Though it barely made a ripple of news, yesterday the Senate Armed Services Committee did an astounding thing. By voice vote, the committee adopted an amendment requiring the Defense Department to rename military assets named after Confederate generals within the next three years.
Even more surprising: The Republican-led committee adopted an amendment offered by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. If you want evidence of just how much pressure the nationwide protests have put on Washington, D.C. to take concrete action, you won't find a much better example than a panel of terrified Trump-allied Republican senators following the lead of a recent Democratic presidential candidate to adopt a position directly opposed to that of their tantrum-ing manchild.
The Defense Department itself has signaled a willingness to strip Confederate names from bases if it were done in a "bipartisan discussion." That, too, is a position at direct odds with Donald Trump, who continues to insist that the bases will be renamed over his dead tweet-fingers. Or, at least, over a presidential veto.
Renaming military bases is not the point of the protests, and renaming military bases would not by itself do anything to lessen the widespread police brutality America has now witnessed even at the protests themselves. And it's quite possible that the provision will be stripped back out of the bill by the full Republican Senate once they've had a taste of whatever tantrum the nation's top white nationalist next dishes out.
But this isn't a discussion that anyone thought the Senate would be seriously considering even a few weeks ago, and it is a signal of the raw power of these continued protests. Even Trump's most loyal enablers know they cannot blindly follow Trump on this one.