Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach, D-17, is getting a lot of press for his profanity-laden tweet at President Donald Trump on Tuesday. Here’s a bit more ink to throw in the binder, Mr. Leach: you should be ashamed of yourself.

Leach, a Montgomery County Democrat, says he’s getting a mostly-positive response from people across the country for the tweet, which invited Trump to try and destroy his career and hasn’t received a presidential response yet.

Our thought is that Leach has already done that work himself. Call our notion of politics quaint, but in order to be successful you actually have to demonstrate seriousness of purpose and an ability to earn the respect of those who disagree with you.

Leach isn’t a champion of transparency or a powerful liberal voice in the Pennsylvania senate. He’s just a clown with a smart phone, an internet connection and an 8th-grader’s prediliction for vulgarity.

We should probably aspire to higher levels of competence for those eleceted to Pennsylvania’s General Assembly.

[naviga:h3]Cheer [/naviga:h3]

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-PA, deserves credit for stepping up to the plate and listening to what his constituents have to say about his opposition to President Donald Trump’s travel ban. In what aides to the senator have called an “all hands on deck” scenario, Casey himself apparently took a shift answering his office’s phones.

The office says it’s been receiving as many as 1,200 calls each day on issues from Trump’s travel ban to congressional actions. That’s a ridiculous volume of feedback to try and handle, and it seems as if Casey’s office is doing its level best to make things work.

That’s the way things are supposed to work in Washington: you win an election, follow your best judgement while in office, make your case to the voters back home, and they tell you at the ballot box how you measured up to their expectations.

Agree or disagree with Casey’s positions on the issues, you have to admire the fact that he’s keeping the lines open to both supporters and detractors. That’s more than we can say for some of our other elected officials.

[naviga:h3]Jeer [/naviga:h3]

If Sen. Casey deserves credit for his efforts at showing people he’s listening, then Sen. Pat. Toomey, R-PA, deserves criticism for laying so low he’s become nearly invisible.

During the weekend uproar over Trump’s then-newly-enacted travel ban, when most of Pennsylvania’s elected officials were staking out strong positions for or against the action, Toomey was conveniently traveling and “unavailable.” No one heard from him until 36 hours later, when he issued a milqutoast statement that said precisely nothing of value or substance.

Again, this isn’t about the issues. It’s about the way in which an elected official goes about doing his job. If the senator supports Trump’s cabinet selections and executive actions, he needs to make a vigorous case to his constituents on the merits of his positions. And in Pennsylvania, which helped elect Trump to the White House, there are surely constituents that will agree with him. They deserve to hear from Toomey as much as those who disagree.

Politicians playing cat-and-mouse with constituents and the press is nothing new. But Toomey is taking the tactic too far. It’s been a shameful first six weeks of 2017 for the second term senator. He needs to do much, much better.

—PAR