Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy
along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of
misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before
elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents
and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting
cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle
by which they should vote.
The principle: The
congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So
substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be
stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers.
They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to
achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have
atrophied because of people like them.
Consider
the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered
his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to
have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of
mendacities, without being degraded. In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for
All Seasons,” Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for
his life. When Richard Rich, whom More had once mentored, commits
perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for
Wales, More says: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his
soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!” Ryan traded his political
soul for . . . a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the
accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the
service of a resident pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.
Ryan
and many other Republicans have become the resident’s poodles, not
because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject
careerists have failed to be worthy of it. As explained in Federalist 51:
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man
must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”
Congressional Republicans (congressional Democrats are equally supine
toward Democratic presidents) have no higher ambition than to placate
this president. By leaving dormant the powers inherent in their
institution, they vitiate the Constitution’s vital principle: the
separation of powers.
Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring , became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure
by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking
power that it has, over many decades and under both parties,
improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of
sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices. Corker’s
measure would have required Congress to vote to approve any trade
restrictions imposed in the name of “national security.” All Senate
Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans
flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance
and true to the Constitution’s structure. But the Senate would not vote
on it — would not allow it to become just the second amendment voted on this year .
This
is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved resident.
The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by
unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually
legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican
control.
The
Trump whisperer regarding immigration is Stephen Miller, 32, whose
ascent to eminence began when he became the Savonarola of Santa Monica High School .
Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign official who fell from the king’s
grace but is crawling back (he works for Vice President Pence’s
political action committee), recently responded on Fox News
to the story of a 10 year old girl with Down syndrome taken from her
parents at the border. Lewandowski replied: “Wah, wah.”
Meaningless
noise is this administration’s appropriate libretto because, just as a
magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to,
louts.
In today’s GOP, which is the resident’s plaything, he is
the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional
caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. A
Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but
there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery,
keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control
and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who
say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.
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