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Dan Rodricks: Mac Mathias memories, nostalgia for a principled Republican senator | STAFF COMMENTARY

Imagine, if you can, Mac Mathias today — a moderate-to-liberal Republican senator of keen intellect, with broad knowledge of history and an impressive grasp of foreign affairs.

Imagine a Republican known for his political and moral courage, a champion of civil rights, voting rights, equal rights, the rule of law, ethical government, collegiality and bipartisanship.

Imagine a Republican known not so much for cutting taxes as for increasing efforts to eradicate poverty and hunger.

Imagine a senator who, despite his suburban/rural roots, wants to help cities like Baltimore.

He also wants to support strong environmental regulation to save the Chesapeake Bay and the development of clean energy sources to slow climate change.

He refuses to go along with the tough-on-crime trend of the moment, becoming the only senator to vote against mandatory sentences and the abolition of parole for federal inmates, warning (accurately) of mass incarceration as the nation escalates the war on drugs.

He demands campaign finance reform and decries the influence of money on both Republicans and Democrats. For this, he is called “the conscience of the Senate.”

As I say, it’s impossible to imagine such a thoroughly principled and progressive Republican in Congress today.

Maryland voters might still want to send such an admirable man to Washington, as they did repeatedly from 1961 to 1987.

But it’s hard to imagine that Maryland Democrats would see the point, with today’s congressional Republicans more cult than caucus, and so much potentially at stake with a partisan power shift in the Senate.

Most of all, it’s hard to imagine Charles McCurdy Mathias Jr. being a happy camper in Washington. It’s impossible to imagine him joining all those other spineless Republicans in supporting Donald Trump, by standing behind him at his criminal trial in New York or by cynically casting doubts on the integrity of the 2024 presidential election even before any votes are cast.

Were he still alive, Mac Mathias would be appalled at what’s become of his party.

In fact, when he left Washington, it was during the second term of President Ronald Reagan and the shift of the GOP to the right. That’s almost a quaint thought these days — Reagan’s brand of conservatism being mild by Trump-era standards — but it’s mentioned in a new book as one of the factors that led to Mathias’ decision to leave Washington.

He died in 2010, but memories of Mathias’ long service in both the House and Senate remain golden for those who knew him or worked for him.

The three-term senator is described in “Mathias of Maryland: Remembering a Lincoln Republican in the Senate,” a series of insightful and nostalgic essays published this month by McFarland Books. The editors are Frederic B. Hill and Monica Healy, both of whom worked for Mathias. (Hill is a former Sun foreign correspondent who became Mathias’ director of foreign affairs in 1985.)

Among the essay authors are Rep. Steny Hoyer and former Sen. Barbara Mikulski. The book closes with then-Vice President Joe Biden’s eulogy of Mathias.

“From Mac, more than anything else, I learned about courage, both moral and political,” Biden said. “It is Mac’s moral courage, the rarest of qualities, that made him stand out among the many great men and women with whom I have served.”

The essays, along with the foreword by political scholar and onetime congressional staffer Norman J. Ornstein, describe a very different Washington and GOP.

Once upon a time, Ornstein notes, Mathias operated among kindred spirits, moderates who believed in the importance and integrity of the Senate and holding to a norm that has been called “institutional patriotism.” They were partisan, to be sure, and there were bitter battles over civil rights, the Vietnam War and the GOP’s racially charged push toward “law and order.” But there were bipartisan bright spots — the passage of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Title IX rights for girls and women; even the Senate’s investigation of the Nixon Watergate scandal was bipartisan, civilized and thorough.

But the group of moderate and liberal Republicans who regularly worked across the aisle does not exist today, say Hill and Healy.

“Today’s party is a shell of what it once was,” they write. “It has been on a downward spiral since Ronald Reagan shifted the party to the right and House Speaker Newt Gingrich led it to a new level of tribalism.”

Ornstein notes that there are few, if any, conservative Democrats in the Senate and no moderate-to-liberal Republicans like Mathias. With the exception of the retiring Mitt Romney, Ornstein adds, the few Republican senators with Mathias-level gravitas “regularly voted with Donald Trump’s desires and interests, acting more like apparatchiks than independent-minded, problem-solving senators, saying little or nothing about Trump’s corruption and links to the world’s most vicious autocrats and dictators.”

Perhaps this will change someday, though it’s hard to imagine when — just as it’s hard to imagine Mac Mathias in Washington today.

“A liberal Republican, putting country over party, voting his conscience even when it clashed with the narrow interests of a president of his party, is simply nowhere to be found in the Senate or House,” writes Ornstein. “But one thing is clear to anyone who knew and worked with Mac Mathias: He would not bend his values one iota to fit the demands of his tribe if he were here and in the Senate today.”