"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 president pledged to
preserve the unsustainable status Ryan and many other Republicans have become
the president’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 president. 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. . . . "
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