A sitting U.S. senator and a former governor this week refreshed charges that Republican lawmakers have an obstructionist bent that is at least partly fueled by racism.

On Tuesday, West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller took time out of a Senate Finance Committee hearing to bash his colleagues for pandering to what he described as their racist constituents. “It’s an American characteristic that you don’t do anything which displeases the voters, because you always have to get reelected here,” Rockefeller said, according to Politico. “I understand part of it. It has to do with—for some, it’s just we don’t want anything good to happen under this president, because he’s the wrong color.”

Rockefeller, who has said he will retire at the end of his current term, has the benefit of being able to say whatever he wants. The Democrat even admitted that he has allowed fear of re-election to silence his views on other issues that mattered to him. “Why haven’t I been more up front about this in previous sessions? We’ve all seen this coming,” he said in reference to the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

Elsewhere in the union, former Florida governor Charlie Crist—who recently left the Republican Party after losing a Senate primary race—explained his affiliation switch as a veritable escape from hell. In an interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos, Crist claimed the Republican Party is now seen as “anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-minority, anti-gay, anti-education, anti-environment,” and that he feels “liberated” as a Democrat. “I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president,” he said.

Crist and Rockefeller are not alone. In the past month, Rep. Steve Israel of New York said that “the Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism,” and Attorney General Eric Holder insinuated that the way that both he and President Barack Obama are treated by Congress signified an unusual level of “unwarranted, ugly, and divisive adversity.” (Holder later clarified to say he was speaking of incivility, not race.)

Republican star and potential presidential candidate Paul Ryan also found himself in hot water when he said in a March interview that a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities, in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working” is partly to blame for inequality. Rep. Barbara Lee quickly denounced the congressman from Wisconsin for what she called “a thinly veiled racial attack.” Ryan has spent many of his waking hours since trying to recast himself as a friend of poor minorities, and just last week took time to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus. Some observers have cast doubts on his new conviction.

Using data from General Social Survey findings since 1990, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight found that, as of 2012, white Republicans are 8 percent more likely to hold “negative racial attitudes” than white Democrats. That math rests on responses to questions such as whether or not black Americans “lack the motivation to pull themselves out of poverty” (in 2012, the most recent year used, 57 percent of white Republicans espoused that view, as opposed to 41 percent of white Democrats), but Silver notes that surveys are an imperfect measure of racism.

Obama himself has long noted that some Republican lawmakers feel as though any cooperation with the White House will endanger their re-election chances, but he usually leaves out any overt accusations of racism.