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Tag: Republican leadership

  • President Trump calls for end of Senate filibuster to break funding stalemate

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    President Donald Trump on Thursday urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the government shutdown by eliminating the filibuster — an unprecedented step that GOP leaders have opposed taking until now.”It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.Senate Republicans have so far ruled out changing the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold needed for passing legislation, arguing that it would ultimately benefit Democrats the next time they retake power.But Trump, in his post, brushed off that concern, contending that Republicans should take advantage of the opportunity first.”Now I want to do it in order to take advantage of the Democrats,” Trump wrote.

    President Donald Trump on Thursday urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the government shutdown by eliminating the filibuster — an unprecedented step that GOP leaders have opposed taking until now.

    “It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

    Senate Republicans have so far ruled out changing the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold needed for passing legislation, arguing that it would ultimately benefit Democrats the next time they retake power.

    But Trump, in his post, brushed off that concern, contending that Republicans should take advantage of the opportunity first.

    “Now I want to do it in order to take advantage of the Democrats,” Trump wrote.

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  • The Validation Brigade Salutes Trump

    The Validation Brigade Salutes Trump

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    Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

    Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, officially endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection two Saturdays ago. The news landed as an afterthought, which is probably how she intended it. “Today at the @WVGOP Winter Meeting Lunch, I announced my support for President Donald Trump,” Capito wrote on X, as if she were making a dutiful entry in a diary.

    Republicans have reached the point in their primary season, even earlier than expected, when the party’s putative leaders line up to reaffirm their allegiance to Trump. Several of Capito’s Senate colleagues joined the validation brigade around the same time: the GOP’s second- and third-ranking members, John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming, along with Trump’s long-ago rivals Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. None of their endorsements caused much of a ripple. Perhaps some mischief-maker surfaced the old video of Cruz calling Trump “a sniveling coward” in 2016 or Rubio calling him “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency.” But for the most part, the numbing shows of conformity felt inevitable, just as Trump’s third straight presidential nomination now appears to be.

    The GOP once prided itself on being an alliance of free-thinking frontiersmen who embraced rugged individualism, a term popularized by Republican President Herbert Hoover. This is no longer that time. Full acquiescence to Trump is now the most essential Republican “ethic,” such as it is, or at least the chief prerequisite to viability in the party. This near-total submission to the former boss has persisted no matter how egregious his actions are or how plainly he states his authoritarian goals.

    David A. Graham: The GOP completes its surrender

    Yet the Republican Party now appears to have entered a new level of capitulation to Trump: a kind of ho-hum acceptance phase, where slavish devotion has become almost mundane, like joining a grocery line. There’s a certain power in bland and seemingly harmless gestures from people who know better. Permission structures strengthen over time. Complicity calcifies in obscurity.

    It’s natural to focus on the more blatant markers of Trump’s domination and his facilitators’ dereliction. You can scoff at the clownish stunts of sycophancy shown by the Ramaswamy-Scott-Stefanik wing of the hippodrome. Or marvel at the prevailing silence that greeted Trump’s vow to suspend the Constitution or the legal finding that he was liable for sexual abuse. Or be amazed by the swiftness with which Republican lawmakers reversed course this week on a bipartisan border bill, which many of them had demanded, simply because Trump insisted it die.

    In a sense, though, the innocuous statements from the periphery, such as Capito’s post, are more stupefying.

    Capito, 70, served seven terms in the House before being elected to the Senate in 2014. She has earned a reputation as a serious, relatively moderate lawmaker, and has forged a host of bipartisan alliances. She is the fifth-ranked senator in Republican leadership and is the ranking member on the Senate environment committee.

    The daughter of a three-term governor of West Virginia, Capito was born into the status of “Republican in good standing,” something she has worked throughout her long career to maintain. This also makes her a classic “Republican who knows better.”

    Like many of her GOP colleagues, Capito has expressed serious unease with Trump in the past. She said she “felt violated as an American” by the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters, which she called an “incredibly traumatic” experience. She voted against convicting Trump in the Senate impeachment trial over the riot but made a point of saying it was only because he was not in office anymore (“My ‘no’ vote today is based solely on this constitutional belief”). In general, Capito deemed Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election to be “disgraceful” and declared in a statement that “history will judge him harshly.”

