Cowardly Republicans + Immigration reform + The soul of Trumpists
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Happy Sunday! Time for another installment of The Sacramento Bee’s opinion newsletter, Bee Opinionated!
I’d like to extend a very special “Où se trouvent les toilettes?” to our colleague Yousef Baig, who is off this week enjoying a vacation in France. (Bring me back a beret if you’re reading this, Yousef — and get off your work email.)
This week, The Bee’s Editorial Board continued holding endorsement interviews and meeting with state legislative hopefuls and congressional candidates from across our region. However, efforts to provide transparency to voters hit a bit of a roadblock when a few invitees decided to take to Twitter and publicly refuse to appear in front of our board. The cowar-- I mean, candidates included Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones and Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, who are running for Congress, and Rocklin Councilman Joe Patterson, who is running for state Assembly.
Apparently, these three fail to comprehend that voters in the constituencies they seek to represent may include people who don’t always agree with them. Then again, it’s probably pretty easy to be a politician when you stick your fingers in your ears and sing “LA LA LA!” whenever someone questions your job performance. Of course, California Opinion Editor Marcos Bretón wrote a column this week that put it far more professionally and concisely than I just did:
“It’s a shame, but it’s not surprising.”
California will begin mailing out ballots on May 9, so stay tuned for editorial endorsements and videos from each interview we conduct.
Anyway, here were some of my favorite pieces from this week:
Life and Soul of the Party
The New York Times reported this week that Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader from Bakersfield, actually wanted former President Donald Trump to resign after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. As McCarthy is — perhaps unfortunately — a California-grown politician who once worked at the Capitol in Sacramento, Bretón took pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) to lament the party leader’s conflicted soul — or what remains of it anyway.
President Donald Trump joined by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Calif., and other Congressional Republican leaders, gestures like he is talking on a phone during a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington Jan. 4, 2019. AP photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta.
From that column:
“The malignant followers of Trumpism within the Republican Party now know that McCarthy isn’t really one of them. His soul may have been intact, if only for a moment, when he spoke words that all Republicans should have spoken after Jan. 6: That there is no room for Trump or Trumpism in America.”
And from Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project:
“The irony of this moment is Kevin McCarthy will likely not get the powerful spot he’s always wanted (House speaker) because he got caught lying about saying the obvious truth everyone knew to be right. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the Republican Party in the time of Trump.”
Need we say more?
At a Crossroads on the Border
Deputy Opinion Editor Josh Gohlke took on some Congressional Democrats who seem to be joining Republicans in arguing that we should keep the border closed to asylum-seekers — on the pretext that they might bring COVID into the United States.
The Trump administration invoked a long-forgotten section of Title 42 to close the border early in the pandemic, and Biden has continued the expulsions.
Tens of thousands of asylum-seekers have been unceremoniously expelled from the country every month under the policy, which the Biden administration has said it will belatedly end next month.
In Congress, however, “in the shadow of the midterm elections, a quavering chorus of Biden’s fellow Democrats are in a ‘complete panic’ over the prospect of this reversion to the rule of law. They’re afraid voters will respond to Republicans’ predictable prophecies of the sort of immigrant invasion they want their followers to fear,” Gohlke wrote.
Opinion of the Week
“Unfortunately, I have a prior commitment that includes the day-job that is essential to putting food on the table and, with four kids, there isn’t any other option! They eat a lot. :D … I’m looking forward to reading your analysis of the race.” — Rocklin Councilman Joe Patterson’s cordial response to Opinion Assistant Hannah Holzer’s email inviting him to our endorsement interview. He later wrote a longer reply on Twitter that, shall we say, didn’t blame it on his kids’ eating habits.
Got thoughts? What would you like to see in this newsletter every week? Got a story tip or an opinion to tell the world? Let us know what you think about this email and our work in general by emailing us at any time via opinion@sacbee.com.
And don’t forget: You can’t complain if you don’t vote,
