Over these first deleriously grim weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, I have found myself repeatedly asking various versions of a question regarding Congressional Republicans. The short version is basically, why are they okay with entirely ceding their power? Getting elected to the House or Senate is an Everest-scaling sort of feat, a fulfillment of political aspirations and desire for power; why do none of them seem concerned at being relegated into meaninglessness?
Trump has quite obviously decided that he can rule by fiat, literally acting like a monarch without legislative support, as long as the legislature designed to check such power basically opts out of the job. They have gleefully signed on to that project. Executive orders — which, it must be repeated over and over, are not laws — are treated like divine dictats, social media posts announce supposed dissolution of Congressionally-created government agencies, appropriated money is frozen in its tracks with literally no legal backing. This is the executive and his very rich buddy removing Congress from the equation entirely.
Why, in the face of such a blatant fascistic autogolpe, do the people who scaled their political mountain not seem to care? For these purposes, I am ignoring the true MAGA believers that have made it to Congress, of which, yes, there is no small number at this point. But what, just for example, is Senator John Thune of South Dakota really thinking about his new role as majority leader these days? What does it mean to lead a majority when its only function is to not be the minority so the king can do what he pleases? Thune has been in Congress as a relatively bog-standard Republican since 1997, and today, almost three decades later and two months after he took over the party’s leadership, he has — is choosing to have — less power than ever before.
The answers to this several, of course. One of the biggest, I think, is that they are scared little babies: they are scared of their constituents, they are scared of Trump getting mad at them, scared of losing a primary and getting kicked out of the job they have allowed to be rendered meaningless. There is also surely a healthy degree of excitement for the policy moves themselves — this is a party that considers regulation writ large as something akin to tyranny, so hobbling an agency that stops companies from dumping chemicals in the water supply or exploiting child labor or literally defrauding its customers are all right up their alley.
But I find myself asking the almost certainly doomed question that serves as this post’s headline. What would the line actually be? They happily turned on Ukraine in the space of one minutes-long Oval Office meltdown. They seem entirely unconcerned that their power over trillions of dollars in federal spending has been more or less revoked. They are on board with a wholly invented trade war that seems designed in a lab to magick a recession out of a strong economy. The possibility that there literally is no line is, at this point, the most likely answer.
Just today, Tuesday, the day Trump will address a joint session of Congress, he posted a literal fascist dictator decree regarding “illegal protests” on college campuses, saw his tariffs responded to by Canada and China in obvious fashion, and watched the Dow Jones drop almost 800 points before lunchtime. Stopping all of what Trump and Elon Musk are up to would be hard, at least on a short time scale; stopping some of it would take just five or ten Republicans in the House and Senate, sick of the attempts to rip up the Constitution and tank the economy and destroy American science and ruin basically everyone outside of the one percent’s lives. Are there just a few of them with a spine and some semblance of the love for America their party has for decades claimed sole ownership over, willing to stand up to the least fit, most ignorant, most malevolent person to ever hold power in the country? This is, apparently, too much to ask.
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