A wide spectrum of political thinkers stepped forward to offer kudos. Liberal writers like former contributors to The New Republic, Jonathan Chait and Alex Pareene, both offered Camp qualified praise for producing something that at least resembled the work of an adult lawmaker. Meanwhile, in a surprising non-crank missive from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, Camp was hailed as one of the “smarter Republicans ... trying to reclaim the mantle of economic opportunity.”
I recount this history because the whole affair seemed like the first of many nervous tics heralding a larger disorder within the Republican Party, one which has indeed hit an apotheosis under the second term of Donald Trump. Congressional Republicans have rather assiduously withdrawn from their traditional duties, refashioned themselves into elected facsimiles of genuine lawmakers, and, with Trump’s return to power, completed the mission to dismantle their institutional power and weaken an entire branch of government. In many important respects, “Republican members of Congress” no longer really exist anywhere but in memory.
Congress as a whole has been weakened by a host of malignancies in recent years. The rise of unitary executive theory during the presidency of George W. Bush paved the way for expanded executive branch powers that his successor, Barack Obama, took no real interest in unwinding. Around the same time, Congress ceded its constitutional duties by giving the executive branch blank checks in the form of Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, which allowed lawmakers to take a passive role in the ongoing “global war on terror”—crediting themselves when things were going well, while castigating the president when they weren’t. Meanwhile, the conservative legal movement was executing a decades-long plan to transform the Supreme Court into a kind of super-legislature with a line-item veto on the future, a project that came to fruition under Trump’s first term.
Again this took little urging from Trump, who was out of Washington beginning a long sequestration at Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds and stash boxes of classified materials in the lavatory. The Republican Party’s journey to self-abnegation continued apace. As one adviser to Ohio Senator Rob Portman put it in an interview with the National Journal, “If you want to spend all your time going on Fox and be[ing] an asshole, there’s never been a better time to serve. But if you want to spend all your time being thoughtful and getting shit done, there’s never been a worse time to serve.”
The Republican majority is contributing to this effort mainly by allowing themselves to be trampled. And they’re refusing even to defend the paramount purposes of their own institution: As Trump and Musk have usurped the power of the purse explicitly granted to legislators by the Constitution, Republican lawmakers have stood by and let the plunder happen. Naturally, the path of true subservience to Trump never does run smooth: This week, we’ve been treated to the sorry spectacle of Republican lawmakers begging Trump to turn the money spigot back on for their constituents.
But a whole new conception of what it means to be a Republican congressperson, and what they will be expected to do, has finally taken shape. Gone are the Camps and Romneys, the diligent wonks and the rangy strategists. Here now are the little Javerts, running star chamber investigations in newly weaponized committees, alongside an army of what are essentially internet trolls, producing content for an increasingly low-minded media economy. If you want to imagine the future, think of South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace, shrieking “Tranny! Tranny! Tranny!” on the floor of the House, while hatching newer and more confusing performance art stunts.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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