If You Could Walk Through The Mouth Of The Current WH-Occupant, You'd Be Talkin' The Dirt Road

Last eve, this blogger received a text-message from his daughter bemoaning her latest parenthood-test: "What are you to do when your 3 boys [ages 15, 13, and 9] were openly saying "$hithead" and claiming presidential speech as a defense?" The only response the blogger could offer was "I'm sorry." Cartoonist Gary Markstein, with today's illustration, and James Fallows, in today's blog post, go right to the greatest failure thus far in 2018 that would allow the current occupant of the White House to evade condemnation of his vile, racist statements. If this is a (fair & balanced) indictment of the $hithead-in-Chief, so be it.

[x The Atlantic]
Have They No Sense Of Decency?
By James Fallows

TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

ago colleagues conceivable concerns decency decided democrats enough era finally hatch hearings history house independent james john lindsey looked majority mccain mccarthy mind moment party politics president pride question race rather re-election republicans senator sense shelby shithole spare stand statement talk televised think took trump turned votes watergate welch years

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“Have you no sense of decency?” It’s the question that the members of the Republican majority in the Congress—51 senators, 239 representatives—might bear in mind, in the “shithole” era.

If only two of those senators would stand up against Donald Trump, with their votes rather than just their tweets or concerned statements, they would constitute an effective majority.

With the 49 Democratic and independent senators, these two would make 51 votes, which in turn would be enough to authorize real investigations. They could pass a formal resolution of censure. They could call for tax returns and financial disclosure. They could begin hearings, on the model of the nationally televised Watergate hearings of 45 years ago.

They could behave as if they took seriously their duties to hold the executive branch accountable. They could make a choice they know will be to their credit when this era enters history — as did the Republicans who finally turned against their own party’s President Nixon during the Watergate drama, as did the Democrats who finally turned against their own party’s President Johnson over the Vietnam war, as did the Republicans who finally turned against their own poisonous Senator McCarthy in the episode that gave rise to “Have you no sense of decency?” more than 60 years ago. They could spare themselves the shame that history attaches to people who did the wrong thing, or nothing, or kept looking the other way during those decisive periods.

(I’m not even talking about the House, where the GOP has a larger majority, where there’s never been as much talk about “world’s greatest deliberative body,” and where the main outlet for Republican concerns about this era in politics has been the rapidly growing list of incumbents deciding to retire rather than run again.)

Even without the House, just two senators could make an enormous difference.

• Two like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker who are not running for re-election and have no primary-challenge consequences to fear;
• Two like Orrin Hatch and John McCain who mainly have their places in history to think about;
• Two like the young Ben Sasse and the veteran Lamar Alexander who pride themselves on being “thoughtful”;
• Two like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski who pride themselves on being “independent”;
• Two like Rand Paul and Mike Lee who pride themselves on their own kind of independence;
• Two like Rob Portman and John Barrasso who pride themselves on being decent;
• Two like Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton with conceivable long-term higher-office hopes;
• Two like Tim Scott and James Lankford who jointly wrote a statement on the need for broad-minded inclusion;
• Two like Chuck Grassley and Richard Shelby, who like Hatch and McCain are in their 80s and conceivably have “legacy” on their minds (remember that in the Alabama Senate race Shelby took a stand against his party’s odious nominee, Roy Moore);
• One like Dean Heller, facing a tough re-election race, plus maybe Lindsey Graham, who used to be among the leaders in blunt talk about Trump’s excesses.

If any of these two, or some other pair from the thirty-plus remaining Republicans, decided to take a stand, they would not change everything about this perilous moment in politics. But they would do something, about the open secret of a destructive presidency that nearly all of their colleagues are aware of and virtually none is doing anything about.

They could remind their colleagues of the Senate’s appropriate check-and-balance function.

And they could spare themselves, in history’s perspective, the question Joseph Welch so memorably asked the rampaging Senator Joe McCarthy, during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.

From the Senate’s own historical site:

As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"

Have you no sense of decency? It is a question worth pondering, in the shithole era. # # #

[James Fallows has been associated with The Atlantic Monthly for many years and has written nine books. His most recent work will be China Airborne (2012). His articles and essays have appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, and other magazines. He was also one of Nader's Raiders at Public Citizen and Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for the first two years of his presidency, the youngest person to ever hold that job, being two months younger at the time than Jon Favreau, Barack Obama's speechwriter. Fallows attended Harvard University (MA), where he was president of the newspaper The Crimson. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa (BA, history and literature) and then studied economics at Oxford University (UK) as a Rhodes Scholar.]

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