Will Matt Gaetz Finally Cause the Senate GOP To Stand Up To Trump? My Money's On No!

I really thought I'd laid the bar on the floor, but somehow Donald Trump has already burrowed under it by announcing (former*) Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general. I had the pleasure of sharing this news with several of my law school colleagues, where it literally provoked a laugh-out-loud howl of incredulity.

It wasn't just my people though. Senate Republicans also seem rather blindsided by the pick:

The selection of Mr. Gaetz blindsided many of Mr. Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill. The announcement was met with immediate and unvarnished skepticism by Republicans in the Senate who will vote on his nomination. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she was “shocked” by the pick — and predicted a difficult confirmation process.

[....]

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, when asked about Mr. Gaetz’s selection, said, “I don’t know the man other than his public persona.”

Mr. Cornyn said he could not comment on the chances that Mr. Gaetz, or Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, would be confirmed: “I don’t know — we’ll find out.”

“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said as other senators dodged questions from reporters.

Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, told reporters that many members of the G.O.P. conference were shocked at the choice of Mr. Gaetz for attorney general, but mostly thrilled at the prospect that he might no longer be a member of the chamber.

The House, Mr. Miller added, would be a more functional place without Mr. Gaetz.

He predicted a bruising confirmation fight, adding that if the process revealed evidence to corroborate the allegations of sex trafficking against Mr. Gaetz, he would not be surprised if the House moved to expel him, as it did with Representative George Santos. Mr. Santos lost his seat after the Ethics Committee documented violations of the chamber’s rules and evidence of extensive campaign fraud.  

But things aren't all bad. You'll never guessed who raced ahead of the pack to greet Trump's failson pick with open arms:

One of the few lawmakers to offer a positive assessment was a staunch Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who called Mr. Gaetz “smart” and “clever” but predicted tough confirmation hearings.

So, how long will it take for the Senate GOP caucus to fall in line? I'm guessing it'll happen before the first confirmation hearing. (That is, if we have confirmation hearings).

Oh, and speaking of organizations that have put their dignity in a lockbox, we did finally learn what bridge is too far for the ADL, which blistered the Gaetz selection because of his "long history of trafficking in antisemitism," including "defending the Great Replacement Theory." How he's distinguished from the ADL's glowingly-praised Elise Stefanik, who also promoted Great Replacement Theory, was left unsaid.

* Gaetz hastily resigned his seat following the announcement, also getting ahead of a planned House Ethics Committee report that was set to issue findings on Gaetz's myriad, er, "controversies" -- including allegations of sex trafficking minors. Score one for QAnon!

How Gullible is Susan Collins?

As the implications of the Supreme Court's leaked draft opinion overturning Roe continue to reverberate, one major political figure has dialed up her concern-o-meter all the way to 11. Sen. Susan Collins claims she is shocked to see Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch voting to overturn Roe given their assurances made to her during the confirmation proceedings about their respect for precedent.

To be honest, I don't think Supreme Court justices can or should be bound to any "assurances" they made during their confirmation proceedings. But that's neither here nor there. What I'm really curious about is just how gullible Susan Collins actually is?

Seriously, I'm curious. On the one hand, it seems impossible to believe that she believed that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch wouldn't overturn Roe. She's shocked that what everyone knew and everyone told her actually came to pass? She thought that some bromide about "respecting precedent" would actually constrain them? Come on. Nobody is that stupid.

But ... well, maybe some people are that stupid. Or more aptly: one of the vices of being powerful is that it generates a feeling of insulation -- the bad things are never actually going to happen. If things are going well -- and if you're a powerful U.S. Senator, things are almost by definition "going well" for you -- it's hard to imagine that some of the privileges and entitlements you've taken for granted could just suddenly go away. It's the same complacency that's led some politicians, on both sides of the aisle, to shrug as the fabric of free and fair elections in America continues to fray. Of course we'll never stop being a democracy. That's unfathomable. And since it's unfathomable, what's the harm in letting others pull out another joist here or loosen another screw there? We're still in power, and so we can still pump the brakes if things get too far.

