Capitol Hill's Republican Sycophant Caucus
In “Free Expression”, Gerard Baker the Journal’s Editor at Large, offers a forthright and colorful take on the big political, economic and cultural issues shaping America and the world. The column appears weekly on Tuesdays.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
'I don't mind what Trump does, because I trust Trump."
Thus spoke Sen. Lindsey Graham last week, cheerfully declaring the unconditional surrender of not only his own judgment, his freedom of thought, his relevance and his dignity, but -- and this one actually matters -- his role as a leading member of one of the elected branches of the U.S. government.
The submissive senator was responding on Fox News last week to a report that President Trump had started negotiations with Hamas, the terrorist organization whose destruction Mr. Graham had recently called "nonnegotiable."
Flustered for a moment by this latest sudden turn from the White House, Mr. Graham quickly recovered and gave that neatly laconic affirmation of his self-extinction and his superfluity as a thinker and policymaker. You were left wondering how he might have responded if he had been told that Mr. Trump had just signed an executive order exiling him to Siberia, confiscating his personal property and burning his house to the ground.
I pick on the gentleman from South Carolina only because he is the most ubiquitous and performative of the class of sometime self-sovereign senators turned servile sycophants who are supposed to be making our laws. He isn't alone.
As the president ventures further down a "diplomatic" track that punishes and alienates for no good reason our closest neighbor and ally, that rewards the tyranny of a murderous and implacable foe of America, that nods approvingly as the dictator of that country carries out the rape of a free nation, that casually slashes at the bonds of alliance that have served this country well and enhanced its global power and standing for decades, my question is: When is someone going to say something?
By someone, I mean a member of the world's greatest deliberative body -- and maybe its junior partner across Capitol Hill too.
To be sure, a small number of souls have spoken out. But the rhetorical question stands because I know, as well as you do, reader, that the vast majority of Republican senators, and some representatives, if they were sequestered in a locked room and given a truth serum, would say that the president's pursuit of a ruinous and incoherent trade policy assault on Canada, backed by the manic threat of forced annexation, the punishment handed out to Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine, the expressions of solidarity with Vladimir Putin and Russia, and the apparent determination to emasculate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and casually dismiss the security pact with Japan are mad, bad and dangerous acts of national self-harm.
Let me stipulate: Mr. Trump is the duly elected president, equipped with a popular mandate and with considerable leeway to do as he thinks right in the exercise of his executive responsibilities -- especially in foreign policy. He told us he was going to do many of these things (though not all). Them's the breaks. Have at it.
But there is nothing in the Constitution or the conventions of democratic politics that requires that the members of the coequal elected branch of government be constrained from offering even the slightest hint of critical advice or withholding consent when they see a president nonchalantly pouring gasoline on our national security and international economic relationships and dancing around them with a lighted match.
Some might have hoped that the president's top foreign-policy advisers -- with their own solid national-security credentials -- might have exercised some influence. But that was always improbable.
Take Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He gave up a Senate seat, with at least a notional independence, so now he owes Mr. Trump everything. If reports are correct, he seems to have discovered that his assigned role is to reduce the office once occupied by Thomas Jefferson, William Seward and Henry Kissinger to that of a kind of glorified FedEx guy, jumping on a plane to deliver the boss's thoughts to designated addresses around the world. Still, at least we are told he now has a say in which of his employees get fired by Elon Musk.
But senators and congressmen have a constitutional function too if they would exercise it.
I have no doubt that Mr. Trump thinks his ultimate foreign-policy objectives are the right ones. Bringing jobs back to America is a good goal. He's right that old alliances need to be rebalanced and reworked. He may even be right that the imperative of bringing peace to Europe is so great it is worth tolerating some intolerable reward for an aggressor and pain for his victim (though he does need to be reminded in this case which is which).
But those ends don't justify these means: tearing up a trade agreement he himself negotiated with Mexico and Canada, cutting assistance so Ukraine is exposed to a Russian slaughter he says "anybody would do" in the circumstances, having his vice president gratuitously insult allies who have bled and died in America's wars.
I know why so many lawmakers sit by and watch as the arson unfolds: fear for their jobs. I am sure they rationalize their complaisance by thinking their political future is indispensable to the nation. But there must be more who harbor a deeper fear: of what history will make of them if they don't speak up now about the wanton vandalism to the country they were elected to protect.
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Good example of how wrong things have gone.
I suppose now the MAGA will call the WSJ author a RINO, or maybe even a traitor.
I've always heard that the USA does not negotiate with terrorists. When did that change?
when Trump decided he wanted it to