Mark Meadows-- a very conservative Republican-- made a comment about how "it's easy to be bold when you're not coming back." Yup, Corker is retiring. The implication, of course, is that the rest of the GOP congressional caucus is made up of a bunch of chickenshits, which... it kind of is because the smart ones agree with Corker, and they just don't have the courage to say it.
So, political science time!
Retirement. What does it do to a legislator's courage? We can measure that! There is actually a long tradition of trying to measure how legislators' behavior changes when they tell the voters to take this job and shove it. The idea is as follows. If you are pandering to someone, once you decide to retire, you no longer need to pander to anyone. You can do whatever you want. So, for example, if legislators vote insincerely, they'll change their voting patterns when they retire.
John R. Lott started a long series of papers on this notion years ago to see if there is a pattern of insincere voting. What did he find? Almost no change in voting patterns when legislators decide to retire. Changes were somewhere around 1-2% of all roll calls. Implication? On votes, anyway, legislators are pretty sincere.
The biggest measurable change? Lawrence Rothenberg and Mitchell Sanders wrote a paper called "Severing the Electoral Connection" (American Journal of Political Science 2000, Volume 44, Issue 2) in which they claim to show big retirement effects. On voting behavior, the effect isn't really much bigger than anything Lott ever found, but they did find "participatory shirking." Basically, retiring legislators stopped showing up to vote. They got lazy. Senioritis.
That's still not what is going on with Corker, though. The thing with Corker is about rhetorical pandering. One of the books I regularly recommend is Jacobs & Shapiro's Politicians Don't Pander. Essentially, politicians (normal ones, anyway) stick to their sincere positions, which is pretty much why there isn't much of a retirement effect on how legislators vote, but they try to pitch their beliefs in a way that voters will like. The constraint that the public places on politicians is on how politicians present their beliefs, not on what beliefs they present.
Corker, though, is retiring. He really is truly free. He can say whatever the fuck he wants, and this isn't about policy. This is about basic competence, or lack thereof. As Meadows says, retiring legislators can be bold. Yes, the research actually does kind of back that up, and Corker is taking full advantage of that. The rest of those chickenshits in the GOP? They are telling the naked emperor how great his outfit looks.
Bad image... bad image...
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