It’s “amusing”—I’m pretty sure that’s a smile (of sorts) on my face rather than a rictus of despair—watching Republican senators attempt to swallow their “pride” and pretend that Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Miami Matt Gaetz, aka “the Viceman”, is “appropriate”. The same may be said for Robert F. “Vaccine Man” Kennedy, and, well, all the rest of Trump’s obscene pack of moral hyenas, as Robert Tracinski so aptly explains in this post at the Unpopulist. And if you think that choosing Sen. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State is “sane”, well, you’re wrong, as Daniel Larison explains at his blog, Eunomia.1
As far as I know, no Republican senator has said up front that they are going to “defy” Trump on any of these nominees. They haven’t even said that they will reject his Caesarian “proposal” that the Senate should allow him to anoint his entire cabinet via the “recess appointment” route, so that none of the nominees will have to undergo the embarrassment of, you know, a hearing.
Clearly, they’re hoping that the press will do their dirty work for them. Clearly, they’re hoping that Trump won’t be so mean as to demand that they allow him to seat his entire cabinet without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to listen to U.S. senators as if they were, you know, important.
Well, maybe the press will be able to knock off one or two of them, but I’m not at all sure that that will happen. I’m sure that there are plenty of reporters at the Washington Post itching to prove that Trump doesn’t own the Post— how far they’re going to get remains to be seen.
The Republicans in the Senate are another matter. The fact is, to be a Republican these days is to be a coward. Ever since Trump’s arrival on the scene, every supposed conservative/Republican “foe” of Trump has decided that discretion—that is to say, “cowardice”—is the better part of valor. They keep waiting for someone else to bell the cat, and the cat keeps eating their souls, one by one, until there is none of them left. Sad!
1. Rubio will turn the State Department into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Cuba Lobby, an utterly fraudulent political machine based in Miami that devotes all of its resources to harassing and bullying any left-wing government in South America that it can get its hands on, fighting “dangers” that don’t exist.