    Capito, it turns out, would not.

    Read: Why Republican politicians do whatever Trump says

    Although she did not expect Trump to be the Republican nominee again—“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said in October 2021—Capito is now fully on board with his restoration. Her endorsement on January 27 carried an almost nostalgic longing for Trump’s time in the White House. “Our economy thrived, our nation was secure, and we worked to address the challenges at our border,” she wrote. Sure, Trump wasn’t perfect, but what’s a little violation, trauma, or national disgrace? Apparently it still beats the alternative, Nikki Haley.

    Capito’s office declined a request for comment.

    This is not meant to single out Shelley Moore Capito for special cowardice or delinquency. Okay, maybe it is meant to single her out a little, but mostly as an object lesson in the insidious complicity of going along merely by adding one’s name to a stockpile. (Trump had yet to receive a single endorsement from a Senate Republican at this point in the campaign eight years ago: Jeff Sessions of Alabama became the first, on February 28, 2016.)

    Capito illustrates the power of the random. She could be any number of Republican officeholders. When he quit the presidential race last month, Chris Christie mentioned some others. “Look at what’s happening just in the last few days,” Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said in his exit speech, taking note of high-level elected Republicans who were falling into line. He singled out Barrasso and House Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota.

    Barrasso and Emmer are “good people who got into politics, I believe, for the right reasons,” Christie said in his speech. They are both well-mannered institutionalists who have been flayed by the former president in the past: Trump dismissed Barrasso as Mitch McConnell’s “flunky” and “rubber stamp,” and torpedoed Emmer’s bid to replace Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, deriding him as a “Globalist RINO.” Barrasso and Emmer would probably rather their party moved on from Trump.

    And yet, they endorsed him. “They know better,” Christie said. “I know they know better.” From direct experience, in Christie’s case: He endorsed Trump in 2016 for what he now admits were purely political reasons. He then embarked on a long and at times debasing stint as one of Trump’s chief political butlers during his presidency.

    Read: The most pathetic men in America

    In his speech last month, Christie said his biggest frustration with the GOP primary was that so many Republican officials and candidates complain privately about Trump yet remain loath to condemn him in public. (Of course, many Democrats engage in a similar dance about President Joe Biden and his age, expressing fulsome delight in public that he’s running for reelection at 81—he has the energy of a 35-year-old!—while moaning endlessly in private about how old he seems.)

    Shared tolerance for conduct like Trump’s tends to build over time. “People are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope),” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which was quoted by my colleague Anne Applebaum in her 2020 Atlantic cover story, “History Will Judge the Complicit.”

    “What’s just astounding to me is that there are so few outliers,” Eric S. Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, told me. Edelman, a career foreign-service officer, is a friend of the Cheney family and a fervent critic of Trump.

    “I know that ambition in Washington is kind of a garden-variety sin, right?” Edelman said. Partisan considerations are inevitable, he added, “but by and large, the people I saw in Washington, whether I thought their policies were good or bad, on some level you expected them to be animated by what’s best for the nation.”

    Pioneers, by definition, are outliers. Republicans from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump were first viewed by their party as rogues or extremists. But the main driver for most politicians is almost always longevity, Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. “It’s to stay in the game for as long as you can, which is really the opposite of leadership,” said Sanford, who himself was an outlier—an anti-Trump Republican—which essentially cost him his job in Congress (he was defeated in a Republican primary in 2018). “Leadership is, I believe, This is my true north; I’m going to stand where I’m going to stand.”

    Edelman quoted a line attributed to Ted Cruz in 2016, after Trump had defeated him in a bitter nomination fight, smearing the senator’s wife and father in the process. Cruz famously refused to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention that year. “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” Cruz told friends, according to an account by my colleague Tim Alberta in his 2019 book, American Carnage.

    Cruz has since become a chief accessory to Trump in a party lousy with jacket-holders for the former president.

    I remember being in Cleveland on the night Cruz gave his mutinous convention speech. It was a stirring and gutsy performance, the first (and last) time I’d ever felt much admiration for him. The bloodlust in the hall was palpable as it became clear that he was not building to any endorsement. “Vote your conscience” was Cruz’s crescendo line, which aroused the loudest boos of the night. They lingered like a warning siren, and if Cruz ignored it at the time, he has heeded it ever since. Add him to the list.



