He spoke for us all

That sickening thud reverberating around the nation this week is civility hitting absolute rock bottom in our nation’s capital.

While neither party is exactly shrouded in nobility, our president must accept the entirety of the blame for this latest descent into tumult, for tweeting that four Democratic women of color should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Whatever you think of this president and his policies, since three of the four congresswomen are Americans by birth his tweet is evocative of a xenophobia one would hope would be restricted to an inglorious past.

Most ominous on this dark day for democracy, though, was the fact that House Civility Caucus chair Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Kansas City, became so fed up with presiding over the peevish, hours-long House

debate over simply condemning the tweets that he dropped the gavel and walked away.

“It’s one of those moments,” Cleaver said on CNN Wednesday, “where you realize that people have come here for the purpose of conflict, being engaged in conflict, as opposed to getting something done.”

How to break this high fever, when a congressman devoted to decorum succumbs, however briefly, to the distemper around him?

One suggestion from Cleaver himself: While people can’t control what a president says or does, they can control how, or if, they respond.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Cleaver told The Wall Street Journal, “when I walked down, in my head I was like, ‘I’m through with this mess. These people don’t want discourse.’” Yet, even after a very difficult day, Cleaver plans to continue with the Civility Caucus. He needs our support in doing so.