Oh, Lord, what have we come to?
I have diligently tried to keep two names out of my mouth, at least publicly. One is Jada Pinkett Smith, for obvious reasons. The other is Lauren Boebert.
Unlike her sister Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Boebert seemingly grew up with few advantages, much less privileges. No University of Georgia degree, no successful businessman daddy. Instead, she is a divorced 36-year-old mother of four children and one grandchild, whose former husband pled guilty to public indecency and lewd exposure after showing his supposedly tattooed penis to two women at a bowling alley. About a month later, he was charged in a domestic violence incident involving the future congresswoman. He must be a real charmer (perhaps his tattoo is his full name and not just his initials) because they were married three years later. Of course, it didn’t work out.
So the freshly minted divorcee got herself some national press for being thrown out of a performance of the musical Beetlejuice in Denver last weekend, which is initially surprising that she went to the theater for entertainment and not a gun show or a QAnon meeting. The fact that headlines describing her ejection include the words “groping” and “fondling” is close to nauseating.
If this woman did not hold a chair in the U. S. House of Representatives, no one would give a damn about her trashy behavior. But she is, Blanche, she is in that chair.
There was a time before Boebert and Greene, and before Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman, when Republicans elevated women of distinction to high elected office. Margaret Chase Smith is arguably that lady par excellence. I’ve spoken of her before in this column briefly, but she deserves a more thorough examination in these days.
When she became a member of the United States House of Representatives in 1940 representing a Maine congressional district, Mrs. Smith was the first woman to do so. When she ran for the U. S. Senate in 1948, she defeated her three Republican opponents in the primary by getting more votes than they did combined. No small feat, considering that trio included the sitting governor of Maine and a former governor. The general election brought Mrs. Smith a landslide victory in which she received 71% of the vote, and on January 3, 1949, she became the first female to take a seat in the Senate, which she would hold for the next 24 years.
Just over a year into her first term, Senator Smith gave her famous “Declaration of Conscious” speech in which she denounced the tactics of fellow Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, without mentioning him by name, causing him to leave the chamber during her speech. She ended it by saying, “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
Her words are as true today as they were in 1950.
Unlike Senator Mitt Romney, who announced he would not seek reelection next year, complaining that his Republican party “is inclined to a populist demagogue message,” Senator Chase made her comments on the Senate floor—not outside to the press—at the beginning of her tenure in the Senate. Romney did vote for the conviction of Trump in his two impeachment trials, receiving the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award in the process, although there is an argument to be made that courage is easier when one has around 300,000,000 reasons allowing one to do the right thing.
McCarthy would later refer to Senator Smith and the other Republican senators who signed on to her speech as “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” But Senator Smith would survive McCarthy, both in the Senate and in life. He died just seven years later, officially of “Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown,” but widely believed to have been exacerbated by alcoholism and morphine addiction.
Senator Smith would run for president in 1964, becoming the first woman to have her name placed in nomination at a major party convention. She refused to withdraw her name from the ballot, thus denying Senator Barry Goldwater unanimous consent. Kind of shady, don’t you think?
On her lapel, Senator Smith was known for wearing a single rose. For many years, she sought to have the rose designated as the official flower of the United States, which eventually came to pass by an act of Congress in 1987.
Anyone from Tyler, Texas, has to love that.
