Lessons from San Juan

On July 9, a handful of private messages sent on the Telegram app among Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rossello Nevares and his staff were leaked on social media, offering Puerto Ricans a glimpse of how little their political leadership thinks of them. Further disclosures followed two days later. Then, on July 13, Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (Center for Investigative Journalism) published an 889-page cache of Telegram messages sent over a four-month period beginning late last year.

Some of the messages were vile – violent, profane, juvenile, misogynistic and homophobic attacks on political rivals, journalists and celebrities. The scandal quickly became variously known as ChatGate, TelegramGate and, my favorite, RickyLeaks.

Puerto Ricans erupted in mass protest, demanding Rossello’s resignation. Initially, Rossello thought he could ride it out with an apology, even as some of his aides who participated in the chat-ring resigned. But the protests continued. Rossello then announced that he would not run for re-election in 2020, and that he would resign as the head of his political party. Still the protests continued, and, last night, Rossello gave up – his resignation will be effective on August 2.

It may not have been the popular protests that finally convinced Rossello. It may have been the prospect of impeachment. His decision came a few hours after the speaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, Carlos Mendez Nunez, announced that the House would initiate impeachment proceedings today, and that he had the votes to remove Rossello from office.

Mendez, like Rossello, is a member of the New Progressive Party – the PNP, for Partido Nuevo Progresista. The PNP holds two-thirds majorities in both houses of the Puerto Rico legislature. Therefore, assuming that Mendez’s vote count was correct, Rossello faced removal from office by members of his own party.

It’s worth considering whether Rossello’s crass vulgarities were substantially worse than the crass vulgarities of President Donald Trump. In public, at least, Trump avoids the kind of words that were used on Telegram – words translating, for instance, to “whore” and “cocksucker.” But Trump publicly expresses the same kinds of bigotry that Rossello and his aides expressed privately – in Trump’s case, it’s usually racial, xenophobic and religious bigotry, although both Trump and Rossello have ridiculed physically disabled people.

Puerto Ricans widely condemned the bigotry of their governor. And Puerto Rican legislators of the governor’s party joined them.

By contrast, each new instance of President Trump’s vulgar bigotry only strengthens his bond with his voter base. And, although almost all Republican leaders condemned Trump as a bigot before he took office, no more than a handful – and none in any leadership position – have condemned Trump’s bigotry since he took office. It stands beyond our ability to imagine that the Republican-controlled Senate would take impeachment by the House seriously, let alone vote to remove Trump from office.

Rossello has one more trick up his sleeve. The Puerto Rico constitution provides that a gubernatorial vacancy is filled by the secretary of state, but that position is vacant, the previous secretary of state having resigned after his participation in the RickyLeaks scandal was disclosed. Second in line is Secretary of Justice Wanda Vazquez Garced.

Vazquez has had her own brushes with scandal, most recently accusations that she improperly used her position to intervene on behalf of family members in a private housing dispute. Vazquez also made a powerful enemy in Thomas Rivera Schatz, the president of the Puerto Rico Senate. Vazquez investigated allegations of corruption in Rivera’s office, leading to a federal indictment against a Senate official on charges of submitting fake invoices on behalf of Rivera’s allies.

The eight-day interim between Rossello’s announcement of his resignation and the effectiveness of his resignation leaves the possibility that he will try to fill the vacant secretary of state position – aided, no doubt, by Senate President Rivera. I don’t know whether the Puerto Rican populace would stand for such a manipulation of his own succession by a disgraced governor on his way out the door.

As long as Republican senators remain unwilling to confront Trump, I’ve argued, impeachment by the House would be a “gesture.” And as long as Republican primary voters remain committed to Trump, there is no meaningful pressure on those senators to confront Trump.

Fortunately for Puerto Rico, voters and politicians are apparently willing to hold their leaders to some pretty basic standards of decency, and, when their leaders fall short of those standards, they are willing to remove them from office – even if they voted for those leaders in the past, and even if those leaders are members of their own party. Trump’s voters, and Republican senators, evidently lack the same intellectual integrity.