The chamber’s degradation preceded Trump. But he may trash it once and for all.
 | By Frank Bruni |
When I covered Congress for The Times a quarter century ago, there was a sense that the House and the Senate weren’t just at opposite ends of the Capitol. They were at opposite ends of the earth.
The House was where tempers were supposed to flare, where decorum reliably disintegrated, less a preciously regal sanctum than a proudly ragtag mosh pit. Small wonder that Matt Gaetz found his political home there. While the House has certainly known its share of statesmen and stateswomen, it has long put out a welcome mat for cads.
But the Senate? It prized, or at least preached, dignity. Its members considered themselves a more even-keeled, erudite sort. And most (though not all) were. While a randomly interviewed House member was as likely to spew inanity as insight, most senators had something substantive to say. That was essential to their ethos and integral to their airs.
Not anymore. For decades now, the Senate has been losing its august way, and a second Trump administration will reveal just how shamefully far from its onetime description as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” it has strayed.
Yes, its Republican members owe a degree of deference and robust measure of cooperation to Donald Trump, whom a majority of American voters just elected. But they don’t owe him Gaetz as attorney general, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services or Mehmet Oz as the overseer of Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare.
They’re under no obligation to turn the upper echelons of the federal government into the green room of “Fox & Friends.” Doing so isn’t allowing Trump the tools he needs to effect change. It’s allowing him the fools he needs to turn governing into some obnoxious amalgam of end-zone touchdown jig, “Candid Camera” knockoff and Devil’s Night toilet-papering of the neighbors’ houses.
If senators are honest with themselves, they know that many of Trump’s voters weren’t calling for that; he achieved victory with the crucial help of Americans who wanted lower prices, stronger borders and less wokeness, not bedlam, buffoonery and Elon Musk.
And if senators have any regard for the “advice and consent” charge that the Constitution gives them, they’ll recognize the difference between supplication and service, the incompatibility of obsequiousness and honor. They won’t confirm Trump’s most egregiously inappropriate nominees, and they’ll push back against any attempts by him to circumvent the Senate confirmation process by making those nominees recess appointments.
Those are big ifs, given most Republican senators’ behavior in the time of Trump. For those of you just tuning in to the program, Lindsey Graham didn’t used to be a simpering toady like this. Ted Cruz once fought against Trump.
Mitch McConnell — oof, what to say about Mitch McConnell? He disparaged Trump in private, made all those damning remarks about Trump on the Senate floor after his second impeachment, then didn’t do the one thing necessary to prevent Trump from roaring back: vote to convict him and encourage other Republican senators to follow suit. A man supposedly devoted to the institution of the Senate could — given the way Trump wants to ride roughshod over it now — go down as the handmaiden to its greatest degradation. That’s the stuff of Greek tragedy, though Greek tragedy is too grand an allusion for today’s Senate.
“The Senate’s modern decline began in 1978,” George Packer wrote in a lengthy elegy in The New Yorker, “The Empty Chamber,” in 2010. He said that the increased influence of money in politics, the arrival of C-SPAN cameras in the Capitol, a new breed of conservative warriors and an intensifying partisanship had changed everything.
About three years after Packer’s article, Harry Reid, the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, got rid of the filibuster for presidential nominees other than Supreme Court justices. Roughly two and a half years after that, McConnell, the Senate’s Republican majority leader, refused to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee for a vacant position on the Supreme Court. Those were mile markers on the Senate’s journey toward House-caliber acrimony. The chamber has lurched closer to that destination since.
Some of its newer members may hasten that arrival. Take Senator Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican who was elected to the chamber in 2022. A former mixed martial arts fighter, he challenged Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, to a brawl during a Senate hearing in 2023, telling O’Brien to “stand your butt up.”
Or take Senator-elect Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican who defeated Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, on Nov. 5. The rags-to-riches autobiography that Moreno peddled on the campaign trail was an audaciously lavish fiction, and the Senate is his first elected office, achieved with the help of his considerable personal wealth and the chief MAGA magnate.
“I wear with honor my endorsement from President Trump,” Moreno said this year, singing a song with a melody much different from the one he warbled in 2016, when he referred to Trump as a “lunatic” and a “maniac,” or in 2019, when he said that there was “no scenario” in which he would support Trump.
He’s obviously not much of a fortune teller. But he’s one heck of a sycophant, and he’ll find bounteous Republican company in a deliberative body whose remaining capacity for real, responsible deliberation is about to be put to a defining test.
