Sir, it does not lie in your mouth to say that. You do not walk that talk in your Senate dealings.
You voted to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for reaching a final vote on approving Supreme Court justices to lifetime appointments, after having argued against it. Your deed violated your very own message and avowed political beliefs. You failed to face the president on an equal footing and say, “No! I will not vote to give you the ‘nuclear’ option.” Instead, you kowtowed to his demands. You rendered the Senate, and Congress, subordinate to the Executive.
You owed the nation an act of political courage: You owed the nation your vote against dropping that 60-vote requirement. Instead, you showed political cowardice: You voted a strictly partisan line to eliminate that higher level threshold. Were you threatened? Did the Majority Leader threaten to deprive you of your chairmanship? Were your perquisites threatened? No matter. You should have shown good old American grit, courage, and independence and voted against the lowering of that threshold. You failed America.
I don’t expect you will find any greater store of courage this time. Rather, I expect you’ll lack the guts to vote against your party on the repeal of “Obamacare”. Thus, you will once again fail America, this time voting to un-insure tens of millions of poor Americans, as is the intention of your leadership in the Senate, and your leader in the Executive, the Republican President, the party leader, the captain of your team.
In what may very well be your last days, weeks, months in the Senate, Sir, rise and do the right thing: Grow a backbone, and stand up and vote against your party when your leaders clearly show so much disdain and so little compassion for Americans when putting forth such options as replacing “Obamacare” with “No Care”.
Be brave. You once were.
