May 25, 2017 11:20 AM UTC

Coffman Admits Why GOP Can't Hold Trump Accountable

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• by: Colorado Pols

An eye-opening quote from Colorado’s own Rep. Mike Coffman in a Politico story today about the slow response from congressional Republican leadership to the deepening scandals besetting President Donald Trump’s administration:

The controversy over Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia is mushrooming into an all-consuming Washington melodrama and full-fledged criminal investigation. But don’t look to GOP congressional leaders to ditch the president.

Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are taking a cautious approach to Trump’s Russia scandal, pointedly refraining from criticizing the president and tiptoeing around the topic — or simply avoiding it. It’s a strategy intended to avoid intraparty fights over Trump’s controversial presidency and sidestep confrontation with a president of their own party who has yet to sign key GOP agenda items like repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes…

In a way, those committee investigations — as well as the appointment of a special counsel at the Justice Department— have given Ryan and McConnell cover to sidestep questions by claiming they’re awaiting the findings of those probes. But the reality is that neither man will lead Republicans in taking a hard line against, or call for the impeachment of, the leader of their party — even if the controversy gets uglier and the public clamors for action.

“He’s got to work with the president, so yes, since the election there’s been a change in tone,” Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), said of Ryan’s rhetoric toward Trump. “He has to work with the president to get his agenda passed.” [Pols emphasis]

Coffman’s frank acknowledgement that his party’s leadership is obliged to work with President Trump, thus necessitating a “change in tone” from their prior criticism, also describes Coffman’s own change of tone from before the election until now. Coffman, who ran in 2016 on his most audacious anti-Republican campaign even after years of triangulating off his own party, himself said how “excited” he was to work with the President after winning the election.

The point is that Rep. Coffman has ripped the scab off something critically important to understand about the relationship between Republicans in Congress and President Trump–including self-proclaimed critics of Trump like Coffman. As long as Republicans retain any hope of accomplishing long-sought agenda items like the repeal of Obamacare and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in the near term, they need a functional Trump administration to do it. And that obliges them to soft-pedal Trump’s swirling scandals.

This also demonstrates again why Coffman opponents have railed so bitterly against his attempts to triangulate off the Republican leadership in Washington. No matter what Coffman says, or how he personally votes on the issue of the day, he voted for the GOP leadership now taking steps to enact Trump’s agenda.

Scenery aside, that’s the only thing that matters.