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    Mark Leibovich

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  • The New Majority

    The New Majority

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    The last time Republicans won control of the House of Representatives with a Democrat in the White House, the two parties clashed so ferociously that Congress nearly crashed the economy with a first-ever debt default. But with the GOP’s majority-making victory, those bitterly partisan confrontations of the Obama era might seem like halcyon days compared with what’s to come.

    Republicans will assume control of the House in January, at a moment of deepening political turmoil. Trust between the parties is lower than it’s been in decades. A would-be assassin assaulted the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. A majority of the GOP’s House conference refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and party leaders have vowed to immediately disband the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol sacking that occurred just hours before that very vote. Republicans will launch their own investigations, into not only the actions of Biden’s administration but also the business and personal life of the president’s surviving son. Politically motivated impeachments of President Joe Biden and members of his Cabinet could be inevitable. “There are going to be fulsome investigations, and we will not take anything off the table,” Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the House’s third-ranking Republican, told me before the midterm elections.

    Read: How a GOP Congress could roll back freedoms nationwide

    Yet Republican leaders will be presiding over a majority sure to be far smaller than they were hoping for or expecting. When I spoke to Stefanik in the run-up to Election Day, she was confident bordering on cocky. “This is going to be a historic red wave, so buckle up, Russell,” she assured me. What transpired in last week’s election was instead barely a trickle. Stunning most pundits as well as Republicans, the race for the House majority was so tight, the vote-counting took a week to make clear the GOP’s slim victory. The Republican margin in the House could be so small as to make it nearly impossible for Kevin McCarthy, who is likely but not guaranteed to become speaker, to govern.

    Democrats, meanwhile, will have one last opportunity in the next six weeks to pass legislation, in a lame-duck session of Congress. After that, Biden’s progressive agenda is dead—at least for the next two years. Lacking a majority in the Senate, Republicans will have to strike deals with Biden and the Democrats just to keep the government running, let alone to make their mark on policy. Few lawmakers in either party have much hope for a grand bargain. McCarthy is more of a campaigner than a legislator, with little record of bipartisan dealmaking. He’ll have to corral a caucus that includes many Republicans who are far more loyal to former president Donald Trump than to him; some of them, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, began making demands for more power weeks before the election and are sure to reject any hint of compromise with a president they consider illegitimate. “Governance will be a challenge,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me. “Everything over the next two years will have to be a deal of some bipartisan agreement. Achieving those always creates some frustration on the two wings of the political spectrum, because you can’t have absolute victories.”

    Cole, a 20-year House veteran long allied with the Republican leadership, sounded a more optimistic note about the incoming majority. Compared with the Tea Party class of 2010, which helped the GOP capture the House during Barack Obama’s first term, he noted, this batch of newly elected Republicans is more diverse in terms of race, gender, and ideology. Many of them represent districts that Biden won, and more of them have previous legislative experience, which could lead to more pragmatism. “I would hope that we don’t fall into the trap that I would argue the Democrats fell into [under Trump] and turn ourselves into the impeachment caucus,” Cole said.

    That might all prove to be wishful thinking. Although Biden struck several significant bipartisan deals during his first two years, most of those were with Senate Republicans, and they passed over the objections of House GOP leaders, including McCarthy. Many House Republicans seem focused on investigating over legislating. The next two years will also play out against the backdrop of the 2024 presidential campaign, and now that Trump is running again, he will likely oppose any agreement that Republicans hammer out with the incumbent. Stefanik evinced little interest in bipartisanship when I spoke with her, insisting that Republicans would dictate the terms of the policy debate. “We’re going to pass good legislation and send it to the president’s desk, and he’s going to have to choose [if] you work with us or not,” she told me.

    The first major test for House Republicans may come over the same issue that defined their confrontations with Obama a decade ago: the debt ceiling. McCarthy and other Republicans have already said they will again try to use the required lifting of the nation’s borrowing limit as leverage to force fiscal restraint. Fearing the economic fallout from another round of brinkmanship, Democrats have begun talking about raising the debt ceiling—or eliminating it altogether—in the lame-duck session, before Republicans formally take power. The GOP would surely criticize Democrats for such a move, but many in the party might quietly accept it as a gift. “That,” Cole conceded, “would make it easier.”

