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Don't Assume Republican Will Is Indomitable
Inside the mailbag: Gavin Newsom... John Thune ... CA-Gov
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Matt Colbert: Dem Senators continue to vote for Trump’s judicial nominees. Why?
Are they lazy? Do they think they’re buying some kind of goodwill for the next time there is a Democratic president? Do they just... support his nominees? I would love to hear a reason, even a bad one.
The reasons, plural, are the same you’ll hear whenever members of the Senate minority vote for the other party’s presidential nominees. Some mix of:
Like it or not, this nominee is qualified.
This nominee is a constituent of mine, and has support from his or her community (plus maybe some of my donors).
I have received concrete promises from this nominee relating to my agenda or important home-state concerns.
[on truth serum] This nominee was going to be confirmed anyhow and providing him or her a meaningless surplus vote is an incredibly cheap way to bolster my bipartisan bona fides, which I’m assured are very important to voters.
In the abstract these aren’t terribly objectionable rationales. They’re not inspiring by any means. But being a legislator, particularly a member of a legislative minority, is all about choosing from among uninspiring options.
And you can see why going along to get along in certain instances seems worth it: Politics is still transactional, even if Donald Trump’s untrustworthiness means all transactions must have enforcement mechanisms. Establishing credibility with a subset of swing voters and voters in the other party clearly has some value. Susan Collins dominated Maine politics by being the kind of moderate who’s always there for Democrats when they don’t need her. She takes every free, low-stakes vote with the Democrats that she can.
But we do not live in the abstract. We live in Trump’s America. And in Trump’s America, every single executive and judicial branch nominee has passed a loyalty test in which they agree to lie or spread doubt about the 2020 election.
And so every vote for a Trump nominee is a vote for the idea that the 2020 Big Lie is not disqualifying. Something we can live and work with. As my recent commentary about the Jared Polis/Tina Peters fiasco makes clear, I think that’s crazy; that tolerating soft election denial is a big error with a decades-long tail. It’s why I published this piece more than a month before Trump’s second inauguration.