A Senator Rebels! (Wishful Thinking)

It can happen here...I hope

I can understand why one who’s gone to the trouble of running for and winning a Senate seat would want to retain it. Even the trendiest restaurant can always find a table for you, but fellow diners probably don’t come over and ask to take a selfie with you, as they probably would with Leonard di Caprio or Lady Gaga. You have a staff on which you can dump all the onerous stuff — the plowing through thousand-page big, beautiful (and hideous) bills, the fetching of cold drinks and snacks. Lobbyists are forever trying to slip you large sums of money under the tables of the chic bistros to which they’ve taken you. Members of the media are forever asking your thoughts on this thing or the other thing. You’re probably assigned a chauffeur and bodyguard. At hearings, you get to ask people really pointed questions, and then to snarl, “It was a yes-or-no question, hotshot,” when they obfuscate.

But even with all the goodies, I can’t understand how remaining a senator could be better than being a Great American Hero, someone about whom schoolchildren, provided the planet doesn’t burn to a crisp first, will write reports for their middle school civics classes for years to come.

It seems to me that all a Republican senator aspiring to Great American Heroism has to do is declare, “I can no longer pretend, solely because he’ll surely try to end my legislative career, that Donald fucking Trump is anything other than a stupid, incompetent, infantile, delusional, corrupt, hateful, petulant, vulgar, treacherous, soulless fascist, and, indeed, a fecal stain on American history. From this moment forward, I will cease to support his ghastly agenda. I urge my counterparts in this noble chamber to follow me. Or, if they prefer, we can walk side by side.”

Would that not be an extraordinary act of the best kind of patriotism — the self-sacrificing kind? Would that not guarantee the rebellious senator a place alongside Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, and John Henry Faulk, the great heroes of the second most horrifying in American political history, after the current one — the McCarthy era?

Wouldn’t being regarded as a Great American Hero be better than getting schmoozed by lobbyists?

“But, John,” you say, “hasn’t it been done, by Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger?” Well, yes, those two did indeed repudiate The Lion of Mar-a-Lago, and bless their hearts for doing so, but: (a) that was before things got nearly as nightmarish as they’ve become in Trump 2.0, and (b) neither of ‘em was a senator. A senator declaring himself or herself sick to death of MAGA would be a proportionately bigger deal.

I can’t help but think that once our brave senator slithered out from under the Vile Excrescence’s Swiss Bally leather oxfords, others would surely follow — and of course claim to have been trying behind the scenes to undermine MAGA all along. That’ll be sickening, but what price the de-fascismization of America?

I hope the senators do better than Mr. Biden did when he ignored this: