Ron Johnson on the Warpath

Ron Johnson. Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / (CC BY-SA)

With GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s blessing, Wisconsin’s U.S. Senator Ron Johnson has ginned up the dirtiest of last-ditch distractions to save Donald Trump‘s dying presidency.

Johnson, who voted against the issuance of all witness subpoenas during Trump’s impeachment ‘trial’ and for the acquittal of the President, has just engineered as chair of the Homeland Security Committee within weeks of the 2020 election the subpoena of dozens of Obama administration officials to aid Trump’s re-election and further enable Trump’s above-the-law-below-the-belt behaviors:

The committee’s action Wednesday targets several high-profile individuals who have long been criticized by Trump and his allies, including former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and more than two dozen others who are will receive deposition notices.

Wednesday’s vote also allows Johnson to issue subpoenas for documents and testimony to McCabe and James Baker, the FBI’s former top lawyer, in addition to top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr and Stefan Halper, who was an informant for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation that targeted the Trump campaign.

Servitude to Trump at taxpayer expense has been ‘s pattern for some time and could win him consideration as Wisconsin’s worst US Senator ever – a status no one had been able for decades to wrest away from disgraced Senate abuser Joseph McCarthy, (R), as the Daily Beast recently wrote.

McCarthy’s mighty perch on the permanent investigations subcommittee allowed him to inflict maximum damage on the body politic, giving him unchecked power to subpoena government officials, Hollywood screenwriters, authors…journalists, and ordinary citizens. The senator put them under oath in front of cameras and badgered them about their supposed Commie ties and those of their acquaintances, threatening contempt of Congress—and possible jail terms—when they didn’t acquiesce.

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Johnson’s has actually suggested that Trump should win “multiple Nobel Peace prizes”, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported. And Wisconsin’s senior senator ultimately took a memorable stand on the impeachment of Trump, declaring that a federal agency’s finding that Trump broke the law was “irrelevant” to his impeachment trial.

Move over Lindsey Graham. Johnson must now be Trump’s favorite Senate water-carrier.

James Rowen, a former journalist and mayoral staffer in Milwaukee and Madison, writes a regular blog, The Political Environment.