Wisconsin has several high-ranking GOP Members of Congress whose influence could help rein in Donald Trump and tamp down rising fears of another Korean war, but their silence enables Trump's recklessness, normalizes his distracted dilettantism and embarrasses our state.
* Cong. Jim Sensenbrenner has been in the US House of Representatives for 39 years and is second in seniority among all Republicans. How does someone with nearly four decades in the Nation's Capitol just blend into the wallpaper like a neophyte back-bencher? Where is his leadership?
* Ditto for House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan. He has to know that Trump is eroding our democracy, menacing the country and endangering the world, but all Ryan can muster when all hell is breaking loose in official Washington is suggesting that Trump and braver-than-Ryan-and-Sensenbrenner GOP Sen. Bob Corker sit down and talk things out? That's beyond pathetic.
* Then there's Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee which oversees the Department of Homeland Security.
Who wants to argue that Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about unleashing fire North Korea and shelving the international deal that has frozen Iran's progress towards developing nuclear weapons is making the homeland secure?
He's also sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Corker chairs. Anything to report on, Senator?
Johnson likes to brag about his chairmanship, and even threatened to convene a hearing there on the final GOP health care bill he helped write before Senate leaders pulled it without a vote, so he was willing to put the committee into play to save that rightfully-doomed legislative fiasco - but on real matters of homeland and security, crickets.
The sad reality is that these Republican elected officials, despite their strong incumbencies and identities independent of Trump are frightened by his access to a Twitter account.
That's what scares them - - 140 characters Trump might launch at them on the Internet, not what might be launched by Trump or at the American people in part because officials in positions of power and influence went silent at the very moment their voices needed to be raised.
What the use of sending representatives to Washington, DC if they loose their nerve and abandon a larger sense of duty when they get there?
* Cong. Jim Sensenbrenner has been in the US House of Representatives for 39 years and is second in seniority among all Republicans. How does someone with nearly four decades in the Nation's Capitol just blend into the wallpaper like a neophyte back-bencher? Where is his leadership?
* Ditto for House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan. He has to know that Trump is eroding our democracy, menacing the country and endangering the world, but all Ryan can muster when all hell is breaking loose in official Washington is suggesting that Trump and braver-than-Ryan-and-Sensenbrenner GOP Sen. Bob Corker sit down and talk things out? That's beyond pathetic.
* Then there's Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee which oversees the Department of Homeland Security.
Who wants to argue that Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about unleashing fire North Korea and shelving the international deal that has frozen Iran's progress towards developing nuclear weapons is making the homeland secure?
He's also sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Corker chairs. Anything to report on, Senator?
Johnson likes to brag about his chairmanship, and even threatened to convene a hearing there on the final GOP health care bill he helped write before Senate leaders pulled it without a vote, so he was willing to put the committee into play to save that rightfully-doomed legislative fiasco - but on real matters of homeland and security, crickets.
The sad reality is that these Republican elected officials, despite their strong incumbencies and identities independent of Trump are frightened by his access to a Twitter account.
That's what scares them - - 140 characters Trump might launch at them on the Internet, not what might be launched by Trump or at the American people in part because officials in positions of power and influence went silent at the very moment their voices needed to be raised.
What the use of sending representatives to Washington, DC if they loose their nerve and abandon a larger sense of duty when they get there?
