Over and over, throughout my adult life, the GOP has treasured appearances over action and principle. The last four years were the only hiatus in this behavior since the last half of the Reagan administration. Time and again, the old-guard GOP figures throw some red-meat and platitudes but, when push comes to shove, they vote the way most likely to get them a favorable mention on the op-ed pages (and news pages in this time of a partisan and fact-free press) of the New York Times and Washington Post. The right thing to do, even the easy thing to do, in this case, was to vote to not turn American politics into Third World blood sport politics by hunting down and punishing people who lost an election…and make no mistake, that is exactly where we are headed (see Donald Trump Is Now Under Criminal Investigation in Georgia) and with predictable results.

Now that President Trump is off center stage, the porkers are free to head back to the trough. They will give lip service to the plight of working-class America, they will cluck sympathetically at the horrendous spectacle of one in every four US pregnancies ending in abortion, they will talk about securing the border, and they will do absolutely nothing about those issues. They didn’t before President Trump. They did so reluctantly while he was in office. And now that President Trump is gone, we’re back to what Cassidy’s constituents would say “laissez les bon temps rouler.”