“Have You No Sense of Decency?”

The question that came to my mind at 3 a.m., words so memorably uttered by attorney Joseph Welch in 1954, when the infamous McCarthy hearings, a.k.a. witch hunt, had gone on already for far too long. If you’re too young to remember it (and I was too young at the time to pay attention), what happened was that Senator McCarthy’s demagoguery had until that moment run virtually unchecked, as he whipped the country into a state of hysteria over suspected “internal enemies.” In the course of those Senate hearings, McCarthy destroyed reputations and sometimes lives. He must have felt all-powerful and thought nothing could stop him. Then one lawyer uttered the fateful words:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness.  

 … I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. 

 … You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

To read the long exchange between McCarthy and Welch, from which these lines are excerpted and which I recommend you read in full, find it here. Now look at our country today in May 2020, through the lens of 1954. 

I want to ask all Americans who continue to support the man in the White House, a man who has demonstrated every day since his campaign that he has no sense of decency and who becomes only worse every day, in these difficult, difficult times when we need real leadership:

“Have you no sense of decency? Have you no conscience? Would you sacrifice your country to allow this national shame to continue?”

My parents were Republicans. My mother and I voted for John Kasich in the primary of 2016. (I should note that my father had been dead for several years and thus voted for no one.) No, I am not a registered Republican, but I wanted to vote against the man who won the nomination, in hopes he could be stopped before the race began. I could have lived with a President Kasich. What we have now is intolerable.

If the Republican Party is not to become one of the sorriest footnotes in American history, it is time for party members, especially those in the Senate, to get their act together and to renounce this man as candidate for re-election, to show the country that they have not utterly sold their souls for what can only be short-term political gain.