Sensenbrenner: "I ain't goin' nowhere"

F. Jim Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Congressman that liberals love to hate lately, comes off better than you might have expected in a profile by Craig Gilbert in Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Sensenbrenner has made news recently as a champion of the Patriot Act, and for his high-handed and childish handling of a hearing of the House Judiciary that he chairs. As Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show, Sensenbrenner "literally took his gavel and went home."

Norman Ornstein, a well-known pundit and scholar who had an acrimonious dispute with Sensenbrenner over a bill before the House, calls the veteran congressman "the most obdurate human being I've ever encountered" and says the hearing flap has made him "a poster child for arrogance and abuse of power," Gilbert reports, in the tone of what has been written about F. Jim on the Internet in the last month.Sample.

But F. Jim has his defenders, including an ACLU activist, who says he's prickly but not a total wingnut.

Worst news: F. Jim says he has no plans to leave Congress after his term limit as Judiciary chair expires at the end of 2006. He'll find some other way to wreak havoc, he says. (Well, that's not quite what he says, but you get the drift.) And Bryan Kennedy, mounting a second campaign for F. Jim's seat, missed a rare opportunity to get in the newspaper because he "could not be reached for comment."