You just cannot count on this crop of republicans.
As I’ve often said, the Republican Party is so good at folding they should be the White House valets. Doesn’t matter what your issue is, they’ll fold. They fold on debt, on immigration, on regulation, on gay marriage, on Obamacare, on [Insert Your Issue Here]. Regardless of the merits of this or that issue, on the whole they’d rather pre-emptively surrender.
The GOP Don’t Never Dance With Them What Brung Them
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
[…]
Also absent was Cory Gardner, the Colorado Republican. Daines tossed a friendly pitch for his home-state audience, with amusing references to some pal of his re-charging his Tesla in Bozeman. And, when he was done schmoozing for Eyewitness News in Bozeman, he left the room. So, for the remaining 70 per cent of the hearing, what should have been six Democrats and seven Republicans was instead six Democrats and one Republican – the lonely chairman, Ted Cruz. That’s why the Dems got 85 per cent of the question time and lobbed puffballs at Rear Admiral Titley – until eventually Judith Curry and I chose to push back at the fatuous Markey.
Why did this happen? I’m a foreigner, and I certainly rarely feel more foreign than when I’m in the ghastly US Senate. But I’ve attended committees in the Canadian parliament and other parts of the Commonwealth and can’t recall any occasion when the majority party’s members have chosen to boycott the hearing.
Why did no Republicans show up? Rubio was off campaigning in California and ignoring all those senatorial duties his constituent Jeb! wants him to focus on. But Thune and the rest of those guys were all in the building, voting on various Senate flim-flam going on that day. So even though they were 90 seconds away they chose not to attend.
The not so subtle reason is that, like Bob Dole (currently threatening, if Cruz is the nominee, to “oversleep” on Election Day), their antipathy to Ted Cruz outweighs everything else. Dole feels that Cruz has been given the greatest honor any man can have – the keys to the Senate men’s room – and yet he won’t play by the rules of the club.
The slightly subtler reason is that these Republicans felt that the whole climate biz was a bit of a hot potato for them. Yet, putting aside my own presence, the three scientists in the room were among the most respectable figures in the field: John Christy is the great innovator who developed the world’s first satellite temperature record; Judith Curry, among the old boys’ club of climate science, is perhaps the most distinguished female climatologist on earth, although she would disdain such a categorization; and Will Happer is an eminent Princeton physics professor garlanded with almost all the major awards in his field.
All of them have paid a price for speaking out against Big Climate. So, in disdaining Cruz (and/or me), senators Thune, Rubio, Moran, Sullivan and Gardner were also disdaining some of the most distinguished climate realists on the planet. Those three scientists did not deserve that from a handful of political hacks. Indeed, by their absence, they were contributing to the overall message of climate conformism: If you disagree with the “97 per cent consensus”, at least have the good taste to crawl away and die somewhere far off out of sight.
More here. H/T: Doris Wise Montrose