    David A. Graham: The divided states of America

    As for what Republicans actually want to do with their newly acquired power, Stefanik pointed to the “Commitment to America” agenda that McCarthy unveiled in September. It’s a broad-brush list of priorities that is light on legislative detail. The GOP wants to lower inflation, fight crime, and secure the border. But absent good-faith negotiations with Democrats, any bills they pass won’t become law. An effort to tackle border security, for example, could be an invitation to reengage in talks over a larger immigration-reform package of the kind sought by the two parties for decades. Again, Stefanik wasn’t interested: “You have to secure the border before you even talk about broader visa reforms.”

    Such a response could become familiar over the next two years. Republicans are coming to Washington not to legislate or to govern, but to fight. That’s one promise, at least, the new House majority should find easy to fulfill.

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    Russell Berman

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  • A World Without Chuck Grassley in the Senate?

    A World Without Chuck Grassley in the Senate?

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    The long-serving Senator Chuck Grassley is, for lack of a comparison closer to home, Iowa’s Queen Elizabeth II. This is partly a matter of sheer longevity. At 89, the senator is older than John Deere’s first self-propelled combine, which appeared in 1947. He was 26 when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in 1959. The year Kevin Costner filmed Field of Dreams in Dyersville, 1988, Grassley was 55.

    Age aside, Grassley is simply a part of Iowa’s political furniture—many voters in the state have never known a time without him. When I was born, in 1993, he’d been the state’s senior senator for 12 years; he has held elected office—first in the state House, then in the U.S. House and Senate—since my father was 4 years old. For many Iowans, the day when Grassley would not be their senator has been scarcely imaginable.

    Until now, maybe. Every six years, Iowa Democrats have inched closer to unseating the seven-term Republican senator. This time, they seem closer than ever: A recent poll showed Grassley leading 64-year-old Mike Franken only narrowly, suggesting that this will be Grassley’s toughest reelection fight in four decades.

    Read: What does Chuck Grassley fear?

    Twelve years ago, he defeated Roxanne Conlin by 31 points. In 2016, he beat Patty Judge by 24. This year’s race against Franken didn’t seem particularly newsworthy until earlier this month, when Selzer & Company, Iowa’s most respected polling firm, released results from a survey showing that Grassley was leading Franken by a mere three percentage points. “It says to me that Franken is running a competent campaign and has a shot to defeat the seemingly invincible Chuck Grassley—previously perceived to be invincible,” J. Ann Selzer, the president of Selzer & Company, told the Des Moines Register.

    The poll is only a snapshot in time, and it could certainly prove wrong. But it’s reasonable to assume, given other polling since then, that Franken is closer to unseating Grassley than any challenger before him. The most obvious reason for this is that Iowans may finally be noticing how old their senator is—a veritable crinoid in the creek bed of Iowa politics. Although Grassley seems healthy—he runs several miles each morning and kicks off campaign events by doing push-ups onstage—more than 60 percent of the Selzer poll’s respondents said his age was a real concern. “There are a lot of voters between 75 and 85 who think, I wouldn’t want to be in the United States Senate right now. I wouldn’t want to have that life; why does he?” Jeff Link, an Iowa Democratic strategist, told me.

    Read: The president’s cognitive decline

    For the first time in the history of this particular poll, more Iowan respondents disapprove of Grassley’s job performance than approve of it. Pair that dissatisfaction with the fact that Franken is a strong candidate. A retired Navy vice admiral from deep-red northwest Iowa, the Democrat could provide a nonthreatening alternative for the independents and Republicans who are reluctant to give Grassley another term. Franken “is energetic, very smart—almost loquacious—but he knows what he’s talking about,” David Oman, a state Republican strategist and a former co-chair of the Iowa GOP, told me. Despite that positive assessment, the recent emergence of an assault allegation from a former campaign manager might cool Democrats’ enthusiasm. (Franken has denied the allegation, and police have closed the case, calling it “unfounded.”)

    Undergirding all of these factors is the plain reality that Iowa, like the rest of the country, is becoming more partisan and more polarized. For 30 years, Iowans sent both Grassley and a Democrat, Tom Harkin, who retired in 2014, to the Senate at every chance, no matter which party was in the White House or who was occupying the governor’s mansion. The consensus among Iowans was that such a balance was ideal. But the days of winning big by being part of that balance are over.

