WE FEEL YOU, BROTHER:

When Donald Trump was elected president, I wondered what had happened to my party. He was filthy, the opposite of everything that I was taught to strive for. His name was on strip clubs in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. He openly bragged about taking sexual advantage of women. As a boy, I looked up in reverence to the men who stood on stage at the Promise Keepers conventions, preaching about living with integrity. They talked about being unselfish, sacrificing yourself for others, keeping promises at all costs. To see a president so out of sync with these values was jarring. Weren't we the Moral Majority? The people for whom free markets were our highest economic value and righteous leadership was our highest qualification for governance? How were we supporting someone who seemed so disconnected from our values? Someone who seemed to regard free markets as anathema instead of an ideal? Weirdly, this businessman didn't seem to understand how trade worked.

When I moved to Devin Nunes' district I was proud to be represented by him. He was a farmer, one of the salt-of-the-earth people I could trust to carry out my commonsense Republican values. His influence grew and his family stopped farming in California, but I was proud to see him listed on Time's Most Influential 40-Under-40 list of politicians to watch. He said then that the Founding Fathers were his political heroes, and I applauded. I voted for him in every election.

But Devin Nunes's behavior became bizarre and erratic after President Trump's election. His ardent support for this amoral man betrayed the values that we hold as Republicans and as Christians. He seemed to entirely discard the Constitution, with its brilliant ideas about checks and balances. He seemed to be possessed, serving a new master who neither knew about nor cared about the value of integrity or the ideas that Nunes' former heroes Madison and Jefferson enshrined in our founding documents. When he followed President Trump into attacks on the free press, I saw the once-valued fourth estate under attack. Those who aspire to integrity encourage the accountability of the press. Those with something to hide attack it. 

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