Congressman Carlos Curbelo can change back and forth from conservative red to liberal blue with each political breeze that blows. Now he is joining the fully outed establishment Republicans by saying he will not support Donald Trump.
In case you are still wondering exactly who and what are establishment Republicans, it has now become exceedingly clear: those who refuse to give their support to Donald Trump. Lindsay Graham, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Jeb Bush among the politicians, and George Will, Bill Kristol, and Charles Krauthammer among the conservative pundits. All would apparently prefer to see Hillary Clinton become President.
Today they are joined in their petulance by my ‘rino’ Congressman Carlos Curbelo. It is hard to imagine what goes through the mind of someone who becomes driven by extreme political ambition. Curbelo ran as a conservative and pulled off a major upset of a sitting liberal Democrat. No sooner was he elected than he started sounding just like the man he had defeated.
Curbelo’s first action in Congress was to give the Spanish language response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address. Mimicking our Senator Marco Rubio, he called for amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens who had violated our immigration laws and sneaked into America. Despite being a large donor to his campaign, when I wrote to the Congressman requesting an English transcript of his speech, I received no response.
The Congressman then followed up by immediately running campaign ads for the next election. The ads that ran in the Florida Keys sounded if they had been taken directly from his Democrat predecessor’s playbook: Stop drilling for oil. Fight global warming. And my favorite, Cross the aisle and work with the opposition.
Now he has made good on his promise to cross the aisle, by teaming with Democratic politicians to work on non-existent global warming. How insulated from reality must a politician be, to think that he is making a smart move by getting in bed with liberal ideologues desperate for a campaign issue? Didn’t he happen to notice that Marco Rubio destroyed his entire career by doing the same thing on illegal immigration?
Deciding to join the Republican turncoats who refuse to support Donald Trump, was an equally brilliant move. To make matters even worse, he has proposed the nutty idea that Trump may be a ‘phantom Republican’ put up by the Democrats to destroy the Republican Party. Congressman, if you want to see a phantom Republican, look in the mirror!
In fact, I don’t know whether the Congressman has changed from red to blue because he is really a liberal, or has just made a political calculation that his district is more likely to re-elect him if he moves to the left. Whatever the reason, he is alienating his conservative base while trying to appeal to liberals who will always vote for the Democrat, no matter what.
As a practical matter, it is too late to find a conservative challenger for this election. In the same way that I am forced to support Trump, I will still vote for Curbelo. It is terribly disappointing at this critical juncture in our nation’s history, that we are unable to come up with Ronald Reagan type conservatives to lead us. However, unlike Curbelo’s dopey refusal to support Trump, I am being realistic, and in both cases accepting the lesser of two evils.
