Rep. Glenn Grothman has earned a reputation as a politician who speaks his mind — though he probably shouldn’t.
It was a few years ago, for example, when the Wisconsin Republican argued that the District of Columbia doesn’t deserve statehood because it doesn’t have any local mining. That came on t heels of Grothman explaining his opposition to equal-pay legislation by saying, “You could argue that money is more important for men.”
Around the same time, he reportedly criticized sex-ed classes because, as Grothman put it, some gay teachers “would like it if more kids became homosexuals.”
Last year, the GOP congressman expressed concern that by diversifying the courts, President Joe Biden might be “actively discriminating against white heterosexual men.” Soon after, Grothman lamented the lack of “white guys” among the White House’s judicial nominees.
Unfortunately, he’s still at it. The Daily Beast reported:
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) on Thursday accused “the angry feminist movement” of emasculating men and said the U.S. should “work our way back” to 1960 if former President Donald Trump wins in November.
Even by contemporary Republican standards, Grothman’s remarks, delivered on the House floor from what appeared to be prepared notes, were striking.
The Wisconsin lawmaker initially claimed that Lyndon Johnson’s agenda “took the purpose out of the man’s life, because now you have a basket of goodies for the mom.” Grothman added, “They’ve taken away the purpose of the man to be part of a family. And if we want to get America back to, say, 1960, where this was almost unheard of, we have to fundamentally change these programs.”
After criticizing a variety of social-insurance programs — including day care and pre-school — and denouncing “the angry feminist movement,” the Republican concluded, “So I hope the press corps picks up on this, and I hope Republican and Democrat [sic] leadership put together some sort of plan for January, in which we work our way back to where America was in the 1960s.”
In 2020, it’s worth noting for context, Axios published a report ranking Donald Trump’s top loyalists on Capitol Hill. Grothman claimed the top spot at #1.
I mention this because the former president is defined in large part by his retrospective perspective. Trump isn’t forward thinking; he boasts about his desire to go backwards, to a time when he thinks America was “great.”
And while the presumptive GOP presidential nominee tends to be vague about just how far back he wants to roll back the clock, his congressional sycophant was more explicit: Grothman doesn’t just want to go back four years, to Trump’s term; he wants to go back six decades, to a time when people who looked and thought like him enjoyed a more exalted status over everyone else.
The Republican congressman keeps running for re-election, even after he broke his term-limits pledge, and his Wisconsin constituents keep sending him back to Capitol Hill. In fact, in the 2022 midterm elections cycle, he won 95% of the vote — because literally no local Democrat was willing to run against him.
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