There was a time when conservatives in general – and Republicans in particular – took national security seriously.
We can argue about when that era ended; after Wednesday, no one can argue the fact that it has ended. Dozens of Republican Congressmen proved that when they chose to violate the Secured Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) where the current impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump is being conducted. In the process, these clowns delayed testimony for nearly five hours and violated all sorts of security regulations by bringing in their phones (a flat-out violation).
One of these fools – at least in rushing the SCIF – was Virginia’s own Ben Cline (R-6th District), as can be seen from this Washington Post [1] story (third video, titled “Desperate”: Lawmakers react to Republicans disrupting impeachment inquiry testimony; Cline can be seen about 24 seconds in as he pats his fellow committee crasher on the back).
Thus, less than two weeks before Election Day, Cline provided the perfect reason why I will be voting for the straight Democratic ticket on November 5 – with the full understanding that I am possibly the only one against the rest of the Bearing Drift contributors on this.
At first, I was going to be merely theoretical (although I still think correct) about how the GOP needed to by punished – hard and deep – for Trump, how the lesson needed to be sent to every single Republican on a ballot from now until he is defenestrated (either via impeachment and conviction or by losing re-election). I would then shift to how the Virginia Republicans behaved over the last two decades (three tax increases and rejected Medicaid expansion with a tax cut while accepting Medicaid expansion with “work requirements” that disincentivize entrepreneurial behavior and increase regulation of poor people).
Cline’s clown show, however, took this to an entirely new level of mandatory punishment for the GOP/RPV.
Nearly all of my fellow BD contributors who weighed in on the 6th District race in 2018 insisted that Ben Cline was the nice guy in the race for the GOP nomination. He was more reasonable than Cynthia Dunbar. His experience as a Delegate would mean he would keep his head down and do for his constituents – just as the Republicans running for state and local office this year are supposed to do.
Instead, he violated clearance rules in a manner that would make Hillary Clinton’s private server explode. He participated in the compromising of a SCIF. Mieke Eoyang [2] (a former staffer of the House Intel Committee) explains what these fools did:
“Foreign adversaries are constantly trying to figure out what goes on inside those rooms to figure out what the US knows about them, to out US high-level sources in their governments, to know what the US government knows and use it against us.
…
“But in ‘storming the SCIF’ without observing the security protocols, Rep. Gaetz et al, endangered our national security & demonstrated they care more about a political stunt than protecting intelligence information. I cannot emphasize enough how serious this is.”
So if Ben Cline can beclown himself like this, what can we expect of the rest of this bunch?
No one can say with a straight face that the Republican Party of 2019 is anything remotely like the party the led us to victory in the Cold War, fought for freer trade, and defended American interests robustly abroad. For many 2019 Republicans, that’s a feature rather than a bug.
However, we now also know that the Republican Party of 2019 thinks “more about a political stunt than protecting intelligence information” – and that Virginia Republicans, rather than an exception to this rule, have become an example of this rule. That is what Ben Cline showed us all on Wednesday.
Ben Cline deserves neither power nor office. He exemplifies a party that needs to be taken to the woodshed, and the only way they will listen is if the voters replace them – all of them – with Democrats (I can’t even bring myself to accept Republican-in-all-but-name Chris Peace – sorry, Andrea [3]). It’s a harsh remedy, but the Republicans have done this to themselves …
… especially Ben Cline.