State GOP hopefuls mum about Trump
Party leaders urge their imperiled candidates to speak out.
Senior Republican Party leaders began urging their most imperiled incumbents this week to speak out about the wrongdoing surrounding President Donald Trump, but it appears Texas Republicans in tough congressional races either weren’t given that message or just aren’t heeding the advice.
Texas Republicans in what have been characterized as the most competitive congressional races in the state — U.S. Reps. John Culberson of Houston, Will Hurd of Helotes and Pete Sessions of Dallas — aren’t talking. In fact, nearly all Texas Republicans in Washington have been silent on this week’s convictions of former Trump associates.
The American-Statesman asked
all 25 House Republicans representing Texas for a comment on the developments on Wednesday and again on Thursday, and only Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, responded.
“As a former federal prosecutor, I have faith in our criminal justice system and will be watching closely as the facts and evidence of this case unfold,” McCaul told the Statesman on Thursday.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters Wednesday at the Capitol, “having been a lawyer and judge, I just think we ought to see how this thing plays itself out. It’s hard to make a rush to judgment.” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who faces a surprisingly strong opponent in U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, has been mum on the subject.
Texas Democrats meanwhile, are having a field day, but their party faces its own pressure to shed a cautious midterm strategy and hammer the opposition for fostering what Democratic leaders are labeling “a culture of corruption” that starts at the people around Trump and cascades through two indicted House Republicans to a series of smaller scandals breaking out in the party’s backbenches.
One day after Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, implicated Trump in payoffs to two women before the 2016 election, and the former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of eight felonies, Republicans were concerned that the worst might be to come in the House, although the party’s senators expressed few worries.
‘Not above the law’
By urging some candidates to speak out or at least stay silent, Republican leaders who fear losing control of the House risked opening the first significant rift between the Trump White House and the GOP-controlled Capitol.
On cue, U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., called the accumulation of Trump-related scandals a “sad chapter in our country’s politics” and said that “no one is above the law.” Curbelo, in a tough re-election fight, also reproached the president for his caustic attacks on special counsel Robert Muller.
“He’s making a major mistake by attacking the Mueller probe in such a personal way,” said Curbelo, who represents a district that Hillary Clinton won handily in 2016.
U.S. Rep. John Katko, running a difficult race in central New York, told The Post-Standard in Syracuse on Wednesday that mounting legal trouble around the president “raises it to another level of concern, there’s no question about it.”
“Wherever the facts go, if they go towards the president or someone in the White House, they’re not above the law,” Katko said, voicing support for the Mueller inquiry. “No one is.”
Nearly as alarming to House Republicans were the mushrooming scandals in their own chamber, misdeeds that might dampen turnout among conservative voters.
Only hours after the decisions on Cohen and Manafort, U.S. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, R-Calif., was indicted on a charge of using campaign money to help fund a lavish lifestyle, including the alleged purchase of golf shorts masked as a charitable veterans contribution.
Those charges came only weeks after U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., was arrested on charges of insider trading, something that also has tarnished a handful of his colleagues, including Culberson, who invested in biopharmaceutical company Innate Immunotherapeutics. U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland, also invested in the company. Neither are accused of any wrongdoing.
The ‘I’ word
To date, Democrats have urged their candidates to conduct their own races and avoid a national campaign against Trump or the Republican Congress, except on carefully targeted issues like health care costs. Trump’s scandals, they argued, will play like background music that they do not need to accentuate.
But the summer eruption of apparent GOP malfeasance has some arguing that Democrats should make corruption more central.
“There’s no way this won’t matter in a whole bunch of races out there, and Democrats need to be talking about this everywhere,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
Democrats also worry that employing a Trump-tinged message about corruption will only prompt more questions about whether they would use a new House majority to impeach Trump, a campaign that could rile an otherwise demoralized Republican base. Democratic leaders have studiously avoided the “I” word for months, preferring to shift the burden onto Republicans.
But the criminal implications of Cohen’s guilty plea will raise the pressure on Democrats from their own base.
“We need to see what Mueller comes up with,” U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said about the potential for an impeachment inquiry.
Some Texas congressional Democrats haven’t been as restrained in talking about Trump.
“Cohen has shown the criminality of a president who is a serial liar,” U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, said Tuesday. “While the actions of this Trump gang are so corrosive, it is the ongoing silence and wishy-washy wavering of congressional Republicans that enables such serious damage to our democracy.”
U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, said Wednesday that it doesn’t take a conviction to impeach and remove a president from office.
“The ultimate question isn’t whether the country has a way to remove an unfit president, but rather whether Congress has the will to remove an unfit president,” he said. “As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wisely indicated, ‘There comes a time when silence is betrayal.’ Such a time is upon us.”
U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, also called for the impeachment of “crooked Donnie.”