Today is the day in Washington DC when something extremist may happen - or may not - in the tale of President Donald Trump’s wild insistence that his re-election was stolen.
As of last night, Trump’s efforts to undo the November election (and thus the votes of millions of Americans) have cost the GOP dearly: one and possibly both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia. And today is the day that his push for members of Congress to formally reject the Electoral College tally will stand or fall.
No one is surprised to see Tennessee’s Sen. Marsha Blackburn joining in with this gross gaggle of rejectionists, but we are disappointed to see our newest senator, Bill Hagerty, fling himself onto the same clown car. They are both on the wrong side of history.
Immediately upon his swearing in this week, Hagerty joined Blackburn and the other extremist senators - Tennessee is the only state where both senators have signed on to President Trump’s marching orders - so complete, unquestioning and unflinching is their obvious devotion to a losing President.
This supremely selfish gambit by Trump, of course, is hopeless and pointless. More important, it is an insult to the Constitution, to our democracy, and to common sense.
Now, it’s not as if Senator Hagerty went to DC with any hard-and-fast commitments to the contrary. No real issues were engaged in his primary contest with Dr. Manny Sethi, other than which of them might be more devoted than the other to President Trump and his curious administration, and in the general election “campaign” Hagerty simply ignored the Democrat.
I invite you to read my Tennessean column today about this sorry episode and how Mr. Hagerty needs to decide soon what kind of Senator he wants to be.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2021/01/06/marsha-blackburn-and-bill-hagerty-climb-into-clown-car/6563333002/
