Maine’s Republican legislators should wonder, what would Sen. Margaret Chase Smith have done last Tuesday night? She once said on the floor of the United States Senate: “I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calamity: fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear … surely Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

Shame on those representatives for the decision by the House Republican caucus to turn a blind eye towards Gov. Paul LePage’s ongoing and perverse reset of Maine politics into the gutter. I am anguished to consider what my parents, members of “the Greatest Generation,” would think, were they alive today.

I am completely stunned that Republican elected representatives have apparently chosen their personal, short-term political interests over the long-term good of their party and the state of Maine by ignoring the unconscionable behavior of an obviously suffering, paranoid and unstable man.

Had they stood up, as Margaret Chase Smith did, for basic standards of personal and public decency, truth and responsibility, perhaps the Maine Republican Party, and our state as a whole, could recover from this repulsive and heart-breaking mess.

Instead they chose the cowardly path of tacitly endorsing the governor’s repeatedly vile behaviors as the “new normal” for public figures. Shame on you for circling ’round Maine’s schoolyard bully.

Susan Davies

Liberty

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