Toomey’s liberation
Many years ago, Sen. Eugene McCarthy said there is nothing more dangerous in politics than a politician without further ambition.
And perhaps one thing Joe Biden and Donald Trump would agree on is that Pat Toomey, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, is a dangerous man.
Mr. Toomey said that Mr. Trump should resign days before his term was up — to spare the country his probably justifiable impeachment.
He also said he believes Mr. Trump descended “into a level of madness” in his final days in office.
How does Mr. Toomey get away with those statements when other Republican senators quake at the mere hint of disdain from Mr. Trump? For that could incur the wrath of a currently very angry “base” and trigger a primary. No incumbent congressman or senator wants that.
Well, the Republican has announced that he is not running again. He has imposed a two-term limit upon his own Senate service. To paraphrase Janis Joplin, Mr. Toomey has got nothing left to lose.
Pat Toomey is a free man. He is free to call them like he sees them.
Hence, he pronounced our new president’s proposed stimulus package “a colossal waste and economically harmful.”
He points out that COVID-19 relief has, so far, come to $3.4 trillion, which has nearly doubled the federal budget.
He points out, further, that in past relief packages as well as the proposed future one, people who were not out of work and far from the poverty line got checks.
What sense does that make? None at all.
And yet few in the Senate, Rand Paul is an exception, are speaking up about the wastefulness and lack of planning and rationality in relief measures that are in no way meanstested or targeted.
How many more members of Congress might speak up if they were retiring?
And isn’t it a shame that it takes the end of ambition to state truths that are before all our eyes: Mr. Trump has lost it and the relief packages seem to do nothing but throw money at a pandemic.
Maybe unfocused relief really is our best idea. It doesn’t make it a good, or affordable, one.
Perhaps Mr. Toomey will rethink running for governor of Pennsylvania. He has emerged, in the present moment, as a sane and needed voice for his party and his country.
And his promise, after all, was to limit his time in the Senate, not to forswear any other office.
Of course, then he would no longer be a free man.