The hashtag #stopthestupid was trending last night on Twitter thanks to -- of all people -- a conservative Republican congressman from Michigan named Paul Mitchell. But before anyone gets too excited that Republicans are discovering integrity, there’s an asterisk: Mitchell is retiring in January.
Here’s what the exasperated congressman tweeted Sunday night in response to Trump’s lunatic ranting about the election outcome:
Sunday night, there were more than 21,000 tweets featuring #stopthestupid, many of them wondering aloud why more Republicans cannot show the spine and integrity displayed by Mitchell. Most presumably don’t realize, however, that he’s leaving Congress after just two terms in office.
Mitchell is an unlikely candidate to be dismissed as a snowflake RINO. He’s one of the wealthiest members of Congress with a net worth of $37 million, according to RollCall.com, and he is listing as having voted with Trump 96 percent of the time by fivethirtyeight.com. He is a social conservative with 0 percent rankings from Planned Parenthood, NARAL and Americans for Democratic Action.
But Mitchell apparently couldn’t stand serving in Congress after twice having spent more than $3 million of his own money running for office. When he announced in July 2019 that he would not seek a third term -- even though he won reelection by 25 percentage points in his safely red district -- Mitchell made no secret of his disgust for Washington.
In a House floor speech announcing his retirement an astonishing 16 months before the next election, Mitchell didn’t hold back: “It appears to me that rhetoric overwhelms policy, and politics consumes much of the oxygen in this city,” he told his colleagues.
Mitchell had this to say to Politico:
“You look at the rhetoric and vitriol, it overwhelms policy, politics becomes the norm. Everything’s about politics. Everything’s about an election. And at some point of time, that’s not why I came here.
“The problem is it trickles down to our constituents, where they think it’s OK. And they think this way the world should be. I think leaders have to lead. They have to stand up, and they have to demonstrate what we should expect of each other in our country. I was commenting earlier to our senior staff, ‘Do we see the next four [years], in the near term, the better angels coming out of this?’”
Mitchell’s viral tweet Sunday was one of several he has published in recent days. What’s so obvious is that the conservative congressman is saying out loud what so many of his colleagues are thinking. Nothing like resigning from office to help one muster a little honesty.
Mitchell was one of the first Republicans to offer public congratulations to the Biden-Harris team on November 7, and he was surprisingly in Trump’s face all the way back then:
Mitchell has been tweeting away ever since: