Senators Shaheen and Hassan Go Full DINO

 

You may not have been watching, but Mad Dog's son, in California was watching, and he phoned to ask: What's with your New Hampshire Senators? They both voted to confirm eight of Trump's cabinet appointees, and nine if you count Marco Rubio.

Actually, my son turns out to be right.

Our Senators, who New Hampshire voters thought were Democrats voted to seat:

1/ Kristi Noem: Homeland Security, who as Governor of South Dakota sent her National Guard to the Mexican border, wants a national abortion ban, shot her own dog and a goat, thus cementing her cred as a strong advocate for gun rights and the Second Amendment, and demonstrating she is willing to pull the trigger, which is essential to homeland security, and in Congress she sponsored a bill to forbid the EPA  from clean air efforts, and voted to cancel Obamacare. 

2/ Chris Wright: Energy, a climate change denier who nevertheless thinks global warming would be a good thing because it would save millions of lives which would otherwise be lost from freezing to death. He said that climate change protest movement is collapsing under its own weight.

The last Trump appointee who was supposed to kill the Department of Energy was Rick Perry, who had vowed to kill the DOE (once he finally recalled its name) only to arrive and discover it's the DOE that maintains the missile silos, cleans up nuclear waste in contaminated soil like Hanford, Washington, and chases down the occasional nuclear bomb when it inadvertently falls out of an Air Force plane. He also discovered it was DOE research that created fracking. Perry was a big enough man to reverse himself, and say if he had known all the great stuff DOE did, he'd have advocated for strengthening it, not destroying it. Wright has not yet shown any signs of a moment of Paul on the road to Damascus, so to speak. 

2/John Lee Ratcliffe: CIA director whose claim to fame is he berated FBI Director Comey for not investigating and charging Hillary Clinton over her emails.

3/ Sean Duffy: Dept Transportation, who said that China, Europe, Canada and China had committed "economic terrorism, in a way," by reacting to Trump tariffs with retaliatory tariffs.

4/ Scott Bessent: Treasury.  He immediately handed over all of Treasury's encrypted data with all those individual bank account numbers and tax information to Elon Musk.

5/ Doug Collins: Who served two years in the Navy as a chaplain, as his military service (making him a bone fide vet)  and who wrote of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, upon her death, "RIP to the more than 30 million innocent babies that have been murdered during the decades that Ruth Bader Ginsburg defend pro-abortion laws." He opposed Obamacare and supports capital punishment, denounces climate change as a hoax, and thinks tax cuts for billionaires stimulates the economy and, well, you get the picture.

6/ Brooke Rollins: Agriculture-- who suggested the solution to rising egg prices would be for Americans to keep chickens of their own in their backyards.

7/ Douglas Burgum: Not to be outdone by Kristi Noem in South Dakota, Governor Burgum sent North Dakota National Guard troops to guard the Southern border, although it would likely have been a lot cheaper to send them to guard the northern border with Canada, which currently looks like a more likely site of international conflict, don't chaknow? Youbetcha. 

So this is the rogue's gallery our DEMOCRATIC U.S. Senators have voted FOR.

Elizabeth Warren voted against every one of them. 

So, if the explanation from our Senators is that there is nothing disqualifying about any of these folks, then you would have to ask what Senator Warren found disqualifying, and you would have to ask what would be disqualifying? 

The Constitution says simply these appointments are to be made with the advice and consent of the Senate.  So that sort of leaves it up to the individual Senator's conscience, and I would say, Naw, I'm voting against each of these mopes, because they are just too MAGA weird, and leave it at that. 

O'Rourke

Mad Dog suggests we start making plans now to find candidates to run in primaries against Senator Shaheen in 2026,  and another for Senator Hassan's seat in 2029.

We can do better. 

We've got good Democrats who have sought office in New Hampshire, but who were shunted out of the way by Ray Buckley and the establishment, who controlled the purse strings and the voter lists, people like Terence O'Rourke, of Rochester, New Hampshire, who came to notice  when he was running for the open U.S. Congressional seat, after the Charlottesville, VA killings, at a white nationalist rally. 

O'Rourke was speaking at a meeting of Rockingham County Democrats, one of nearly a dozen candidates, and when he got up to the podium, most people were too busy gossiping and chatting, but he caught everyone's attention, and caught many off guard, when he stated simply, "I know there are so many things which divide us starkly right now, but I would have thought the one thing we could all agree in, in America, even now, is that there is no such thing as a very fine  Nazi."

This was after President Trump had said there were very fine people on both sides of that bloody rally in Charlottesville.

O'Rourke

It stopped everyone dead in their tracks that night.

Ultimately, my Democratic friends and compatriots in Hampton did not vote for Mr. O'Rourke, because they thought he was too strident, too angry for New Hampshire. These were mostly women talking. And it's true, O'Rourke is an attorney, and not adverse to conflict, and he had been an Army officer and had fought in the Middle East, and although he never mentioned it, a little Googling revealed he had won a Bronze Star. 

So, yes, maybe he was just a little too manly for our New Hampshire Democrats. 

But what do you think those same folks would say now?