Rodricks: In the midst of the muck, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer stands up for decency

It was in a Senate hearing room in Washington in 1954 when the bow-tied Boston attorney Joseph Welch asserted “a sense of decency” as an American ideal. In the early 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had almost single-handedly created a second red scare by claiming, with little evidence, that the federal government and Army had been infiltrated with communist sympathizers. His obsession was the “deep state” of the Eisenhower era.