Senate GOP shows hints of a spine

Or is it just a vertebrae?

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All is definitely not well in the Senate Republican caucus. As a rule, Republicans in Congress have not done anywhere near enough to push back against Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda. They’ve stayed mostly quiet while he flouts the rule of law, cooperated with him to slash the social safety net, and even failed to find their voice when he tramples all over Congressional prerogatives.

Yet at the same time, Senate Republicans are not doing everything that the Trump regime wants. And while it’s certainly not time to herald some sort of decisive split between the White House and Congress, it is worth noticing the places that the cracks are emerging.

Over the past few weeks, Senate Republicans have shot down two regime nominees who needed their confirmation. The first was E.J. Antoni, the Heritage Foundation economist who Trump wanted to make head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (I wrote about Antoni in an earlier post). The second was Paul Ingrassia, who Trump had nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel, an agency whose most high-profile duty is overseeing whistleblower complaints from within the federal bureaucracy.

Why did the Senate shoot these two nominees down, and what does it tell us about the politics of the Trump era?

Let’s start with Ingrassia. Earlier this week, Politico published a series of leaked chat messages in which Ingrassia said he had a “Hitler streak”, used racial slurs, and said “never trust a chinaman or Indian” (“NEVER” he added for emphasis).

After Politico’s article, Ingrassia’s withdrawal might seem straightforward. But it’s not like overt racism is necessarily a barrier to serving in a high position in the Trump regime. For instance, Daren Beattie, the head of the U.S. Institute of Peace, has said that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work”. And don’t forget that the president’s senior domestic policy advisor is a white nationalist.¹

So why did Senate Republicans draw a line here? It can’t have helped Ingrassia that the GOP is already embroiled in a Nazism scandal after the separate leaking of a bunch of texts from the Young Republicans. The message is that at least some Senate Republicans realize the danger to their party’s brand from being associated with the racism of the far right.

And they’re probably onto something. Even as polls show that Americans favor a hard line on immigration, the difference between that and identifying with the Nazis is huge. The far right now makes up a key part of the Republican coalition, and the party’s leader welcomes them. That’s a political liability going forward.

But another way of looking at this is that the Senate has already confirmed plenty of other political liabilities, and it has done so into much more high-profile positions. It’s too early to say whether, as political gears begin to shift into midterms mode, Republican senators are going to start changing their priorities. But Ingrassia’s fate suggests this might be the case - and that if more Republicans aren’t worried about their party’s association with toxic racism, they should be.

Antoni’s case is more straightforward, but also notable. His nomination split two important parts of the Republican coalition - business interests and MAGA nationalists. The Bureau of Labor Statistics plays a vital role in the economy because it provides the best-quality data on its current state. But however important objective data is for businesses, MAGA nationalists don’t like it because data showing the economy performing poorly undermines their view that Donald Trump is a God-King who can do no wrong. As I wrote in a previous post, Antoni was a MAGA nationalist pretending to be an economist, and so business opposed him and MAGA loved him.

The fact that the Senate sided with business is another small sign that they’re not going to go along with everything that Trump wants. Unfortunately, the optimism that can be derived from this is fairly minimal. Very few of the consequential issues of the Trump era break down on business vs. MAGA lines for the simple reason that the business community has not yet come to recognize that Trump’s authoritarianism is ultimately going to become a business problem.

But it is. Economic growth ultimately relies on political stability, the rule of law, and professionally run institutions. If Trump’s attempt to take the United States down the road to dictatorship proceeds far enough to begin shaking the foundations of the economy, perhaps we will be able to look to Senate Republicans to finally grow a spine. For now, they remain far too timid on almost every issue, even as the occasional exception is revealing.

1. Neither of these positions require Senate confirmation. Interestingly, Beattie was originally lined up for a senior State Department post which did require it, and was moved to the Institute of Peace after media drew attention to his remarks - perhaps because he didn’t have the votes in the Senate.