelection in 2020, Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine, have now endorsed Nancy Pelosi’s plan to reopen the government. As Ed Kilgore notes, there’s a decent chance that Susan Collins will join Pat Roberts in the pasture rather than run for reelection, or she may be convinced to caucus with the Democrats if this shutdown actually does go on for months. Either way, the vulnerable Republicans are just the tip of the iceberg. The displeasure with Trump in the Senate is growing exponentially each day, and the shutdown is just a part of it. His erratic behavior in foreign policy which just led Defense Secretary James Mattis to resign on principle is at least as big of an irritant, and his decision to praise the Soviets invasion of Afghanistan was annoying enough to earn a rebuke from none other than the infamous Wall Street Journal editorial board. In fact, the board was even more incensed about Trump’s treatment of our allies in Afghanistan today:
President Trump’s remarks on Afghanistan at his Cabinet meeting Wednesday were a notable event. They will be criticized heavily, and deservedly so…
…Mr. Trump ridiculed other nations’ commitment of troops to fight alongside America’s in Afghanistan. He said, “They tell me a hundred times, ‘Oh, we sent you soldiers. We sent you soldiers.’”
This mockery is a slander against every ally that has supported the U.S. effort in Afghanistan with troops who fought and often died. The United Kingdom has had more than 450 killed fighting in Afghanistan.
Slandering and abandoning our allies is becoming the norm with this White House, but it is not going over well in Congress. At this rate, there will be more Republican retirements because no one enjoys being a jackass in this kind of hail storm.
And now he’s threatening to declare a national emergency in order to build his wall.
We are certainly in the middle of a national emergency, but it ain’t at the border, it’s in the Oval Office.
Where is “national emergency” mentioned in the Constitution?
IMHO he should be impeached for violating his oath of office “failure to faithfully execute the Office and to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. Ruling by fiat and forcing federal workers to work without pay i.e. involuntary servitude, is in violation of the Constitution. He seems to believe that he was elected Dictator.
Saw that Jim Webb has declined Sec of Defense and it’s become more clear that even Lindsey Graham will realize he can’t offer himself up for the job and retain any kind legacy he thinks he has.
I’d sure like to know who it is on twitter who is feeding him Putin’s version of history. There’s really no other place he could be getting this drivel.
I don’t think it’s on twitter.
Fuck, they’ve got his cell number. Why bother with Twitter?
Probably because with his cell there’s an ez path to track who it is, it’s too blatant. With twitter there’s a way to use links to you tubes (since he doesn’t read) and use multiple fake accounts. It’s out in the open in just the kind of way that Trump likes to traffic in conspiracies.
I’m beginning to think he’s been trained in this for a long, long time, probably going back to the real KGB era, and before his dementia set in.
For more than a year now, I’ve been convinced that he was recruited as a deep sleeper agent decades ago by the KGB but only really got activated for money laundering purposes around 2004. So there’s probably a variety of different ways they feed him ideas for disrupting the West, including direct talks with Putin.
In Re: Susan Collins: “or she may be convinced to caucus with the Democrats….”
Now that’s a scenario that any responsible Democrat would trust.
Or was that some kind of joke?
There was a Democratic faction ten years or so ago that she could have caucused with — Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Baucus, Specter, Bayh, Jim Webb — but they’re mostly gone now.
Speaking of Trump’s bizarre defense of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:
https://www.wonkette.com/trump-russia-afghanistan
working link
“At this rate, there will be more Republican retirements because no one enjoys being a jackass in this kind of hail storm.”
But there remain others, who’d rather be the jackass in a hailstorm, rather than a principled human being with a sense of duty and decency.
Kansas? Interesting. What does Charles Koch want?
That could be a more significant question than most others. But then again, with this cultish climate, who knows?
The donald has about 10 working days to fold. That is when the unemployment claim will start to be filed. The governors will be calling DC and Wall St will go back to selling stock.
OK but what about Republican Governors?
I’m here in Maryland where the impact of shutdown is particularly significant. It’s time for Larry Hogan to speak up I’d say.
This must be devastating the economy of DC and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Or it soon will. People can only borrow on their credit cards for rent/mortgage/car payments for a very few months before they are effectively bankrupt. Surely they are holding back on as many purchases as they can. Entertainment, restaurants, car dealers must all be suffering.
Pelosi positioning McConnell and the senate republicans into having to refuse to vote for the same bill that every last senate republican voted for, that would essentially reopen government without wall funding, takes pressure off Trump and puts it square in the hands of McConnell and his senate troglodytes. The shutdown, and all the pain that comes with it, is essentially on them. McConnell et al continuing to stand behind Trump at that point, even when they own all the pressure, is the very definition of jackasses in a hailstorm.
And, if Trump continues to dig in, as he probably will, refusing to sign, then this may be the trigger for them to muster the votes for a veto proof majority, and then from there, the 20 senate GOP votes to remove him from office to prevent further unnecessary idiocy. The idea that the shutdown could go on, as Trump said, for months and years, is a real and frightening, though entirely unnecessary possibility; all to help him continue to BREAK HIS PROMISE to have Mexico pay for the wall.