Send Republicans in Congress back to their states

By Dana Milbank

The Washington Post

If only we could send them back.

Republican lawmakers have long cut profiles in cowardice during the Trump presidency, but never before have the consequences of their leadership vacuum been as vivid.

GOP legislators professed dismay when a crowd at President Trump’s North Carolina rally, riled by his attacks on a member of Congress who emigrated from Africa as a child, broke into a racist chant of “Send her back!”

“Not acceptable,” proclaimed Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

“That’s offensive,” judged Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina, the House GOP conference vice chairman.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, likewise declared there is “no place in our party and no place in this country” for such words.

Yet when Trump himself said a few days earlier that four nonwhite members of Congress, including three born in the United States, should “go back” to the countries they came from, Republican lawmakers responded with near-complete silence. When the House, 48 hours before the chanting in North Carolina, took up a resolution condemning these “racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color,” only four of 197 House Republicans joined the denunciation.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/milbank-send-republicans-in-congress-back-to-their-states/