Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she hoped President Trump “learned a lesson” in his impeachment, when, in reality, we should be wondering why Marie Yovanovitch apparently learned nothing.
I’m guessing virtually every single one of the other career bureaucrats who testified in the House hearings learned nothing, either.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post on Thursday, Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, went on and on about the importance of “values” and “institutions” and “integrity.”
Yes, no one denies any of those things. So, why does she and every other lifelong government employee who testified in the House talk like they have a monopoly on what our “values,” “institutions,” and “integrity” look like?
We get it. President Trump did things in a way that the permanent bureaucracy doesn’t like. I suspect that was expected when voters threw in with the reality TV star over the former secretary of state with 40 years of government experience.
But Yovanovitch acts in her op-ed like she could never have seen this coming.
“Our public servants need responsible and ethical political leadership,” she wrote. “This administration, through acts of omission and commission, has undermined our democratic institutions, making the public question the truth and leaving public servants without the support and example of ethical behavior that they need to do their jobs and advance U.S. interests.”
This is known as projecting, or to cast one’s own thoughts and opinions on others.
There have always been voters suspicious of the government no matter who’s running it. They’re called open-carry advocates.
But Yovanovitch isn’t talking about them. She’s imagining some new class of people driven by Trump to suddenly feel ambivalent, if not outright hostile, toward the government agencies and workers who have kept the country on the same crippled path for decades.
Yovanovitch and the rest don’t understand: The country doesn’t belong to them, and neither does its destiny. That belongs to the voters, and we decide who gets to steer us there. When we get tired of the driver, we change him out. That’s what an election is for.
Yovanovitch and the rest are nothing but cogs in the wheel, minor pieces in a machine. Fortunately for them, it’s not a role they have to play if they don’t like the direction.
They can quit, and they’re certainly free to speak up if they have policy or political disagreements, though that may mean stepping down from their nice jobs.
That’s a dispute and nothing more. It’s not a colossal battle over whether the United States is an inherently good country or whether our government has been hijacked by evil actors.
Yovanovitch probably got a raw deal in the Ukraine affair, and that’s too bad, but she’s not doing her reputation any favors by behaving as if she and those like her are the true vanguards of democracy.