Until you can't. That's the thing people like Collins forget -- at some point, when the surrounding structure has gotten weak enough, she doesn't have the power to pump the brakes anymore. The fabric of reproductive freedom, just like the fabric of our democracy, requires work to maintain. But if you've gotten so used to its existence that it feels less like an ongoing project and more like a fact of the world, you forget that necessity.

So maybe Susan Collins really was that gullible. She got so used to the world as it is that she forgot to take the steps necessary to actually stop Roe from being reversed. It's complacency, and it's laziness, and it's arrogance, and it's hubris. And now it is all coming to roost. Congratulations, Susan Collins. Your tremendous credulity in the face of overwhelming evidence that, yes, obviously, these Justices would take an axe to Roe means that reproductive rights in America are now dead and gone.

Or maybe Collins doesn't actually care at all, and this "shock" is another one of her performances. Certainly, that hypothesis also has to remain live, since one can be sure that her tangible response to the Court overturning Roe will begin and end with a statement expressing shock. But I suppose when it comes to Susan Collins, the range of options always has lain somewhere between unfathomably gullible and sociopathically manipulative, without too much riding on where she actually falls.

Susan Collins as Marie-Reine Le Gougne

If you're my age or older, the name "Marie-Reine Le Gougne" may ring a faint bell of recognition. Better known as "the French judge", Le Gougne was at the center of 2002 Olympic figure skating scandal which saw a Russian pair win gold over the seemingly far more deserving Canadian duo of Jamie Salé and David Pelletie. Le Gougne voted for the Russians and immediately attracted suspicion for it -- she soon confessed that she had been pressured into her vote by the head of the French federation as part of a trade where a French couple would receive a scoring advantage in the ice dance competition later in the games. Le Gougne was suspended and disgraced; eventually the decision was made to give both pairs a shared gold medal.

Here's the thing though: there were nine judges in the 2002 Olympic figure skating competition. Five voted for the Russian pair. Four went for the Canadian. So why was Le Gougne, "the French judge", singled out?

The answer is simple: everyone knew that the four eastern bloc judges (from Russia, Ukraine, China and Poland) would vote for the Russian pair. And everyone "knew" that the western judges (from the USA, Canada, Germany, and France) would vote for the Canadian. The only real decider was the Japanese judge -- who passed for neutral. He picked the Canadians. But it didn't matter once Le Gougne didn't vote for her "side". A 5-4 vote gave the Russians the victory.

It is a testament to just how deeply this sort of corruption was ingrained in the Olympics that nobody even thought to be aggrieved by the fact that the regional blocs were guaranteed to vote for "their" skater regardless of performance. Indeed, the entire fix was premised on the assumption that they would do just that. And yet, despite the fact that their votes if anything represent a deeper rot inside the body of Olympic figure skating, unlike Le Gougne, these judges received no punishment and no public attention whatsoever. Everything fell on the head of Le Gougne, because her corruption wasn't assumed from the get-go.

And that brings us to Susan Collins. Collins has had a rough year, politically-speaking: she's seen her approvals tank over the course of the Trump administration; and she's now in a statistical dead heat with her 2020 Democratic challenger Sara Gideon. This brings me almost indescribable joy. Time after time, Susan Collins has been a loyal water-carrier for the worst excesses of the Trump administration. She may grumble or pout or furrow her brow in grave concern, but when push comes to shove she has almost unerringly toed the party line. If a "moderate Republican" is someone who "talks about voting differently from other Republicans before voting exactly the same as other Republicans," Susan Collins is indeed Washington's quintessential moderate Republican. And this identity has made her one of the true, great villains of the Trump era.

In a sense, this is unfair. Susan Collins isn't voting any differently from Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz. Indeed, that's the very indictment against her: she votes just like they do. But like the eastern bloc judges, the corruption of Cotton and Hawley and Cruz is assumed. Everyone knows they're in the bag for whatever Trump would have them do. Collins has cultivated a public identity predicated on the idea that we should not "know" this about her. So it is more of a shock (even if by this point it should have ceased to be one) when she inevitably caves.

