The Abdication of Senate Republicans

McConnell - lead betrayer of the Constitution.

I've mentioned a book "Mortal Republic" which looks at the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of imperial rule in Rome.  A major player in the demise of the Roman Republic was the Roman Senate which ultimately abdicated it authority and gave way to Octavian - later Augustus - the first Roman emperor.  The Senator's motives 2000 years ago parallel what we are witnessing as the Republicans in the United States Senate throw away any allegiance to their oaths of office and telegraph to Donald Trump (and by way of precedent, future presidents) that government will be by presidential fiat and that there are no restraints on presidential power.  Avoiding a primary and re-election - and self-enrichment for those like Mitch McConnell - is all that matters in the short term, with there being no long term agenda.  Given Trump's extreme narcissism and desire to be an American equivalent to Vladimir Putin, this abdication of authority should be terrifying to every American of good will who believes in democracy.  Senate Republicans have made it clear that to them, the rule of law, facts, and morality mean absolutely nothing. All that matters is avoiding Trump's wrath and that of his increasingly ugly base of support in order to stay in power.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at Senate Republicans betrayal of all their party once claimed to stand for.  Here are highlights: 

REPUBLICAN SENATORS who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive [Trump] president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)  . . . . Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the case against Mr. Trump had already been proved, so no further testimony was needed. But he also said, without explanation, that Mr. Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct did not merit removal from office; voters, he said, should render a verdict in the coming presidential election. How could he measure the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing without hearing Mr. Bolton’s firsthand testimony of the president’s motives and intentions, including about whether [Trump] the president is likely to seek additional improper foreign intervention in that same election?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Mr. Alexander’s illogic, only he lacked the courage even to take a position on whether Mr. Trump had, as charged, tried to force Ukraine’s new president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, or whether that was wrong. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) managed to be even more timorous, telling reporters that “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us” and refusing to elaborate.

So cowed are most of those “lots and lots” of Republicans that few of them dared to go as far as Mr. Sasse. Some have echoed the president’s indefensible claims that there was nothing wrong with the pressure campaign. Their votes against witnesses have rendered the trial a farce and made conviction the only choice for senators who honor the Constitution.

Americans who object to Mr. Trump’s relentless stonewalling and Republicans’ complicity can take some comfort in the prospect that most or all of the evidence the White House is hiding will eventually come out. A reminder of that came Friday in a New York Times report about Mr. Bolton’s unpublished book, which describes how Mr. Trump ordered him last May to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani said publicly at the time he wanted to induce Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden because it would be “helpful to my client,” Mr. Trump.

[T]here will surely be more reminders in the weeks and months ahead. We can hope only that voters who wanted that evidence to be heard in the trial will respond by showing incumbent senators they are a force to be reckoned with, as much as the bully in the White House.

Trump and Russia: It’s Already Collusion

Today's earlier post looked at 18 possible reasons why Donald Trump could indeed be a Russian asset under the direction of the Kremlin.  In a separate piece in Politico Magazine, a former Deputy Secretary of State argues that regardless of what the Mueller investigation reveals, we've already seen evidence that Trump is colluding with Putin and daily taking actions to future Putin's long term agenda of diminishing the West while expanding Russia' sphere of influence and, in some cases, geographic borders.  Meanwhile, Trump is spewing more lies and trying to conflate his dealings with Putin as being no different that those between Bush 41 and Mikhail Gorbachev and/or Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin even though nothing could be further from the truth.  Indeed the Politico piece lays out the stark dichotomy between the dealings with Russia' leaders in the late 1980's and 1990's and what we are witnessing now with Trump.  Here are article highlights: 

On Friday, the New York Times revealed an FBI investigation whether Candidate Trump had colluded—the word he hates and denies—with Russians to help his campaign. The next day, the Washington Post probed into President Trump’s refusal to let his own government in on his sensitive conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among other developments, Congress has renewed calls for the State Department interpreter Maria Gross, the only other American present for Trump’s two-hour private meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, to share what she knows about the contents of their discussion.

As the plot has thickened, so have fallacious distractions. . . . . leading to persistent suggestions that Trump’s relationship with Putin is much the same as Clinton’s dealings with Yeltsin in the 1990s.

The Clinton-Yeltsin connection shares only one similarity with the Trump-Putin one: In both cases, the American president was helping his Kremlin counterpart. Other than that, the differences are as stark as the climate in Miami and Murmansk in January.

Whether he knows it or not, Trump is integral to Putin’s strategy to strengthen authoritarian regimes and undermine democracies around the world. This unprecedented aberration defiles what America stands for at home and abroad; it alienates and dispirits our allies; and—if it is allowed to persist—it will jeopardize our security.

In contrast, Clinton worked tirelessly with Yeltsin for seven years to assist his reforms. Yeltsin wanted post-Soviet Russia to join the community of democratic nations and the circle of major powers that would chart a course for a peaceful twenty-first century. He needed Western aid and encouragement, and Clinton did his best to provide both.

When Clinton was elected in 1992, he picked up where Bush had left off, dedicating much of his own time working directly with Yeltsin on a massive, urgent, and difficult agenda:

• bolstering Russia’s shaky economy,

• responding to requests for expertise on building a social safety net for workers as privatization replaced massive state enterprises,

• helping relocate to Russia retired Soviet-era officers living in what were now independent nations,

• sending N.G.O. experts to advise on how to organize free and fair elections,

• ensuring that Russia would be the only one of the former Soviet republics with nuclear weapons in exchange for Moscow’s assurance to respect the other new states’ territory and sovereignty,

• opening the door for Russia to join the G-8.

Flash forward to the current administration. . . . . Under Putin as a revanchist, Russia has reinstated four key ingredients of Soviet politics and geopolitics: the Iron Fist, the Big Lie, the expansion beyond Russian borders and the subversion of Western societies. He is giving another chance to a system that ended up on the ash heap of history in the last century because of its internal failures.

The Cold War is back with several new and ominous features. The tables have turned. Putin is on a roll. Strongmen in Europe are cloning themselves after him and with his help. Democracy is under stress if not crisis. So are regional and global institutions founded under the leadership of the U.S. after World War II, notably NATO and the integration of Western Europe.

Trumpism is a godsend to Putin and a nightmare for governments in his sights—including Trump’s. The U.S. commander-in-chief is out of sync with his own administration, not to mention the government as a whole. Note his stubborn yearning to lift sanctions on Putin’s pet oligarchs. . . . he is shutting down America’s global franchise while building up literal and virtual walls.

Instead of shoring up key Atlantic allies, Trump is bullying and belittling them, thereby making them even more vulnerable to the rise of right-wing nationalists who now have a booster and exemplar in Trump.

Trump has an affinity for dictators—as he himself reportedly acknowledged only this week during a lunch with senators, “I don’t know why I get along with all the tough ones and not the soft ones.” He actually does know why: He’s a wannabe. He envies their unchecked power, use of intimidation and penchant for operating in secret, apparently because he doesn’t trust the advisers and agencies who work for him.

This weekend’s Post article zeroed in on the Trump-Putin “one-on-one” last July in Helsinki, without aides or note-takers. Gross, the State Department interpreter, was the only American other than Trump who knows what was said, and she is under wraps. Whatever Trump told his own staff afterward, it would be likely what he wants people to believe, especially if he is hiding something. . . . . What’s more telling was the smug look on Putin’s face and an uncertain one on Trump’s after the meeting.

Future historians will have a serious handicap when the archives of this administration’s foreign policy are opened years from now since so much of the normal process for conducting American diplomacy has been subverted or eliminated. But we already know that that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker.

Or put it this way: Trump has been colluding with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency. We’ll see if it started before that.