Capitol Hill's Republican Sycophant Caucus - Baker, WSJ (priceless)
I usually cannot stand him but this one is good.
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‘I don’t mind what Trump does, because I trust Trump.”
Thus spoke Sen. Lindsey Graham last week, cheerfully declaring the unconditional surrender of not only his own judgment, his freedom of thought, his relevance and his dignity, but—and this one actually matters—his role as a leading member of one of the elected branches of the U.S. government. The submissive senator was responding on Fox News last week to a report that President Trump had started negotiations with Hamas, the terrorist organization whose destruction Mr. Graham had recently called “nonnegotiable.”
Flustered for a moment by this latest sudden turn from the White House, Mr. Graham quickly recovered and gave that neatly laconic affirmation of his self-extinction and his superfluity as a thinker and policymaker. You were left wondering how he might have responded if he had been told that Mr. Trump had just signed an executive order exiling him to Siberia, confiscating his personal property and burning his house to the ground. I pick on the gentleman from South Carolina only because he is the most ubiquitous and performative of the class of sometime self-sovereign senators turned servile sycophants who are supposed to be making our laws. He isn’t alone.
As the president ventures further down a “diplomatic” track that punishes and alienates for no good reason our closest neighbor and ally, that rewards the tyranny of a murderous and implacable foe of America, that nods approvingly as the dictator of that country carries out the rape of a free nation, that casually slashes at the bonds of alliance that have served this country well and enhanced its global power and standing for decades, my question is: When is someone going to say something? By someone, I mean a member of the world’s greatest deliberative body—and maybe its junior partner across Capitol Hill too.
(snip)
But there is nothing in the Constitution or the conventions of democratic politics that requires that the members of the coequal elected branch of government be constrained from offering even the slightest hint of critical advice or withholding consent when they see a president nonchalantly pouring gasoline on our national security and international economic relationships and dancing around them with a lighted match.
(snip)
Take Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He gave up a Senate seat, with at least a notional independence, so now he owes Mr. Trump everything. If reports are correct, he seems to have discovered that his assigned role is to reduce the office once occupied by Thomas Jefferson, William Seward and Henry Kissinger to that of a kind of glorified FedEx guy, jumping on a plane to deliver the boss’s thoughts to designated addresses around the world. Still, at least we are told he now has a say in which of his employees get fired by Elon Musk. But senators and congressmen have a constitutional function too if they would exercise it.
(snip)
I know why so many lawmakers sit by and watch as the arson unfolds: fear for their jobs. I am sure they rationalize their complaisance by thinking their political future is indispensable to the nation. But there must be more who harbor a deeper fear: of what history will make of them if they don’t speak up now about the wanton vandalism to the country they were elected to protect.
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