But still -- if Susan Collins feels that this is all unfair, I do think she has a point. She is not, objectively speaking, any worse than Cotton or Hawley or Cruz.

She has a point, and that point should be reflected in how we see her. And so when Collins loses her seat in 2020 (and I expect she will), and all the columnists race to write their eulogies for her Washington career, this is the only point about her truly worth making: Susan Collins was, at root, no different -- no better, no worse -- than Ted Cruz.

That is her legacy. And it is completely, entirely, deserved

Loving the Children To Death

Right now, the Republican Party is trying to square a very nettlesome circle. On the one hand, they want to communicate that they care about the immigrant children the Trump administration is ripping away from their families. On the other hand, they want to do as little as possible to actually challenge Trump's policies or effectuate any meaningful change -- especially if it might mean (heaven forbid) some of these kids actually get to stay in the United States and build a safe and productive life here.

The latest bit of rhetoric emerging out of this impossible dynamic is the claim that it is for the children's own good that they are being ripped from their families and locked into cages. Moderate Republican(tm) Susan Collins kicked this off, wailing about how "dangerous" it is for parents try and cross the American border as cover for refusing to join Democratic efforts to end family separation.

More recently, that gambit has been extended to allege that the children in question are actually trafficking victims and that therefore efforts to prevent family separation are the real acts of child abuse. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for example, tweeted the following today:

Dems' Keep Families Together Act is better called the Child Trafficking Encouragement Act. Show up at border with a minor & call him your child, then you get released into the US! Children will be abducted & sold to drug cartels & slave-traders as a free ticket into US.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) June 19, 2018

Meanwhile, his Nebraska colleague Ben Sasse took a more circuitous route -- sprinkled with many rhetorical condemnations of the family separation policy -- to arrive mostly at the same place:

This bad new policy is a reaction against a bad old policy. The old policy was “catch-and-release.” Under catch-and-release, if someone made it to the border and claimed asylum (whether true or not, and most of the time it wasn’t true), they were released into the U.S. until a future hearing date....

Catch-and-release – combined with inefficient deportation and other ineffective policies – created a magnet whereby lots of people came to the border who were not actually asylum-seekers. This magnet not only attracted illegal immigrants generally, but also produced an uptick in human trafficking across our border.... 

Human trafficking organizations are not just evil; they’re also often smart. Many quickly learned the “magic words” they needed to say under catch-and-release to guarantee admission into the U.S. Because of this, some of the folks showing up at the border claiming to be families are not actually families. Some are a trafficker with one or more trafficked children. Sometimes border agents can identify this, but many times they aren’t sure. 

Any policy that incentivizes illegal immigration is terrible governance. But even more troubling is that catch-and-release rewarded traffickers, who knew they could easily get their victims to market in the U.S.

Incidentally, "Ben Sasse takes a more circuitous route to arrive at the same place as Tom Cotton" basically describes the Republican Party dynamic on every noteworthy case of Trump administration extremism.

Anyway, first thing to say about the trafficking talking point is that it's basically bogus: DHS statistics indicate that 0.61% of family apprehensions at the border are even alleged to be cases where smugglers have falsely presented a trafficking victim as a family member.

But let's take the tiny minority of trafficking cases at face value. Those kids whom Collins and Cotton and Sasse are so concerned about? They're the ones the Trump administration is putting in cages. One might forget that the immigrant children are supposedly the victims in the GOP story, given how every Republican solution centers around keeping them incarcerated until they can be sent back to their countries of origin (where, remember, they were by stipulation abducted and smuggled across international borders -- so not a great place for them). Much like Syrian children, immigrant children (whether victims of traffickers or not) are good enough for Republicans to imprison, but not good enough to rescue.

It's no accident that the more honest voices of the Trump movement -- the Ann Coulters of the world -- are perfectly explicit in stating that the children are just as much of the enemy as their supposed "traffickers". Nothing the Republican Party has done over the past several years has been remotely consistent with the idea that they actual view immigrant children as valuable human beings whom we have an obligation to treat with respect. The priority is ensuring -- at any cost -- that they do not have the opportunity to build a dignified life for themselves in America. If that means ripping them from their parent's arms, so be it. If they means permanently destroying families, so be it. If that means sending them back to countries where they'll be executed by paramilitary gangs, so be it.

