An indelible stain on the reputation of Ashley Moody

On June 1, 1950, U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith delivered a speech on the Senate floor known as the Declaration of Conscience in which she took to task her fellow Republican, Sen. Joe McCarthy, a populist forebear of Donald Trump. In doing so, she was fearlessly leaning into the rising storm of anti-communist paranoia and persecution that was McCarthy’s stock in trade.

With Harry Truman in the White House and Dwight Eisenhower running to unseat him, Smith said, “The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”

And with a handful of exceptions among her Republican colleagues — six Senators to be exact — she stood alone for almost four years to the day, until June 9, 1954, when Joseph Welsch, a private attorney representing the Army, which was under attack by McCarthy, called him out at a televised committee hearing.

“You have done enough,” Welsch said. “Have you no sense of decency?” And with that, the fever of McCarthyism broke, and a nation wearied by McCarthy’s excesses turned their backs on him.

Historical parallels have their uses, but they should not be belabored. There probably will not be a Joseph Welsch, who brings Trump to heel and America to its senses at just the right moment with just the right words. It is certain no Welch will be found among the Republicans in the Florida congressional delegation, nine of whom lent their names to the seditious attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election that was the laughable Texas lawsuit curb-stomped by the U.S. Supreme Court last Friday night, and all of whom have since 2016 distinguished themselves by either active collaboration with Trump or sotto voce cowardice when their oaths of office demanded better from them.

Add to this nine Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, and Attorney General Ashley Moody, and you have a baker’s dozen of disappointments.

Little was to be expected in this matter of Gov. DeSantis, a Trump creation, and Rubio and Scott, Trump thralls. Still, Moody had the opportunity Bull Halsey had in mind when he said: “There are no great men, there are only great challenges, which ordinary men … are forced to meet.”

Moody, a former Circuit Court judge and the daughter of a federal judge, promised as a candidate that she would not politicize the office of the people’s lawyer.

There was every reason to believe her, and believe her we did.

But she lied.

Since being sworn in two years ago, Moody has missed no opportunity to toady to Trump. Apparently bereft of the principles and conscience that Sen. Smith exemplified, General Moody has totally jumped the shark since Election Day, abusing the prerogatives of her office by gratuitously joining in legal attempts to subvert a manifestly open and fair election that even U.S. Attorney General William Barr, a loyal Trump caporegime, has said was free of significant fraud. 

Why? Because political survival is the prime directive for the morally challenged. All of the Florida 10 are likely to be reelected provided they do not skate onto thin ice with Trump and get primaried from the right, which is why they never fail to demonstrate obeisance to Trump regardless of right and wrong. It is such a demeaning and dispiriting spectacle, and, again, for no one more than Ashley Moody. 

And therein lays Moody’s tragedy. She could have been a Margaret Chase Smith, but she failed to meet the great challenge of her time, and she did so in spectacular fashion, abandoning any pretense of fidelity to American democracy for naked partisanship.

Whereas Smith rode to the sound of gunfire when the country was in danger, Moody proved to be the danger.

It is a stain she can never wash off; whatever her political future is.