    Grassley has changed, too. Back then, he was viewed as a kind of farmers-first independent, interested chiefly in restraining federal spending, whistleblower protections, and promoting free trade. Democrats liked him—and often voted for him. In 1991, Grassley was one of just two Republicans to vote against the Gulf War. “That made him seem above partisanship,” David Yepsen, a former reporter for the Des Moines Register, told me. Grassley’s image, among Iowans, was of a man who operated above the partisan fray.

    Read: What everyone’s missing about Iowa

    That gloss began to wear off in 2009. At first, Grassley seemed a willing negotiating partner on President Barack Obama’s plans for health-care reform; he worked for months on a bipartisan bill. But he hadn’t bargained for how unpopular the Affordable Care Act would be with his party’s base. During a tour of central Iowa that summer, Grassley was mobbed by Republicans and Tea Partiers who rejected the plan. He buckled under the pressure, abandoned the talks, and ultimately voted against the final bill. “He’d never been treated that way by his own party. It changed him,” Yepsen said. “It made him mindful that there’s a new kind of conservative out there, a new generation coming on—the populists.” And he responded accordingly.

    In the ensuing years, Grassley came to recognize that there were fewer and fewer points to be earned by working across the aisle. In 2016, as the chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was party to the Senate’s refusal to give Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, and along with Republican leadership, he held open more than 100 seats on the federal bench during the final months of the Obama administration for Donald Trump to fill. “You can’t underestimate Democrats in Iowa watching his leadership in the Judiciary Committee putting all these conservatives on the Court, and seeing them now do their thing on the Dobbs decision,” Yepsen said. “Conservatives love it. But it makes him much more of a partisan.”

    Whether Grassley would support the candidacy of Donald Trump was initially an open question. The womanizing, scandal-plagued Republican presidential nominee seemed, after all, to be the Iowa senator’s bizarro opposite. Yet Grassley, like most others in the GOP, fell in line. He has stuck by Trump through vulgar comments and allegations. In 2019, Grassley—an actual author of the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act—defended Trump’s firing of the whistleblower and impeachment witness Alexander Vindman. Lately, Grassley has broken from his party only a handful of times, including to gently push back on some of Trump’s “America First” protectionist trade policies and to support the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill. The senator seems altogether untroubled by Trump’s effort to discredit the 2020 election, and continues to appear alongside him at rallies.

    “The way that [Grassley] didn’t stand up for much of anything is emblematic of the Republican Party in the years of Trump,” Bill Kristol, the editor at large of The Bulwark, told me. “People you thought would be independent just ended up going along.”

    Nowadays, the way Iowans view Grassley simply reflects their politics, not some old-timey desire for balance and comity. Democrats see him as an utter disappointment—a caricature of the man they may once have disagreed with but at least respected. Some Republicans are pleased with the careful line he’s walked, embracing Trump while hanging on to moderates. For other Republicans, Grassley is not nearly MAGA enough. This year, for the first time in his Senate career, Grassley faced a primary challenger. Jim Carlin, a state senator who has criticized Grassley for voting to certify the results of the 2020 election, earned 26 percent of the primary vote.

    Given this transformation in how Iowans regard Grassley, defeat at the hands of a Democrat is more plausible than it’s ever been. More plausible, but still not likely. The Selzer poll may have given Franken a jolt of momentum, including a burst of Hail Mary fundraising, but the state is reddening and the gap in party registration is wide and growing: The Iowa GOP has roughly 88,000 more registered voters this year than the Iowa Democratic Party, according to the Iowa secretary of state’s office. In 2020, that advantage was only about 20,000. This gap, combined with the historical precedent of higher Republican turnout in off-year elections, seems likely to add up to a Grassley victory. The numbers are “hugely problematic,” Jeff Link, the Democratic strategist, said—even for a three-star admiral.

    A world without Chuck Grassley in power is one in which most Iowans have never actually lived. That may be why “Faith in adversity” has recently become the unofficial motto of the state’s Democrats. This year, they even decided to put it on a sign. Orange placards dapple grassy lawns throughout Iowa, each bearing a message of hopeful conviction—We believe Michael Franken will defeat Chuck Grassley, the signs say—as though they can speak such a mammoth upset into existence.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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