The U.S. Senate has long been nicknamed “The Cave of Winds,” for good reason. The chamber gusted with gusto yesterday when Lamar Alexander delivered his farewell speech.
Lamar, a two-time presidential candidate who was so dull that his strategists felt compelled to affix an exclamation point to his name (the signs said, “Lamar!”), is what passes these days for an eminent respectable mainstream Republican. Mitch McConnell got so emotional yesterday about Lamar’s imminent retirement that he choked up on the Senate floor, which was more tears than Mitch has ever publicly shed for the 270,000 Covid dead.
Lamar’s valedictory remarks would not be worth a mention here if not for a few passing observations that frankly turned my stomach. To wit:
“Our country needs a United States Senate to thoughtfully, carefully and intentionally put country before partisanship and personal politics…While you’re here, you might as well try to accomplish something good for the country.”
That’s rich, coming from the guy who put partisanship over country during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. Lamar was teed up to be the conscence of the Senate, but when the moment came to accomplish something good for the country – to oust a lawless president – he predictably wimped out.
Trump, as you may recall from the distant past, had been busted in a flagrant abuse of power, seeking to manipulate the ’20 election by withholding congressionally-authorized military aid to Ukraine unless its leader agreed to gin up fake dirt on Joe Biden. Trump’s high crimes look even worse today, given how he’s still trying to manipulate the ’20 election, this time after the fact.
There was speculation that Lamar would put country over partisanship because he was retiring at the end of his term and didn’t need to suck up to the MAGA voters back home. But his home is Tennessee, and rest assured that his friends and peers at the country club and in the boardrooms would not have looked kindly on a breach of tribal loyalty. Which is why Lamar signaled his exoneration vote with this milquetoast rationale: “I think it was a mistake (to solicit fake campaign dirt from a foreign power). I think he shouldn’t have done it. But abuse of power is such a vague term. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Abuse of power doesn’t mean anything…Music to Trump’s ears.
After Lamar (and a handful of other Republican cowards) voted to exonerate and cleared the way for Trump to preside with characteristic incompetence over the most deadly pandemic in a century, the affable Tennessean surfaced on Meet the Press to explain himself. His message to Trump was simple: Please learn your lesson and don’t misbehave again.
When Lamar was asked whether Trump would interpret his acquittal as a license to commit more abuses, this was the senator’s answer:
“I hope not.”
Wait, there was more: “If (behavior) like that gets you an impeachment, I would think you would think twice before you did it again.”
Lamar was then asked: “What example in the life of Donald Trump has he been chastened?”
Lamar: “I haven’t studied his life that close.”
Trump had been president for more than two years, and a candidate in Lamar’s party for two years previous, yet Lamar had never looked at his track record or researched his reputation? Well. That doesn’t seem to jibe with yesterday’s nostrum that senators should do their jobs “thoughtfully, carefully.”
Trump feasts on people’s weakness, and Lamar said all kinds of weak things when he voted to acquit – like claiming that Trump’s impeachable act was a minimal offense akin to “somebody who left the scene of an accident,” and tut-tutting that “its appropriate for me as a United States senator to say, ‘Mr. President, you shouldn’t do that.'”
But, in hindsight, his most memorable rationale was that the American people – not the Senate – should render the ultimate verdict on Trump: “Under the Constitution, the people should decide when the president does something that’s inappropriate. That’s for the voters.”
Well, guess what: Trump has been renounced by a record 81 million voters, yet he won’t accept the verdict, he’s sowing mass distrust of our free and fair elections – trying to game the process after the fact just as tried to game it with help from Ukraine – but what has eminently respectable Lamar said about that manifest abuse on his way out the door?
Zip.
In the end, he was just another Republican profile in cowardice, a doormat for Trump’s jackboots.