This past week, all hopes that a GOP-controlled Senate would ever stand up even to President Trump’s most destructive cabinet picks finished fading, as all but one Republican legislator voted in favor of longtime dangerous kooks Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services. Even Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who has long been an advocate for public health, caved and put his thumb up for RFK Jr. and his disastrous designs on the nation’s health systems.
The sole holdout? Mitch McConnell, the long-standing Senate majority leader who’s in recent months receded from view. We have never been big McConnell fans. The man with the once-iron grip on the GOP legislative agenda used his considerable influence to block good policy on corporate regulation, the environment and all manner of other things.
In maneuvering to hold a vacant Supreme Court seat open for Trump and then ramming through one of Trump’s nominees at the tail end of his presidency, McConnell is as much as anyone the architect of the dissolution of Roe v. Wade, as well as more broadly an out-of-control court that has granted the executive broad immunity. His refusal to support Trump’s second impeachment has gotten us to where we are.
Given that history, it’s telling that McConnell was the only Republican who had the backbone to vote against these two dangerous and patently unqualified nominees and it gives us a stark sense as to why the others fell in line. He also opposed the unfit defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, now embarrassing himself in Europe on his first foreign outing. McConnell is 82 and not running for reelection, whereas his colleagues are cowed that any opposition to the MAGA agenda, no matter how damaging this would be to the country, would harm their reelection chances.
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during the debate that “if there were a secret ballot, I would bet that Gabbard would get no more than 10 votes in the Senate — 10 maybe.” He’s right and others like Kennedy and Hegseth and Kash Patel to be FBI director would all be defeated. But Trump uses fear and intimidation to keep wavering Republicans from straying.
As to Schumer’s point, the Senate used to conduct all its business in secret. From the first meeting in New York in 1789 and continuing when the Congress moved to Philly in 1790, the House of Representatives was open to be watched, but the Senate was like a jury: no visitors, no press, not even congressmen. The practice ended in 1794. We are not suggesting a return to secrecy, but at least it allowed senators to vote based on their conscience not their fears of political retaliation.
So now, we’ve ended up with a DNI with an affinity for foreign dictators. And we have someone atop the nation’s health infrastructure who has spent years spreading vaccine disinformation in ways that have been very credibly tied to deaths in American Samoa and elsewhere.
It is no overstatement to say that these votes are concrete threats to the nation and all its inhabitants, regardless of their state of residence. The senators who cast them have clearly chosen themselves over their constituents and the stability of the nation. For shame.
