Republican Senators Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and John McCain have been receiving many kudos for speaking out against Donald Trump’s worst behaviors, lack of character, and unfitness for the presidency. But do not be fooled: These Senators are not moral heroes.

Our mothers, fathers and other wise advisers have long told us to pay more attention to what people do than to what they say. That adage has never been more apt than it is today, as people laud Flake for speaking out on the Senate floor, Corker for blasting Trump in the halls of the Capitol, and McCain for criticizing Trumpian behavior [without mentioning his name] in media interviews. Their words have been characterized as courageous—at a time when “courage” is defined as saying what is painfully obvious to even the most casual observer. And you can call that courage, if you like, because at least they are speaking out, when others won’t. But what are their actions?

Just hours after speaking on the Senate floor, saying that he would no longer be “complicit” with the Trump agenda, Senator Flake betrayed his own promise by voting for a bill that guts consumer protections. The result is that Flake enabled Trump to get what he really wants—a legislative “win” that he can brag about. How is that not being complicit, Senator Flake?

The same goes for Corker and McCain. Both of them joined all of the rest of the Senate Republicans voting for the bill.

Sure, Flake’s speech yesterday denounced “Trumpism.” But that term has been given far too much credence. Calling something an “ism” usually means that there is a thought-through philosophy behind it. That is certainly not the case with Trump. “Trumpsim” isn’t a philosophy: It’s a random series of irrational, spur-of-the-moment, reactive utterances, tweets and tantrums whose only coherent theme is defiance, anger, bragging and lying to shore up his fragile ego, winning at any cost, and destruction of anything relating to Obama.

So, if you’re fed up with these kinds of behaviors, Senators Corker and McCain, why are you voting for bills that reward them?

More specifically, in the case of the CFPB bill you just voted for, Trump probably knows exactly zero about what was in it. The pesky details and the inner workings of the CFPB are likely of no interest to Trump. What he hates about CFPB is not its policies, but its provenance: It’s an Obama-era programm which, by some definition in Trump’s angry, egotistical brain, must be erased. Also, Trump is desperately lusting after a legislative win. So, by voting to gut provisions of CFPB, Senators Flake, Corker and McCain, you are doing Trump’s bidding. How is that courageous, Senators?

If you really oppose what Trump has been doing to the presidency, democracy, and foreign policy, speaking out is nice. But your power, Senators, is not just in your voice, it’s in your vote. Keep talking, but show us that you mean what you say by acting — in the interest of your country, not just your party — on your much-ballyhooed convictions.

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The Republican Party has strayed so far from “societal norms” or “polite company” in recent years that it has caused some to ask, “Where have the grown-ups in the party gone?” It’s a fair question, particularly when looking at those members of the Grand Old Party who are currently running for president.

But it wasn’t too long ago that there were indeed grown-ups who very visible in the Republican Party. Some would say that when Ronald Reagan was elected president thirty-five years ago that he was a grown-up, even if his politics ranged further to the right than the two Republicans who had proceeded him, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Importantly, Reagan’s choice for Vice-President, George Herbert Walker Bush, was cut from the cloth of proper establishment Republicans.

As we are learning now, with the imminent release of Jon Meacham’s book, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, the elder Bush has been a measured and often cautious man; someone who does not act impulsively and who is not afraid of dissenting opinions in his company. When he became president in 1988, he commanded one of the very few successes that the United States has had in armed conflict since the end of World War II. He put together a coalition of forty-three nations to oppose Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iraq, and the forces were strong enough to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait in four days.

But when Pappy Bush ran for president on his own right in 1988, he made a startling and strange choice for his vice-presidential running mate, one that opened the door for the “kiddy corps.” His selection was Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, someone who was known to most as a mental lightweight before he was anointed, and who pretty much convinced the rest of the world of that after he was nominated. We are now familiar with the term “kiddy table” when talking about Republicans running for office, but to get there, one has to perform poorly in the polls. If you were looking for child-like naiveté as a ticket to the table, Quayle might have been seated at the head of the table. Who can forget him saying, “What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.”

We all have blind spots, and unfortunately for George H.W. Bush, he was also deaf to the advice of many other Republicans when considering Quayle for Number Two. Quayle may have been the first of the recent cadre of young, energetic, not-too-bright, and generally non-empathetic “rising stars” in the Republican Party. He came to us courtesy of a true grown-up, a war hero, and a very credible president, George H.W. Bush.

As tidbits come out about the Meacham book, we learn that Bush 41 had significant issues with the way his son, George W. Bush, ran his two-term presidency. Pappy saw Vice-President Dick Cheney as many others have, as a controlling force who had a war agenda which was central to his vision of foreign policy. 41 also saw 43’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, as somewhat oblivious to facts.

Criticizing the administration of George W. Bush is both rather easy and also sad. He never should have been president of the United States. However, there were enough American voters who preferred him as their choice over Al Gore in 2000 that Bush nearly won the vote and actually won the appointment of the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.

So George H.W. Bush wittingly brought Dan Quayle to the national scene and then unwittingly brought us his son, George W. We do not really know if Pappy Bush wanted George W. to be president, but from what we can currently tell, Pappy did not tell his son that the job was over his head and it would not be wise to call upon his political chips to try to get there. The bottom line is that one way or another George H.W. Bush brought us George W. The American people confirmed ‘W’s’ so-called readiness to be commander-in-chief.

After ‘W’ was two-termed out, the Republican Party went back to a grown-up in John McCain as their nominee in 2000. McCain was regarded as a serious opponent to Barack Obama, until he made that fateful decision to ask someone he had not previously met to be his vice-presidential nominee. He called upon Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, who was regarded, again, as a young and energetic Republican firebrand. Unlike Quayle, Palin could rally a conservative crowd, but her knowledge of the news was laid bare when she was asked by CBS’s Katie Couric if she could provide the name of one newspaper or magazine that she reads, and she couldn’t think of any so she blurted, “All of them.”

McCain lost to Obama. Palin soon thereafter quit her governorship in mid-term and has since been somewhat of a darling of the right. Even though she has not sought political office over the past seven years, she has had a huge impact on the Republican party, both its insiders and its voters. She has taken the main stage and said truly outrageous things reflecting huge gaps in knowledge, in critical thinking and in empathy. These characteristics are now common in most Congressional Republicans. The extremism of Congressional Republicans is why the very conservative John Boehner gave up on managing the Kiddie Table in the Lower Chamber of Congress.

Would we have had this brand of Republican had George H.W. Bush not given us Dan Quayle and later his son, and if John McCain had not given us Sarah Palin? The strength of the current extremists is such that they surely would have risen to prominence somehow some way. But the apparent legitimacy that they have in the GOP was greatly strengthened by the nod and a wink from the likes of Pappy Bush and John McCain. They both may well be regretting that now.

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