It Would Only Take a Single Senator
(Atlantic Monthly Article)
With Republicans clinging to a precarious 50–49 majority, every individual GOP senator can serve as a check on Trump’s excesses whenever they choose to act.
(Snip) This means that just one Republican senator joining the Democrats and independents would give them 50 votes, against only 49 Republicans, until McCain’s successor is sworn in. And even after that, a total of two Republican senators would have it in their power to create a 51-vote majority and impose limits on an executive they know to be out of control.
Who might those two senators theoretically be? A list I offered early this year still applies:
Two like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker who are not running for re-election and have no primary-challenge consequences to fear;
Two like Orrin Hatch and John McCain who mainly have their places in history to think about (written before his passing)
Two like the young Ben Sasse and the veteran Lamar Alexander who pride themselves on being “thoughtful”;
Two like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski who pride themselves on being “independent”;
Two like Rand Paul and Mike Lee who pride themselves on their own kind of independence;
Two like Rob Portman and John Barrasso who pride themselves on being decent;
Two like Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton with conceivable long-term higher-office hopes;
Two like Tim Scott and James Lankford who jointly wrote a statement on the need for broad-minded inclusion;
Two like Chuck Grassley and Richard Shelby, who like Hatch and McCain are in their 80s and conceivably have “legacy” on their minds (remember that in the Alabama Senate race Shelby took a stand against his party’s odious nominee, Roy Moore);
One like Dean Heller, facing a tough re-election race, plus maybe Lindsey Graham, who used to be among the leaders in blunt talk about Trump’s excesses.
That’s 20 senators total. The current GOP majority includes 31 more, most of whom are even stauncher party-line voters than those listed above and thus would give rise to sarcastic “Oh, sure!” eye-roll reactions at the mere idea of their breaking ranks.
But remember: Every one of them swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, not simply their own careerist comfort. And not a one of them, yet, has been willing to risk comfort, career, or fund-raising to defend the constitutional check-and-balance prerogatives of their legislative branch.
They now confront a president who has been named in a felony guilty plea as having directed criminal activities. (It didn’t get this far or this crystal-clear with Richard Nixon.) Read more...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/senate-inaction/568606/?utm_term=2018-08-27T10%3A00%3A33&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=edit-promo
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