After suspecting for some time that the national Republican party is interested only in one thing — holding onto power at all costs — we have now been shown the best evidence ever that the suspicion is valid.
On Jan. 31, GOP senators almost uniformly voted to smother the “trial” on impeachment articles against President Donald J. Trump, by rejecting a call for further witnesses and documents of Trump’s corrupt act in seeking foreign help to smear presidential candidate Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter, as a way to further Trump’s re-election schemes.
Never mind that, since the House of Representatives finished its own inquiry into impeachment, a massive amount of new evidence has come out that Trump was driving a monthslong pressure campaign to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to smear the Bidens.
And never mind that a number of Democrats acting as impeachment managers, among them Colorado’s own Jason Crow (CD-6), gave stirring speeches urging their Republican colleagues to allow that evidence to be made part of the record in the “trial.”
It seems, thanks to some of this new evidence, that Trump’s extortion scheme — withholding needed U.S. security assistance until Zelensky agreed to “announce” the investigation, and also dangling a meeting between the presidents in the Oval Office as further enticement to corruption — started far earlier than Trump wants us to believe, and involved the president much more directly than we have been told.
But the GOP caucus in the U.S. Senate did not give a damn about any of that. All they cared about was hiding any more evidence from the public and keeping Trump in the White House at all costs, in order to keep alive the party’s drive to dismantle as much of the federal government as possible in the year ahead.
And now, on Feb. 5, the senate is expected to vote along party lines to keep Trump in power and clear the runways for social, political and procedural mayhem between now and the election in November.
In addition to all that, Trump apologist Sen. Lindsay Graham already has called for the Senate to double down on Trump’s crimes by demanding the Senate open an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, thereby using the massive resources of Senate investigatory machinery to help Trump get re-elected in November.
Which means a hard year ahead for those of us who feel the GOP has abandoned any pretense at preserving our republic, and will work to do as much damage as possible to everything from environmental regulations to the nation’s hard-won social safety net for the poor, the elderly and the downtrodden.
Not that it’s only Democrats who will spend the next year hammering away at the sordidly corrupt policies of the Trump administration and its supporters. Even some Republicans have concluded that they have had enough.
For instance, an organization known as The Lincoln Project, started by a small group of anti-Trump Republicans, has been airing ads, writing commentaries and generally letting the world know that they want Trump gone as much as any progressives do.
Among other things, they recently aired an ad against Arizona GOP Sen. Martha McSally, nominally over McSally’s recent ugly insult to a CNN news reporter (she called the reporter “a liberal hack” and refused to speak on some topic). But The Lincoln Project ad went further, pointing out that she is a Trump follower who had already lost one election for the Senate seat once held by John McCain, and should be prevented from capitalizing on an appointment to fill a different seat with a bid to become a permanent member of the GOP’s Senate majority by running for Arizona’s other, recently vacated Senate seat.
But forget about Arizona — we’ve got work to do here in Colorado.
First, we must ensure that our state repeats its 2016 rejection of Trump’s criminally corrupt, certifiably insane, yearslong attack on our government and our society in general.
This should not be that difficult. Back in 2016, a sizable portion of Colorado’s electorate bought into Trump’s lies, though not enough to turn over to him our state’s nine Electoral College votes. We can only hope that, since then, Trump’s antics have convinced at least some of his 2016 supporters that he does not deserve a second term in the White House.
At the same time, we need to oust Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, whose devotion to Trump and Trumpism have been solid enough to show that he has no core political morality, and no backbone. He has proven he lacks the qualities necessary to adequately represent our state in Washington, D.C., and he needs to be shown the door.
The coming year will be filled with petty tirades and lies from the bratty, aggrieved occupant of the Oval Office, with a supporting cascade of mistruths, misdirection and general crap from his sycophants and enablers in Congress and beyond.
And the most important aspect of our work must be to convince voters that their ballot does count, their fears and feelings are justified, and that they must above all come out in force on Nov. 3 and VOTE.
We can do this.
Email at jbcolson51@gmail.com.