Dear Reader,

As the second impeachment of Donald Trump moves into its Senate phase, it feels very much as though we are witnessing a parody of constitutional order. Last week, 45 GOP senators voted against the proceeding, claiming—with virtually no reliable evidence—that the chamber isn’t empowered to impeach a president who is no longer in office. After making a show of concern over Trump’s lawless, demagogic actions, and their direct role in fomenting the deadly January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, senior Republican senators such as Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham briskly began to whine about the mustering of witnesses on the Democratic side of the impeachment debate—just weeks after, out of the other sides of their mouths, they complained that the House was rushing through its own impeachment vote, without a single witness testifying. 

Whatever you might call this sort of thing, it’s pretty much the opposite of serious governance. And the feckless charade of the GOP’s opposition to impeachment stands out in especially stark relief against the chamber’s own august self-image. To float the notion that today’s Senate is studiously serving as a check on the unruly passions of the common citizen—as the nation’s Founders hoped—or that it stands alone as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” as the chamber’s latter-day solons like to believe, is to invite gales of disbelieving laughter. 

Indeed, as The New Republic staff writer Matt Ford notes, today’s Senate is a colossal legislative and deliberative failure, judged against the chamber’s own design and mission: 

Thirty of the 50 Republican senators currently in office aren’t up for reelection for at least another four years. They are somewhat insulated from the whims of their constituents. That’s by design. The Senate’s peculiar nature is often justified as a check against the passions of the moment—as a bulwark of sorts against rise-and-fall demagogues and inflamed political moments. If the Senate can’t fulfill that duty, then what purpose does it serve?

No part of the American political system is immune to scrutiny or criticism, but the Senate attracts an outsize share for good reason. Equal representation among the states is a structural boon for sparsely populated rural regions, lending disproportionate influence to whichever party is strongest among voters there. The modern filibuster is a perpetual kneecap to the legislative process. It hinders policy proposals and weakens Congress as an institution. The Senate’s byzantine structure and arcane rules seem designed to frustrate basic democratic governance

And the GOP caucus’s second bout of organized dereliction in the face of grossly impeachable abuses of power puts a dismal exclamation point on the constitutional uselessness of today’s Senate, Ford argues:

Here we had a president who had spent two months in vain and futile attempts to overturn the results of a free and fair election that he lost. At every turn, he had failed. And so he summoned his followers to Washington, told them that the country was in peril and that they had to fight for it, and directed them to march on the Capitol, where he would join them. He did not and retreated instead to the White House, where he would resist efforts to help the besieged lawmakers when the rioters broke down the doors.

Three weeks later, the Senate has indeed cooled down . . .  but only on providing accountability for Trump’s role in inciting an insurrection against the Senate. Republican senators are now claiming that an impeachment trial would be too vindictive or too dangerous. Some argue that it would be unconstitutional to convict Trump now that he’s out of office, even though the Constitution says no such thing and most legal scholars disagree with this view. Indeed, if these naysayers were correct, then the Senate’s power to disqualify impeached officials from office would be meaningless—an impeached official could simply resign right before the vote.

The grim fact of the matter is that most members of today’s Senate Republican caucus long ago laid aside the basic responsibilities of power and elected to use their office in the transactional pursuit of power for its own sake. With Trump out of office, GOP senators mostly have come to agree that they can afford, once more, to overlook his bald abuses and constitutional trespasses, and proceed with all due haste to the normal business of obstructing legislation to safeguard the citizenry’s basic rights and deliver substantive relief in a roiling public health and economic crisis. And their sage deliberative heads are buried far too deeply in the sand to recognize that this is precisely the kind of self-serving cowardice that made the Trump presidency possible in the first place.

The best way to follow the Senate and the new administration is not only by reading Matt Ford but by subscribing to The New Republic. Try three months of unlimited access to TNR’s exemplary journalism today.  

—Chris Lehmann, editor

Read Matt Ford’s The Senate Is Failing