Supporters won’t dump Culberson just because he votes with Trump
President Donald Trump — and it still feels odd typing that — stopped in Houston on May 31, meeting with families affected by the tragedy in Santa Fe, but mainly to attend a $5,000per-plate fundraiser.
Your mom was right: Anyone you have to pay to hang out isn’t really your friend.
Trump has been no friend to many of the Republican candidates running for re-election in districts and states where he didn’t exactly overwhelm voters with his populist, if authoritarian, charms. This creates worry in Houston’s 7th Congressional District, where John Culberson presides over an area that spreads across the west side of Houston before snaking north to include those sitting in traffic on Highway 290.
Culberson is seen as vulnerable because Hillary Clinton beat Trump there by a 49-47 margin. Democratic candidates who sought the seat (now whittled down to generic Democrat Lizzie Pannill Fletcher) swiftly and sharply pointed out that Culberson often voted in line with Trump, hoping to sway voters by suggesting Culberson is in cahoots with the president.
But there is little surprise that a Republican congressman would vote for measures supported by a Republican president. And many of the measures in Culberson’s admittedly astonishing 98.7 percent record of agreement with Trump were common-sense measures, such as extending government funding for a few weeks to avoid a shutdown.
Even Trump accomplishes the right thing from time to time, even if it often seems accidental. Agreeing with him should not be anathema, though congressmen and -women and every senator should take a step back and assess the situation fully before doing so.
The Democrats seem to think that the two-point Clinton victory in the 7th indicates a strong positive presence for their party. But it’s difficult to see that as a measure of a traditionally conservative district, as Donald Trump is anything but traditionally conservative. Conveniently conservative, perhaps. And always willing to abandon even that.
Trump has gleaned nothing of conservatism as espoused by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan or even our own George H.W. Bush (who turned the 7th Congressional District Republican in 1966). Conservative political thought has many subsets, none of which include the selfaggrandizing, glory-seeking, tone-deaf machinations of the 45th president of the United States.
It’s pretty easy to offend those of Aristotelian, traditionalist conservative thought by lumping them in with Trump. Perhaps because the president seems to care less about individualism and economic freedom than his own self-centered interest and ideas.
It’s hard to deny even the broadest characterizations of Trump having nationalist and authoritarian motives — even if those are subsumed by his own egocentric buffoonery. He was able to take advantage of a loathsome and feared Hillary Clinton during 2016, but that’s not the same as being embraced. And the enemy of your enemy isn’t always your ally.
It wasn’t necessarily funny when Trump tweeted about his May 30 oval office meeting with elder statesman Kim Kardashian. It indeed was funny that he tweeted about the meeting before Kardashian did so, highlighting who was more excited about the confab.
Kardashian visited the White House to discuss prison reform, reportedly after seeing a viral YouTube video about a Tennessee woman serving life without parole for a first-time drug offense. For Trump to give her an audience falls somewhere between hearing out a Free Mumia supporter and Elvis Presley’s visit with Richard Nixon about keeping drugs off the streets. (The King’s solution was not, as some might think, to take them all himself ).
In the same time frame, Trump reacted predictably to the firing of Roseanne Barr for making racist comments — by making it about himself.
Such tomfoolery and concern over motives are a bit irrelevant for a local race where the president’s name is not printed on the ballot. And anyway, Culberson can stand on nearly two decades of his own record and be judged accordingly.
Trump does his best to chase away principled voters, the kind who will eventually re-elect Culberson to his seventh term. Those who might unfairly put Culberson in tandem with Trump — having to peruse the ballot through rolled eyes — will likely hit the button for the Republican candidate anyway.