Republicans care a lot about immigrant children. It's a shame that all that care and concern goes mostly into destroying their lives.

What's The Point of That Woman?

I understand why Tom Coburn wants to be in Congress.

Ditto Marsha Blackburn or Marco Rubio or Deb Fischer or even Steve King. These people have policy priorities and political changes they wish to accomplish -- ones I disagree with, to be sure, but they have them -- and being in Congress is a solid mechanism to turn their dreams (also known as my nightmares) into reality.

But I do not really understand why Susan Collins has any desire to be in the Senate. What motivates her? What causes her to get up in the morning? What exactly is she hoping to accomplish?

I don't think she really harbors any deep desire to put our tax code through a wood-chipper to benefit the ultra-wealthy while decimating students and the working-class. Were she running the show, there's no way she'd produce a tax plan even remotely similar to the one that she just voted for. At the same time, she obviously doesn't have any interest in actually voting against her Republican colleagues more than once in a blue moon, or putting up more than token resistance to policies she'd never draft were she the one in charge. She's the epitome of a moderate Republican: someone who talks about voting against Republican proposals before voting for Republican proposals.

So what's the point? Why does she bother?

I mean that honestly. I have no idea what motivates Susan Collins. I do not understand what drives her. She appears to exist in order to roll over.

Why would one want to live that life? It's baffling to me.

The Independent Republican Conference

The Independent Democratic Conference is a group of six renegade Democrats who effectively let the GOP control the New York State Senate, despite its nominal Democratic majority.

I do not expect there to be an Independent Republican Conference in the U.S. Senate. It will be a 52-48 Republican majority (barring something truly shocking in Louisiana's runoff) -- a two-seat Democratic gain (pickups in Illinois and New Hampshire).

But what is plausible -- maybe -- is that a cohort of Senate Republicans might be willing to break from the past eight years policy of absolute, resolute, kneejerk party line voting and join with Democrats to insure there will be some actual oversight of the Trump administration.

Who are the likely candidates to take up that mantle?

The leader almost certainly would have to be Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE). He was one of the earliest, most consistent, and most outspoken critics of Trump from within the GOP (here's his column on Trump's victory, tealeaf it yourself). That's one -- not because it's guaranteed, but because if he doesn't take the lead I can't imagine any caucus forming. Who else?

The supposedly moderate Susan Collins (ME) is an obvious possibility, but she's never exactly been renowned for her backbone. It'd be a major change for her to start bucking her party on a regular basis. But if ever there was a time for her to grow an actual spine, it'd be now.

Lindsey Graham (SC) could be a possibility. He's likewise been pretty critical of Trump, and has some personal grudges against Trump's wing of the party. His colleague Tim Scott (SC), as the only Black Republican in the Senate, is a complete wild card on this -- I wouldn't normally slot him in unless Trump goes so avowedly White supremacist that he can't not say something.

John McCain (AZ) ... well, who knows what he's thinking these days. I don't have a lot of faith. Jeff Flake might actually be a more realistic shot from this rapidly purpling state.

Marco Rubio (FL) and Ted Cruz (TX)? Don't make me laugh. Both have raced to snuggle up to Trump after getting blown apart by him in the primaries.

Chuck Grassley (IA), Orrin Hatch (UT), and maybe Pat Roberts (KS) might be old enough to do the whole "elder statesmen" thing. None of them will suffer any repercussions if they don't, though.

Dean Heller (NV) might look at Joe Heck's defeat and feel the need to avoid a similar fate. Or he might think that Heck was undone by his late wince away from Trump.

The Democratic Party is in a routed state right now. It will recover, but it will take time. In the meantime, it'll be up to congressional Republicans to decide if they want to put brakes on Trump or let him run wild. Democrats are, for the short-term at least, out of the equation: the last eight years have shown that a unified Republican majority can completely, utterly, entirely shut out the Democratic minority if they want to.

The ball is in your court, Sasse.