The 59-41 Senate vote Thursday to reject Donald Trump’s national emergency power grab yielded two seemingly conflicting revelations. First, Trump is losing some control over his party, with fully a dozen GOP Senators defecting on the vote. To be clear, that's a total embarrassment—even though Trump doesn't have the emotional intelligence to actually feel embarrassment. Second, despite those 12 defections, 41 GOP senators just sold their Article I responsibilities down the river. In other words, having them in office is useless because they're nothing more than a rubber stamp for Trump, full stop, even when he's usurping powers that have been constitutionally bestowed on Congress.
As the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin noted, "If Trump told them to amend the Constitution and toss out the Bill of Rights, they’d likely do it. After all, Article I means nothing to them, so why should any other portion of the Constitution?"
Of course, of those 41 Republicans, several deserve extra derision for going above and beyond to sell their souls to a man that fully two-thirds of voters think is a criminal. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who authored an op-ed explaining in detail why he would vote against Trump, ultimately found the idea of standing on principle and inviting a primary challenge just too harrowing. So instead, he abandoned his oath of office and curled up into a fetal position—it wouldn't be surprising to find him sucking his thumb somewhere in Tar Heel country right now. Other Republican senators who got beaten into submission by the prospect of tough 2020 re-elections include Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Martha McSally of Arizona. Their votes may insulate them from a primary, but all four of them just forfeited any claim in the general election that they will serve as a check on Trump. No. They. Won't.
Oh, and then there are the three bozos who went to the White House the night before the vote to stage a late-night intervention, got completely rebuffed by Trump, and then voted with him anyway. Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Ted Cruz of Texas reportedly interrupted Trump and Melania's dinner (gasp) to make a case for rewriting the national emergency order so it wouldn't steal money from any military projects. Here's what happened next, per the New York Times.
Mr. Trump summoned a lawyer from the White House Counsel’s Office, who said the plan would strip the president of powers he currently possesses. “No way,” an annoyed Mr. Trump told the trio.
Yeah, Trump sent them packing, and on the way back to Capitol Hill they likely congratulated themselves on giving it the ol' college try, and then just got back to the business of buckling under to Trump's every command. Thanks for nothin’, fellas.
Apparently, Republicans hadn't quite gotten the memo from Trump's national emergency power grab that he'll never yield a single iota of his executive authority. Somehow that wasn’t already clear after Trump defied Congress on the heels of a record-long government shutdown fight in which he got destroyed. So just to drive home the point, Trump rejected Utah Sen. Mike Lee's effort to give him one last bite at the national emergency apple while foreclosing it to all future presidents—particularly the Democratic ones. Lee had floated that legislative fig leaf so GOP senators could vote with Trump while also claiming they were taking some sort of stand against executive overreach. Vice President Mike Pence also endorsed the gambit, but Trump wasn't gonna give up jack sh*t.
Mr. Trump called Mr. Lee in the middle of a Republican policy lunch to tell him that he would not support the measure. Mr. Lee, who announced the president’s verdict to gasps from his colleagues, then declared his support for the resolution of disapproval.
Gasps! Are you effing kidding me? What rock are these people living under? At least Lee had the integrity to vote against Trump. The vast majority of Republican senators just clutched their pearls and then voted away their constitutional powers anyway. It doesn't get more useless than that.