It’s been almost 2 months since Donald Trump won the election, and Rodney Davis has been having a blast. From posting shitty jokes on Twitter, to telling his constituents to unfollow him on Twitter when they ask him questions, and even being kind enough to let us know he has terrible taste in music – you guessed it – on Twitter. He’s also REALLY happy he got to attend the Inauguration. It’s all he posts about on his Facebook page. Well, that and begging people to take tickets to the Inauguration off his hands.
The most impressive thing about Rep. Davis is that in the midst of all that excitement and hard work, he’s still managed to find time to completely avoid meaningful interaction with his constituents.
Calls to his offices have been going straight to voicemail for weeks (Though there do appear to be brief windows of availability from time to time). E-mails (if they’re returned at all) are boilerplate. Requests for town halls have been met with “He doesn’t do town halls” by his staff. One voter sent two letters to Rep. Davis a year apart and received the same form response to both. It’s not like Rep. Davis doesn’t have issues to address.
He’s refused to discuss his vote that would have resulted in gutting the independent Congressional Ethics Office. His staff claim they don’t know how he voted. He apparently doesn’t know either, as he won’t talk about it, and refuses to be interviewed about it. One can only assume that he’s embarrassed to admit that his first vote of the new year was one that his voters would be disappointed with. If he had voted to keep the Congressional Ethics Office independent, you’d think he’d be very vocal about being on the right side of the issue, as the immediate backlash to the vote suggests he would have been. His silence on this matter says all you need to know.
He’s refused to explain why his concern regarding Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks isn’t matched by his concern regarding Donald Trump’s Russian ties. Rep. Davis was a vocal supporter of the numerous Benghazi hearings. Yet he’s been strangely silent when it comes to Sen. Durbin’s calls for a congressional investigation into the Russian hacking of our elections, and Trump’s possible entanglements with Russia.
Davis saw no issue with spending 2 years on 7 separate probes costing close to 30 million dollars investigating a single embassy attack (of which we’ve had 19 since the year 2000, none of which garnered anything close to this level of scrutiny). Why then has he yet to demand an investigation into something as serious as a foreign countries intrusion in our elections on behalf of someone they may have literally colluded with, and who now sits in the oval office? This is an excellent opportunity for bipartisanship, as anyone that calls themselves a patriot should be equally concerned by the implications of the Intelligence communities findings, yet Davis remains silent. Why?
He’s refused to address why he supports stripping thousands of his voter’s healthcare away without a viable replacement, because let’s face it, the GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act doesn’t exist yet. They’ve had 7 years to come up with something, and they’re still floundering. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped Rep. Davis from voting to repeal. His voters deserve to know why. How does Rep. Davis feel that his constituents will benefit by losing access to health insurance? Because make no mistake, without a replacement, that’s exactly what will happen.
When you’re talking about people losing their lives and livelihoods due to lack of insurance, people that live and work in your district, people that may have voted for you, you owe them the opportunity to meet with you face to face and have their questions answered. When the outcome of your vote is quite literally life and death for many of your voters, hiding from them is not just cowardly, it’s heartless.
He’s refused to address why he was so excited for the Inauguration of someone he couldn’t, in good conscience, support. Just months before, Rep. Davis said he could not vote for Donald Trump due to leaked tapes that caught him bragging about sexually assaulting women. What changed between then and now that made Rep. Davis decide to support Donald Trump? Was it when Trump faux-apologized for the comments Davis found to be so “inexcusable” and “abhorrent”? What did Trump do that balanced out bragging about sexual assault in Rep. Davis’ mind? It must have been something big for Rep. Davis to make the 180-degree pivot he’s made. His voters deserve to know what changed.
Maybe there’s a reason Rodney Davis seems to be more worried about fitting into his tux than he is addressing the concerns of his constituents. Maybe there’s a reason he won’t take calls, return e-mails, or show his face in his district. Maybe it’s because Rodney Davis can’t answer the tough questions. Maybe he doesn’t want to. Maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe he hopes you’ll just leave him alone so he can get back to Twitter. I’d ask him which reason it is but his phone keeps going to voicemail.
It should also be noted that our Opinion Editor, Boswell Hutson, has reached out to Rep. Davis multiple times for an interview, and has never received a response, whether it be via phone or via email.
(H/T @ABT_EastCentral on Twitter for the above picture)