USA TODAY International Edition
Trump leads Senate to suicide
My 40- year love for institution is dead
Those of us in the academic world are privileged to devote our lives to studying the things we love. Anthropologists love the bones they unearth in prehistoric settlements, scholars of English literature dote on Shakespeare, and medical researchers even come to admire the pathogens they examine under their microscopes.
In my case, I have had a 40- year love affair with the U. S. Senate. But the Senate has let me down, and I feel like a jilted lover, because it has chosen to reject evidence of wrongdoing on the part of a president whose abuse of power the Founders created the Senate to counteract.
My first date with the Senate was in 1976, and I was immediately smitten by its intimacy and quirkiness. You could get lost in the vastness of the House of Representatives, but in the Senate, individual personalities stood out. What also stood out was pride of ownership, the sense that all senators felt that they owned a 1% share in a valuable property and were eternally vigilant to protect the power it represented against claimjumpers from the other two branches of the federal government.
In the intimacy of the Senate, there was no place to hide. Attacks on colleagues in the heat of moment were rare, but when they did happen, efforts were quickly made to repair the damage. Senators could be stuffy and selfimportant, and many were correctly suspected of acting out of presidential ambitions, but seniority was respected and newcomers often sought out veteran members for advice, often across party lines.
Now, freshmen to the chamber routinely insult veteran members, as when Ted Cruz called Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar in 2015, or more recently, when newcomer Kelly Loeffler assailed fellow Republican Mitt Romney for insufficient loyalty to President Donald Trump.
Manhandled by executive branch
There have been times, of course, when the Senate would yield to White House dominance, such as during wartime when the powers inherent in the role of commander in chief would have to be acknowledged, but there was always pushback when the Senate thought it was being manhandled by the executive branch. No self- respecting senator would want to be known as a stooge for a president.
Now, fear of intervention by Trump into their reelection campaigns has made Republican senators not just supporters of the president but rather accomplices in his aggressive assertion of executive privilege and in the diminution of their own power.
In my interviews over the years with senators of both parties, I have detected in them a range of emotions from humble gratitude for the honor of serving in the Senate to lofty conceit at occupying one of the highest stations in American political life. What no one ever expressed to me was a feeling of powerlessness of the kind I read in recent comments — not by Democrats in the minority, but by Republicans like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski: “I have come to the conclusion that there will be no fair trial in the Senate. ... It is sad for me to admit that, as an institution, the Congress has failed.”
And departing Lamar Alexander lamely advised the Senate to take a pass on the tough question of calling witnesses and introducing documents and hand off the decision on Trump’s fate to the voters in 2020.
The whited sepulcher
It is as if these senators thought themselves unworthy of removing a president despite their constitutional remit to do so if the evidence warranted it. But, then again, new evidence was barred from the Senate trial.
What we are witnessing is a Senate in the act of institutional suicide.
One of the foundational elements of the grand design of separation of powers and checks and balances may retain its outward appearance and composition, but it will be as the whited sepulcher in the Gospel of Matthew: a brilliant facade that conceals the decomposition within.