Likewise, when one realizes that Republican lawmakers are small-minded sloganeers with no real understanding of the Constitution, it becomes easier to see why they cannot fake intellectual honesty and fidelity to the rule of law. These lawmakers’ moral and philosophical vocabulary is so limited as to prevent consideration of serious issues or really anything beyond bumper-sticker phrases: Repeal Obamacare! We are the most overtaxed country anywhere! (Not true.)

Unfortunately, “My oath of office requires me to put aside ordinary politics to defend the country from a threat to its security and democracy emanating from the president who was elected with help from a foreign enemy” does not fit on a bumper sticker. Hence, we see an utterly mute Senate afraid to repeat, let alone ponder, the implications of Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) warnings that Trump is unfit and endangers our national security. We instead get silence — or worse — from his fellow Republicans.

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As the public feud between President Trump and Sen. Bob Corker stretched through its third day on Tuesday, a collective, if private, acknowledgment emerged that Corker was speaking for most Senate Republicans when he stood up to a Trump taunt. You wouldn’t know it from senators’ public pronouncements. After Corker tweeted on Sunday that the White House had been turned into “an adult day-care center,” most Republicans were silent — deciding to ride out this moment with the belief that it would fade away.

They don’t think Trump’s unfitness will fade away; they simply want the coverage of the president’s intellectual and temperamental unfitness to die down. How cowardly of them. We see the disturbing spectacle of “the entire Republican caucus in something resembling institutional paralysis, unsure of what to do or how to do it, but doing it in sync with nearly identical bland statements of nothingness.” Perhaps those who are waiting it all out rather than addressing a lapse of democratic governance (what else to call the rule by generals in place of a competent civilian president?) should not be in high office.

Even worse than the silent scaredy-cats are those moral Lilliputians who scold Corker for raising unpleasant matters when they could be cutting the top marginal tax rate. Politico’s report reads more like a parody story from the Onion:

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Trump “needs to stop. But I wish Bob would stop too. Just stop,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in an interview Tuesday. “We’ve got so many other things that we need to be focusing on right now. We need to look ahead, not reflect on anything that’s been done or said in the past.” … “It’s an unfortunate exchange … I would like to see this end,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said in the Capitol on Tuesday, adding that he does not, in fact, believe the White House is an adult day care center. “I would encourage them both to stop what they’re doing and get focused on what we need to be doing.”

So the president is crazy and unhinged — is that supposed to get in the way of a 25 percent pass-through rate?

These people should listen to how small and fearful they sound. The rest of us can surely see how afraid of confrontation with the “tweeter in chief” they have become. Moreover, the moral equivalence — Corker pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is somehow on the same plane as the naked emperor (!) — exceeds anything we have heard since, well, Trump compared neo-Nazis to those protesting against them. Do these people know how to distinguish the honorable from the dishonorable, the worthy from the unworthy?