Senator McConnell needs to act on Moore
If the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is looking for a way to handle the Roy Moore case in the event Alabama voters send the former jurist and suspected pedophile to the U.S. Senate, he might cast his eyes back to 1926.
It was that year when a disreputable Philadelphia ward healer by the name of William Vare was elected to the Senate amidst such a flood of corruption charges that senators refused to seat him.
Vare wasn’t so much expelled from the Senate as banned from it.
It’s been written and broadcast that the last time senators slammed the door of the Senate in the face of a duly elected member was 1862, in the midst of the Civil War.
Oh, contraire.
That honor — shall we call it dishonor? — belongs to Pennsylvania’s own William Scott Vare.
Along with two of his brothers, Vare controlled a large portion of the vote in Philadelphia for the better part of three decades. The Vares stuffed ballot boxes, voted for the dead, bribed and otherwise commanded city officials, all in the name of good government and municipal efficiency.
The Vares came out of a rich tradition; Simon Cameron, Matthew Quay and Boies Penrose were predecessors, Pennsylvania politicians whose sense of the public good demanded that their pockets be liberally lined.
In the early 20th century, Pennsylvania politics was rife with factions and leaders controlling entire cities and regions. For instance, the Mellons held sway in Pittsburgh. But as for out and out corruption, nothing could beat the Vare machine.
Vare, a seven-term congressman starting in 1913, was a Republican. Pennsylvania was a Republican state. The Senate he was elected to serve in was a Republican Senate.
Despite these advantages, Vare failed admission to “the world’s most exclusive club.” He was crestfallen. “I trembled on the edge of eternity,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Senate Republicans were a deeply divided lot in those days.
Establishment types or “regulars” were in the majority. At the same time, 15 or so progressive Republicans were eager to pounce. On a roll call vote in 1927, this reform faction joined hands with Democrats to lay Vare low.
McConnell, fearing long-term damage to his party if it were to harbor an accused child-molester in the Senate, has given Moore ample warning: expulsion proceedings await if you are elected.
It was clear, before the election of 1926, that Vare’s fate was already sealed, said a New York Times reporter, noting that “word has reached the national leaders of the party that the Senate will either refuse to seat (Vare) or having accepted his credentials … take steps … to unseat him.”
The refusal didn’t even require a two-thirds vote, the standard for expulsion. Senators barred Vare on a 56 to 30 vote.
Republican George Norris of Nebraska, one of the Senate’s all-time greats, declared that Vare’s election was “tainted” by misconduct. Vare’s expenditure of nearly $800,000 (the equivalent of $11 million today) to defeat his Republican rivals in the primary election, Norris said, was “contrary to sound public policy” — how quaint — “harmful to the dignity and honor of the Senate” — double quaint — and “dangerous to the perpetuity of a free government.”
“Fraud and corruption”, ugly blots on the body politic, must be confronted, Norris said. No seat for you, William Vare.
Vare fought back, calling the Senate’s action “unprecedented.”
“I was duly, legally and properly elected,” Vare said. He charged the Senate had perpetrated an unconstitutional “coup” against the voters of Pennsylvania.
The arguments and counter arguments raged for another two years in the Senate, until December 1929, during which Pennsylvania limped along with one senator, instead of two, to represent their interests.
Sen. McConnell would surely want to avoid such a long, drawn out fight over Moore.
It would be a media circus, a political bloodbath. Donald Trump would be beside himself.
But McConnell must act. Otherwise, the GOP risks losing women voters for a generation, maybe longer.
Vare said he was “a victim of misplaced zeal.”
If dispatched to the Senate by Alabama voters, “innocent victim” Moore might be expected to wrap himself in God, the flag and the Constitution, while bellowing about “evil” and the conspirators intent on silencing him.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.