The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
GOP leaders silently sticking by Trump, for now
Chris Shays knows what it’s like to cross party lines in a presidential impeachment. As Connecticut’s 4th U.S. House District seatholder in 1998, he was one of just four Republicans to vote “no” on all four articles of impeachment of former President Bill Clinton.
More recently, the Maryland Eastern Shore resident has not been shy about calling the current White House occupant what he is. “I think the president is dangerous, he’s irresponsible, he’s clueless, he lies, he bullies, he intimidates, he aligns himself with racists,” Shays said this week. “He’s a despicable person.”
And that’s on a good day. With President Donald Trump under siege and with clear evidence emerging that he asked the Ukraine president to help him in the 2020 election, you might think Republicans, especially in the bluestate haven of Connecticut, would join Shays in finally, publicly repudiating the man who bullies anyone who speaks up in either party.
It makes sense that the GOP would cut Trump loose now that it’s clear he acted reprehensibly — setting the stage for Vice President Mike Pence or some other decent conservative to carry the party’s flag with plenty of time before the election.
That may yet happen in the U.S. Senate if it comes to a conviction vote. But that’s not what I’ve found in a few days of conversations with Connecticut Republicans.
If there’s a groundswell rising against Trump within the elected and activist quarters of the party, it’s detectable only in the patient waiting, waiting, waiting of annoyed party insiders whose loyalty to an impulsive national leader is broad but thin.
“It’s just disgraceful that Republicans aren’t standing up to him,” Shays said, speaking mainly of Republicans in Congress. But, he added, that will change if the Democrats mount and present a bulletproof case. “That Republicans are afraid of Trump doesn’t mean they like him.”
Many Republicans are ready to jump ship, Shays and others said. But they’re not leaning over the rails yet except maybe to throw up. In Connecticut, as good a place as any to find wavering in the ranks of a party with an oldline business Republican history, it’s too soon to see a movement as House impeachment investigations get underway.
Sure, the well known antiTrump Republicans such as Robert Patricelli, cochairman of the former Commission on Fiscal Sustainability and Economic Growth, and Mike McGarry of Hartford, are as critical as ever. But neither is aware of a groundswell among state central committee members and elected Republicans.
“I think they just are more interested in keeping their state central seat and whatever power they have,” said McGarry, a former Hartford city council member who left the state central committee this summer. “And if they repudiate Trump, they have nowhere to go.”
Some Republicans haven’t returned calls when I’ve left a message, understandably. Leaders of the state House and Senate GOP wanted no part of this whole conversation. They can’t win no matter what they say.
Others say the attack on Trump is, as one operative put it, “a baseless effort by Democrats in cahoots with the media.”
Still others are happy to talk about how they’re staying out of it altogether as they whistle through a bluestate political burial ground that could devour them with a wrong move in either direction.
“I support the office and I’m doing a waitandsee but I’m not sure that what I think makes a whole lot of difference in the scheme of things,” said state Rep. Livvy Floren, RGreenwich. Ultimately, she added, “The people will eventually be the speakers for this and I think we all ought to keep our powder dry and see what happens with the protocols and the rule of law.”
That makes sense for a moderate Republican who’s not in national office. “I don’t feel pressure to break with him or side with him,” Floren said, though she added, “This maelstrom is causing me agita.”
Rep. Gail Lavielle, RWilton, similarly, said she stays out of presidential politics; she didn’t attack former President Barack Obama nor endorse Mitt Romney, the GOP nominee against Obama in 2012. Nor did she say much about Trump in 2016. “And I certainly for God’s sake never, ever said anything good about Sarah Palin,” she said of the 2008 GOP nominee for vice president.
These are local and state Republican leaders we’re talking about here, the great middle between nationally powerful party figures and typical GOP voters. They both set the tone for the conversation and follow what they hear at the supermarket and the dry cleaner.
With her constituents more interested in a flap over a housing proposal in Westport — not pushing her to speak out on Trump — Lavielle is in no rush.
“Nobody likes his behavior...his behavior is ridiculous,” Lavielle said. “As with anything, like John Rowland, you would think that if anything is proven to their satisfaction, they would say ‘This is wrong, I just can’t go along with this.’”
She was referring to former Gov. Rowland’s 2004 resignation and imprisonment after an indictment on corruption charges. With Trump, unlike the popular Rowland and Clinton, who built political careers from the ground up, a collapse of support is likely to come before a Senate conviction, if it advances that far.
Shays, as much as he dislikes Trump, is not on board with an impeachment until and unless the Democratic investigators and prosecutors prove a quid pro quo — a link between Trump withholding military aid for Ukraine and his request that the eastern European nation look into the doings of Joe and Hunter Biden.
“Remember, we are overthrowing the will of the people in an election and you have to keep remembering that,” Shays said. “Do I think he needs to be censured? Absolutely.”
Patricelli also called for a censure. That’s a middle ground that Shays tried but failed to broker for Clinton in 1998. The point is not what happens legally, it is whether this round of legal issues sends
Trump’s reluctant supporters, if not the hard core, are still not jumping over the rails. But they’re inching closer.
“The sad thing is,” Shays said, “it shouldn’t take this issue for them to speak out about all the things he has done.”