Needed: The Courage to Tell the Truth

Marlin Stuzman, R-IN

Despite assurances from several Republicans that they’ve spoken at length with Senator Mitch McConnell, hospitalized five weeks ago, we have yet to hear a single public word from the eighty-four-year-old Kentuckian himself. Governor Andy Beshear did the proper thing this week by sending the senator a letter requesting a candid accounting of his health.

Kentuckians, and indeed the nation, are entitled to such transparency from those they elect to high office. This is not a partisan demand but a democratic one.

I find myself in rare agreement with Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, whose unusually candid remarks distinguish him from the practiced evasions of so much contemporary politics:

“You know, just the things that I’ve heard and seen from some friends is that he’s obviously not doing well, but don’t know if he’s alive or has passed away. His constituents deserve answers where he is at,” Stutzman said.

“I think that the governor of Kentucky has every right to ask after three weeks that no one has said anything. As a Republican, I think we need to hold our own party accountable. And so, the fact that we haven’t heard anything really from Senator McConnell is very discouraging and concerning,” Stuzman added.

Politics, by its partisan nature, so often assumes the countenance of Machiavelli, cloaking its embarrassments in the respectable garments of euphemism and doublespeak until concealment itself becomes a civic virtue.

Stutzman’s plainspoken willingness to question his own party is refreshing not because it is extraordinary in principle, but because it has become extraordinary in practice.

Democrats are hardly immune to the same temptation. For months they brushed aside mounting evidence that Maine’s Graham Platner was unfit for public office, choosing loyalty over candor until the testimony of a liberal woman made further denial impossible. One is left to wonder how differently events might have unfolded had the whistleblower been a conservative.

Such questions are uncomfortable precisely because they expose a habit shared by both parties: the instinct to protect power first and truth afterward.

—RJ