No, it is not. As I explain in my recent essay for The Hill. Here is the gist:
Republican senators and courage
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) warns us that a “rotten seed” has taken root in the Republican Party, “nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice.”
It will not be easy to eliminate treachery or improve judgment in the GOP. But, as we approach Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, New York Times columnist Peter Beinart thinks he has a solution for the absence of courage. If we want “more Mitt Romneys and fewer Josh Hawleys,” writes Beinart, Americans should elect more senators “who are near the end of their political careers.”
Beinart offers Thomas Hart Benton and Sam Houston as historical examples of senior senators who risked their careers to oppose slavery and reject secession, but he closes his essay very oddly with this quote from Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster: “I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me.”
It is true that Webster was willing to displease his constituents, but he was actually speaking in support of slavery when he took that risk.
As a nominal opponent of slavery – having once called it a “great moral, social, and political evil” – Webster’s influence helped carry the day for the compromise measures, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was signed by President Millard Fillmore.
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Although fairly young by Senate standards, Ben Sasse has risked his career by challenging the conspiracy mongers and riot-enablers in his own party. He is one of the few who recognize that, as in Webster’s time, appeasement only encourages the insurrectionists.
You can read the entire essay here.
The Republican party has been dying for years. Trump is an effect, not the cause. It deserves to go. Your suggest is nonetheless amusing. Furthering corrupt, unaccountable plutocracy and bald face lying about what one's party's real policies are in order to get elected are constitutes the new red badge of courage???
Your rhetoric about treachery and rottenness would also have more bite with a global audience if we didn't watch the Democrats: (a) gaslight the whole world about Russiagate and the accoutrement for years; (b) help to advance an imperialist neoliberal economic and legal agenda, then try to blame the Republicans (exclusively) for it, and NOW apparently adopt Trump's "America First" economic policy whilst characterizing Trump as a fascist isolationist for doing so. (Desperate to reclaim the white working class' vote, aren't ya? What does that tell you about the "health" of the Democrat party?); (c) systematically engage in class warfare by exploiting millions of unskilled illiterate laborers, in violation of all labor laws developed over the last 150 years or so, all whilst America's middle class shrinks and its poor get poorer, and try to legalize them to advance your New American Man agenda; (d) have their ultra-powerful American social media lackeys silence alternative points of view, such that even Europe's leaders have spoken out in shock about it. (The stupidity of the GOP now trying to use this flagrant, horrific abuse of social power as ITS talking point is lost on no one but itself and shows how vacuous the party has become); (e) the totalitarian nature of "liberal" discourse control - in ways that Orwell EXPLICITLY warned about.
By the way, are the Dems going to use focus groups once again to decide upon the precise "impeachment" charges? (This time, perhaps exclusively based on working class white flyover state voters' views?). Despite adamantly dislike him, the whole world knows that Trump didn't incite an insurrection or any such rot. What do you think this second show trial looks like to the rest of the world, particularly the legal world?
What, moreover, would be a good alternative to your Democrat totalitarians and their lackeys in the media be then, Lubet? Personally, I would suggest having more young people from the working classes elected to office. No more Schumers, Feinsteins, Pelosis, and other such plutocrats. These alternatives would be honest, earnest, and idealistic. They would actually implement the policies they market to the people. (Those policies also obviously won't work, and so make the alternative all the more attractive).
Furthermore, what, would be healthier than to continue to demonize and try to silence scores of millions of Americans for whom their government's democratic deficit is palpably clear? Do you think calling them cowards and traitors will help "unify" the country, or the opposite? Deep down, do you really want another civil war?
Posted by: A non | January 25, 2021 at 08:13 PM