Republican Congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania appears to be quite a jerk. Not only does he pretend to be pro-life in public while encouraging his mistress to get an abortion in private, but reports suggest he berates and mistreats his staff, and is generally a total scumbag.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained the damning text exchange and an internal memo that appear to show who Murphy really is. It ain't a pretty picture:
A text message sent in January to U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy by a woman with whom he had an extra-marital relationship took him to task for an anti-abortion statement posted on Facebook from his office's public account.
"And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options," Shannon Edwards, a forensic psychologist in Pittsburgh with whom the congressman admitted last month to having a relationship, wrote to Mr. Murphy on Jan. 25, in the midst of an unfounded pregnancy scare.
A text from Mr. Murphy’s cell phone number that same day in response says, "I get what you say about my March for life messages. I've never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don't write any more. I will."
The congressman has been lauded by the Family Research Council, for his stance on abortion, as well as for family values, generally. He also has been endorsed by LifePAC, which opposes abortion rights, and is a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus, an affiliation that is often cited by his office.
The text message exchange was included among a series of documents obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Ms. Edwards declined to comment on the documents.
Repeated voice mail messages left on Mr. Murphy's cell phone on Tuesday were not returned.
Another — a six-page memo to Mr. Murphy purportedly written by his chief of staff, Susan Mosychuk — described a hostile workplace in which Mr. Murphy repeatedly denigrated employees, threatened them and created a state of “terror.”
If you want to understand why the Republican-controlled Congress never accomplishes anything, you can start with the fact that you've got the likes of Tim Murphy in their midst - a guy who clearly wants you to see one thing in public even though he is something entirely different in private. (Then again, all you have to do is take one look into his eyes, and if you know what you're looking for you can see it. I don't suppose most voters know what they should be looking for.)
It's obvious now that Murphy is a total fraud. But even with what we're learning today, I'm concerned that conservatives will learn the wrong lesson from these revelations, and fail to receive the wisdon they offer.
The problem with someone like Murphy isn't that he's a "hypocrite," nor that he is pretending to be a conservative while he's really a moderate or a liberal. The issue isn't where he stands on the political spectrum, nor that his real position on a given issue is something other than what he says.
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He's basically a Republican Hillary. He's not committed to conservative policy ideas, but he'll play-act as a committed philosophical conservative
No, the problem is that there is no genuine core whatsoever to a guy like Tim Murphy. He doesn't want to stop abortion or not stop it. He doesn't want to cut taxes or not cut them. He doesn't have a conviction on spending or regulation or health care policy or crime or national security or anything else. The only thing a guy like this truly believes in is political success for himself.
He's basically a Republican Hillary. He's not committed to conservative policy ideas, but he'll play-act as a committed philosophical conservative if that's what you want him to be. That's utilitarian for him. If association with a certain set of ideas opens doors for him, he'll associate with those ideas. A guy like this could just as easily be a liberal as a conservative, if that was what he needed to advance his career, because it's all play-acting anyway. Sure, he may vote consistent with the character he's playing, but that's just to stay in character. He really doesn't care one way or the other as long as he keeps getting votes.
And the real problem for Republicans - and honestly, probably for Democrats too - is that Tim Murphy is certainly not the only guy like this on the scene. Politics is full of people who "take stands" and proclaim their positions on any number of things in their campaign literature. They might even go on TV talk shows and argue these positions so convincingly you'd be hard-pressed to doubt their sincerity.
I'm sure Pennsylvania voters are surprised by what they're learning today. I bet people who really know him aren't surprised at all
But there's no philosophical soul to any of them. You like what you see of them but you don't really know them. They got in a position to run for office because they made the right connections at the local party level and got the right endorsements and fundraising connections. They sold themselves as viable candidates and convinced people they could win. And they got the only thing they wanted, which was to be a prominent holder of a political office.
Are they all like that? No. The job of voters is to pick out the sincere people from the play-actors. How would you do that? I'd start by looking for some sort of track record. When Murphy first ran for political office, his main claim to fame was having done a lot of television appearances based on his work as a psychologist. He served six years in the Pennsylvania state Senate before being elected to Congress in 2002. I don't know enough about his record in office to say if there were any red flags, but in general I'd say six years of public life and policymaking experience might not be enough to establishment a person's real commitment to certain ideas.
There's no easy answer to this problem, but voters have to find out more about the people they're voting for than just the issue positions they express when they're running. Anyone can claim to believe anything, but if you don't know anything about the person's real background and character, how can you really be sure you're not getting another Tim Murphy?
I'm sure Pennsylvania voters are surprised by what they're learning today. I bet people who really know him aren't surprised at all.
