If nothing else, the unnerving Kavanaugh hearings propelled Democratic senators to fresh heights of vocal indignation, which should have been climbed long ago. Richard Blumenthal declared "All of America is watching the United State’s Senate today … and they should be deeply embarrassed." They should also be deeply ashamed. The Republican majority didn't seize the Senate by coup; in an alarming demonstration that representative democracies can throttle themselves, it was elected.
Mazie Hirono, from Hawaii — for you Trump voters, that's a U.S. state — said it's "it’s very clear that the Republicans will break every norm, every rule, to get this person on the Supreme Court." But not only to "get this person" on the Court. They'll break every norm and every rule to keep others off the Court, such as President Obama's nominee, the moderate Merrick Garland. Republican Senator John Cornyn revealed a severe case of self-induced, short-term memory loss when he said "I can’t think of a more embarrassing scandal for the United States Senate since the McCarthy hearings."
And then there was Patrick Leahy, who, with a too-often institutionally lapsed sense of history and constitutionalism, lamented that "It's unbelievable where we are today. It's almost surreal. This Judiciary Committee is no longer an independent branch of government. And we're supposed to be. The Senate is supposed to be an independent, equal branch of government. We're no longer that. We are an arm — and a very weak arm — of the Trump White House. Every semblance of independence has just disappeared. It's gone."
The Democratic senator from Vermont made that statement before Arizona's Republican senator Jeff Flake delivered a yea vote at the price of an FBI investigation, which columnist Roger Cohen called "a small act of honor in a tawdry time." I agree with Cohen's assessment, even if Flake later votes to confirm. After all, how many other Republican senators insisted that a further investigation precede what Mitch McConnell was attempting to "plow right through"?
It is frequently observed that the U.S. Senate is broken. This is now frequently observed because we tired of observing the despairing, shambolic state of the U.S. House, which, under the cringeworthy guidance of the cowardly Paul Ryan, lost its independence two years ago. (Before that, the House was merely the official GOP organ of mindless obstructionism.) But, as implied in this post's opening paragraph, the U.S. Senate is actually humming along quite well; its majority is doing what 18 percent of the American population put it there to do: vote as a non-independent arm of Donald J. Trump.
Undoing the Senate's unrepresentative composition would require an unachievable constitutional amendment. But American democracy may yet execute a shortcut to stifling the pro-Trump boobs, yahoos and hayseeds of the upper chamber: It just might, this November, throw the fawning majority out, and elect a replacing conscience.
Not since John Tyler's accidental presidency has the electorate wearied so quickly of the chief executive. We can now add a towering disgust of the national legislature to boot — all its Ryans, McConnells, boneheaded Cornyns and hysterical Lindsey Grahams. In its biannual pressure-valve wisdom, the U.S. constitution is granting the nation another chance to reverse its stupendous stupidity of 2016. Let us pray that voters are as wise as the framers.