About 60% of Texas Republicans voted last Tuesday to end John Cornyn’s career in the Senate, but it wasn’t really Cornyn they were rejecting. It was the feckless, do-nothing GOP Senate leadership that makes ‘Waiting for Godot’ look like a ‘Fast and Furious.’
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wound up in a virtual tie with Cornyn, and headed to a runoff precisely because Republican voters, not just in Texas, but across the country, are incandescently angry at the GOP-controlled Senate’s inability to do, well, much of anything.
This righteous fury is why Paxton’s political play in the face of a runoff was so brilliant. He said that if the Senate would pass the Save America Act, and its voter ID provisions, he would drop out, saving President Donald Trump from having to swoop in with a decisive endorsement.
For Cornyn, and more importantly for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., this occasioned a crisis, a much-needed one, in fact, as GOP voters stare across the desk at Senate leadership, like the Bobs in ‘Office Space,’ asking, if they can’t pass a bill with massive public support, what would they say they do there?
Thune responded Monday to growing public calls to pass the Save America Act in the stupidest, most infuriating way possible, by asserting that voters aren’t really angry, and the furor is all just a campaign by paid influencers.
The fact that Thune has not apologized for this yet is incredible. It is as condescending to working-class voters as anything a politician has ever said.
Does Thune think that 60% of Republicans in Texas voting against the Senate status quo is a sign that they think he’s doing a great job?
It is not.
All across the country, Republican voters tell me that they are apoplectic about the Senate. Yes, they understand the arcane 60-vote filibuster stuff. They just don’t care. They want and need action from a body that refuses to act.
And it isn’t just Paxton who knows in his bones how vitally GOP voters need a win on the Save America Act, it is also Trump, who has shown a rare amount of patience with Thune’s ineptitude and incalcitrance. At least so far.
Even Cornyn has come around, if only in the face of his own potential political demise, penning a column in the New York Post calling for the filibuster to be abandoned and the act to be passed.
But Thune, with his long, sad face and low mournful voice like Eeyore the donkey, just keeps saying, ‘We don’t have the votes to break the filibuster.’
Ok, John, then how about this: Any Republican senator who refuses to vote to break the filibuster loses their committee assignments, gets no money from the party and is promised a primary.
The most dangerous thing I heard from GOP voters in Texas, and I heard it from plenty, is that they are starting to think their vote just doesn’t matter, that nothing can change anyway. And right now, who would argue with them?
I don’t know who Thune surrounds himself with who told him that the anger I see everywhere from Republican voters is just a paid influencer campaign, but I would urge him to go talk to some actual voters instead of his K Street cronies.
It was an ominous sign that more Democrats than Republicans voted in last week’s deep-red Texas primary, but not a surprise, because the demoralized aren’t eager voters. And if the Save America Act dies on the vine, even fewer will feel compelled to cast a ballot.
In the final moments of ‘Waiting for Godot,’ Vladimir says, ‘Well? Shall we go?’ To which Estragon replies, ‘Yes, let’s go.’ And then the famous stage direction, (They do not move.).
There is no direct evidence to show that Samuel Beckett was inspired by Senate Republican leadership when he wrote this, but he could have been, because it is the same old scene, over and over.
If nothing else, Thune needs to look GOP voters in the eye and say, directly, ‘We hear you. We know you are angry. We see it in the primary results and we will listen to what you want and try to do better.’
Right now, Thune and Senate Republicans are like the inattentive husband who doesn’t know the divorce papers have already been filed. It may not be too late to work it out with voters, but it’s getting pretty close.