It was practically 50 years in the past that Edward Markey, then the lowliest of Massachusetts state legislators, challenged the legislative previous guard by pushing via judicial reform measures that ended a gravy practice for ethically suspect politicos and their allies. Displeased at Markey within the excessive, the legislative management retaliated towards him by ostentatiously stripping him of his workplace, forcing him to sit down within the hallway.
This boomeranged. Markey took the act of revenge as a badge of honor, and so did voters. They rewarded him by electing him to Congress. Markey’s tv advert in his congressional race highlighted this episode, and it has change into legendary in political circles right here. It featured Markey standing in entrance of a desk positioned forlornly in a State House hall. “They may tell me where to sit,” Markey says into the digicam. “But they’ll never tell me where to stand.” After 20 phrases in Congress, Markey was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013.
California could also be about to expertise one thing related, with the announcement of U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff, blocked by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy from resuming his seat on the House Intelligence Committee, that he’s operating for the Senate. That Schiff could be ousted from the Committee he served so admirably as soon as the Republicans took management of the House has been a foregone conclusion.
As the committee’s chairman in 2019, Schiff led the inquiry into Donald Trump’s try and extort the Ukrainian authorities into saying a patently phony “investigation” into Joe Biden by withholding help desperately wanted by Ukraine to defend itself towards Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
Schiff, a former federal prosecutor who is aware of learn how to run an actual investigation, disregarded relentless waves of vitriol, together with dying threats, making certain that the nation had a file of the “drug deal,” as John Bolton put it, that Trump had commandeered. In order to take action Schiff needed to work round unadorned obstruction by Trump, who ordered his administration to do every part it may do to disclaim America the reality about what had transpired.
The nation watched day after appalling day as Trump’s closest allies on the committee debased themselves in search of to derail the committee’s hearings, typically by advert hominem assaults on Schiff. Puerile insults by Trump – “Shifty Schiff” and “Pencil Neck Schiff” had been among the many then-president’s shows of brilliance – amped up MAGA World’s social media conflict on the California Congressman.
It was Schiff who, figuring out {that a} GOP-controlled Senate would by no means vote to convict Trump whatever the proof towards him, led the presentation of that proof in Trump’s first impeachment trial. Vainly urging Republican Senators to place apart politics and attend to our democracy, Schiff methodically recounted the proof of Trump’s corruption, not merely a mountain of it however a veritable mountain vary. “Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat?” Schiff requested, warning a yr earlier than the 2020 election that Trump would attempt to torpedo the rule of legislation with a purpose to keep in workplace. “And the short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is, no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change, and you know it.”
Schiff couldn’t have been extra on course, as America has discovered, painfully. And by being on course, he made himself one. Kevin McCarthy’s determined need to be elected Speaker relied on favoring Trump and his acolytes by kicking Schiff off the Intelligence Committee. To be exact, you possibly can’t say that somebody with no soul has offered it, however when you may, you’d be speaking about McCarthy.
But turnabout, as they are saying, is truthful play. Schiff has an excellent probability of being elected Senator subsequent yr. And that will place him to face as much as the demagogues much more successfully than he has till now.
Jeff Robbins is an lawyer specializing within the First Amendment and is a longtime Herald columnist.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”