Broward County Rep. Hillary Cassel announced yesterday that she will leave the Democratic Party and join the GOP, becoming the second state lawmaker to do so this month. Hillsborough County Rep. Susan Valdés also announced this month that she had joined the Republicans.
Ethics Alarms has covered, and deplored, this behavior before. Doing what Cassel and Valdés have done is unethical, and the identities of the political parties involved don’t matter. By doing this, the two women have committed a fraud on the electorate. Democrats voted for them based in part on their status as members of their party. Their election victories were achieved by misrepresentation. Cassel, ran unopposed for her second term in November; if she had flipped before the election in a timely fashion, she may well have had opposition. Her rationalization for this unethical reversal, as posted on “X”:
Aww, that’s nice. The ethical way to handle a sudden epiphany when one has been elected by the partisans of one party and now suddenly wants to join the opposition is to resign, and run again under the new banner so voters have not been deceived and know who and what they are voting for. This was how former Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm handled the problem when he changed parties from Democrat to Republican as a Congressman. He resigned, then ran for his vacated seat and won again. Perfect.
As for the Florida Republicans, good luck with these two converts. They are as trustworthy as the husband who marries the second wife he was cheating with during the first marriage.
Ethics Alarms 
That would be the former Senator Phil Gramm, not the late Senator. He’s still alive.
Ugh. Stupid, careless mistake by me, and I’ll fix it. It’s especially irritating because he’s one of my all-time favorite politicians, and I’m thrilled that he’s still kicking. I’m pretty sure the mistake was my mind glomming onto Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham‘s husband Phillip, who committed suicide and whose foundation in his name I’ve dealt with. Fixed.
There are situations where I think this is appropriate. If I remember correctly, Kyrsten Sinema was being hounded by members of her party for not voting the way they insisted that she vote. They went so far as to follow her into the bathroom, yelling at her the whole time so that she couldn’t go to the bathroom. When your party’s behavior becomes so bad that you need a restraining order against them, you should be all owed to change parties.
I don’t see that in this case, however.
She flipped late in her term as well, and wasn’t planning on running again. Flipping within a month of an election, however, can’t be excused.