Herschel Walker should announce he will forswear service in the Senate — but with a twist.
Start with this, though: It is long past time for national and state Republicans and Walker himself to admit he has ethically disqualified himself from public service. It was already pushing the limits of forbearance for someone to run as a Christian conservative while having fathered three children out of wedlock, all to different women, years after beginning to repeatedly blast other men who create fatherless homes.
WARNOCK CALLS WALKER ABORTION ALLEGATIONS ‘DISTURBING’
It was already asking a lot from voters to elect as a senator a man with a dangerous personality disorder that could reappear any time he forgets to take medications. Or who repeatedly is caught in other lies — that is, when he isn’t blathering ignorant nonsense about our “good” air having “decided” to “float over to China’s bad air.”
Now, though, he’s asking too much. A candidate who wants to make abortions illegal for other people should not have paid a woman to abort his own child (and one, at that, with whom he allegedly has another child out of wedlock). Or at least not without having done something absolutely dramatic, at least in private, to show contrition. With receipts for the abortion, receipts for a check Walker sent her within five days thereof along with a “get well” card, and other supporting details, the woman almost surely is telling the truth, while Walker, yet again, is almost certainly lying about it.
In sum, Walker has done nothing to show he is ethically, experientially, or temperamentally fit for service in the Senate. For supposedly “Christian conservative” activists to say anything else is repugnant hypocrisy.
On the other hand, Georgia voters do deserve a choice. It is not the voters’ fault that Walker is dishonest and unqualified. The incumbent liberal Democrat, Raphael Warnock, is hardly a paragon of virtue — not to mention that his governing philosophy is radically to the left of what Georgia majorities say they support. His estranged wife accuses him of abuse and neglect while a friendly court seals records from the public. He stands reliably accused of misusing campaign funds to pay for child support and for personal legal expenses and of wrongly intermingling legislative action with fundraising solicitations.
Leaving Georgians without a choice against Warnock would be a dereliction of responsibility.
Here’s what Walker should do: Announce that he will stay on the ballot because it is legally too late to replace him. He should say if he wins, he will indeed be sworn in, in January, to make things official. He should pledge, though, that within two days of being sworn in, he will resign — under one huge condition. Whomever the governor is (it is likely to be Republican Brian Kemp), of either party, they must agree to appoint a person chosen by the Georgia Republican Executive Committee to replace him until a new election can be held. The committee should name its choice before the Nov. 8 election so voters will know exactly for whom Walker is essentially standing as a proxy.
That person should not be yet another elected official who would necessitate yet another special election to fill that seat. It should be someone readily able to perform well in the Senate immediately. (Randy Evans, former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg and former general counsel to the U.S. speaker of the House, comes to mind.)
This way, voters will have a real choice without thinking their only non-leftist option is ethically unfit for service.
Both Walker and the Republican Party must show that they are, in the words of a book title by Pulitzer Prize-winning political novelist Allen Drury, capable of honor. This is the way to show it.
