Steve Benen reports on GOP anger at Senators who honor their duty:
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) reportedly appeared on NPR this morning and said Republican senators who are worried about Trump’s fitness should keep their fears “private,” and discuss their concerns “within the family.”
In other words, if the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has reason to believe the president is dangerously unfit, the important thing is that the public not find out.
In case this isn’t obvious, what policymakers in both parties should be worried about is Trump’s ability to do the job, not public awareness about concerns that the president can’t do the job.
Assuming Senator Thune really did say that (I’ve yet to find the interview on the NPR website), I’d say Senator Thune has disqualified himself from re-election, because the nation needs to know when the President is incompetent for the job – it’s basically a public emergency.
But it’s not that President Trump has become unfit to be President, but that he was never fit to begin with, and that’s the problem Senator Thune has, because it’s really an indictment of the GOP as a valid political party. It has proven vulnerable to a con-man, and the fact that the GOP has voted more or less in lock-step with the incompetent-in-chief, as this partial list from today’s FiveThirtyEight’s TrumpScore Senator page on the right indicates, leaves each of them individually guilty of suppressing their individual judgments in favor of that of the Party, and the latter has proven disastrous.
Such are the fruits of team politics.
So when Senator Thune speaks of keeping it in the family, he’s really trying to put the Party above the country. And that’s really not an acceptable attitude.
