| This is not a phenomenon that you can blame entirely on Trump, or even the Trump era. The GOP’s interest in policymaking has been eroding for some while now. In the 2012 presidential election, their nominee, Mitt Romney, was famously made to abjure the very accomplishment that catapulted him into the presidential ranks: the Massachusetts health care reform law he enacted during an era when Republicans actually worked to co-opt liberal issues and outcompete Democrats on policy. You don’t have to be too old to recall when our current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, participated in the Gang of 8 bipartisan immigration reform squad—even serving as the point man to defend the work on right-wing talk radio. He ran for president in 2016, and we all know what happened then. Congress as a whole has been weakened by a host of malignancies in recent years. The rise of unitary executive theory during the presidency of George W. Bush paved the way for expanded executive branch powers that his successor, Barack Obama, took no real interest in unwinding. Around the same time, Congress ceded its constitutional duties by giving the executive branch blank checks in the form of Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, which allowed lawmakers to take a passive role in the ongoing "global war on terror"—crediting themselves when things were going well, while castigating the president when they weren’t. Meanwhile, the conservative legal movement was executing a decades-long plan to transform the Supreme Court into a kind of super-legislature with a line-item veto on the future, a project that came to fruition under Trump’s first term. While Trump had a hand in shaping the GOP during his first term, the Republicans’ withdrawal from traditional governance only became more pronounced after Trump left office. As TNR contributor Katelyn Burns noted, after 45 Republican senators declared the impeachment of Trump for January 6 to be unconstitutional, the GOP was "in full retreat from meaningful policymaking of any kind, instead charting a course away from taking on the challenges of the moment in favor of further entrenching itself in the distant patriarchal mythology of America’s past, where the only thing left for conservative lawmakers to do is to fend off the liberal cultural forces that would deny this return to a gauzy, MAGA fantasia." Again this took little urging from Trump, who was out of Washington beginning a long sequestration at Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds and stash boxes of classified materials in the lavatory. The Republican Party’s journey to self-abnegation continued apace. As one adviser to Ohio Senator Rob Portman put it in an interview with the National Journal, "If you want to spend all your time going on Fox and be[ing] an asshole, there’s never been a better time to serve. But if you want to spend all your time being thoughtful and getting shit done, there’s never been a worse time to serve." Now that the second Trump era has kicked off, we can see that the self-diminishment of the GOP’s Washington lawmakers have hit an apex. Much of what Trump is doing is a full-frontal assault on the separation of powers: Elon Musk has been turned loose without any nod toward advice and consent; Musk in turn is attempting to shut down whole government agencies, a task that can only be legally obtained by an act of Congress. The Republican majority is contributing to this effort mainly by allowing themselves to be trampled. And they’re refusing even to defend the paramount purposes of their own institution: As Trump and Musk have usurped the power of the purse explicitly granted to legislators by the Constitution, Republican lawmakers have stood by and let the plunder happen. Naturally, the path of true subservience to Trump never does run smooth: This week, we’ve been treated to the sorry spectacle of Republican lawmakers begging Trump to turn the money spigot back on for their constituents. Obviously, Republicans in Congress still have some consequential duties to perform, none of which they do particularly well. The Senate confirmation process is effectively a sham; aside from some genuine deviance from Mitch McConnell, only Susan Collins seems to remember that it’s necessary to pretend to do due diligence before rubber-stamping Trump’s appointees into office. And lawmakers will still need to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling, neither of which they seem capable of pulling off without Democratic help. But a whole new conception of what it means to be a Republican congressperson, and what they will be expected to do, has finally taken shape. Gone are the Camps and Romneys, the diligent wonks and the rangy strategists. Here now are the little Javerts, running star chamber investigations in newly weaponized committees, alongside an army of what are essentially internet trolls, producing content for an increasingly low-minded media economy. If you want to imagine the future, think of South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace, shrieking "Tranny! Tranny! Tranny!" on the floor of the House, while hatching newer and more confusing performance art stunts. Democrats will, unfortunately, have to adapt to the rules of this new arena rather than pretend the old, regular order of Capitol Hill still exists. But it’s the party that’s locked out of governance that can make the case for governing if they choose to accept the challenge. That requires an aggressive, attack-minded media strategy dedicated to relentlessly hanging every malady of Trump’s second term around the necks of Republicans. It also requires getting attention—so less white-papers-on-websites and op-eds in the Journal, and more cheap shots and crass jokes. The GOP has essentially gone all in on a content creation war; to return to a more high-minded era, Democrats will have to win it decisively. Because while Republican lawmakers have, by their own actions, nearly disappeared—they’re not yet gone enough. |
