After Donald Trump was found guilty in his first criminal trial last week, a group of eight Republican senators decided to fight back by throwing a tantrum.
So far, that tantrum, The New York Times reports, has done a whole lot of nothing.
In an open letter addressed to no one, the senators threatened to obstruct the White House agenda by refusing to vote for certain Democratic legislation or judicial appointees—something, the Times notes, the signatories to the letter were already doing.
It’s a protest that even some of their fellow Republican senators realize is pretty dumb.
“If you have a handful of people who vote no all the time, then the threat to vote no really doesn’t come with a lot of leverage,” said North Dakota’s Kevin Cramer, not exactly a squishy moderate.
You don’t say!
To further emphasize the emptiness of the threats—which another four Republicans have signed on to since last week, including Kentucky’s Rand Paul, whom the Times describes as “an extremely reliable anti-Democratic vote”—the Times also notes that some of the signatories aren’t following through with their own threats of obstruction. Roger Marshall of Kansas voted for a nominee to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week, and Missouri’s Josh Hawley said he’d continue to push—and presumably vote for—legislation he happens to like.
But other than those exceptions they’re already granting themselves, they are absolutely going to teach President Joe Biden a lesson for, as they say in their protest letter, making “a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways.” And how, again, did the White House do that? Oh yeah. By having absolutely nothing to do with the 12 New York jurors who decided Trump sure did break the law.
Of course the tantrum-throwing senators don’t have any specific demands for the White House. So what they’re expecting to achieve with this threat of continued obstruction is unclear. And not the way the Senate is supposed to work, according to another not-exactly-squishy-moderate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“The solution is to have a Republican majority,” McConnell said. “There are opportunities when you’re in the minority, but not to set the agenda.”
How a Republican majority in the Senate would be a solution to the complaints of his colleagues that it’s just really unfair Trump was convicted by a New York jury is also unclear. What does seem clear is that McConnell is rolling his eyes at the absurdity of the protest and thinks these yahoos are wasting their time. Which of course they are.
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