The Senate Proves Once Again That It’s the World’s Most Useless Deliberative Body

As the U.S. Senate seeks to end the Department of Homeland Security’s funding shutdown by finding a workable compromise on reforms to the unconstitutional and deadly Immigration and Customs Enforcement coup in American cities, it has found time to confirm a new DHS chief who will almost certainly expand ICE’s reign of terror. The legislative chamber, which likes to call itself “the greatest deliberative body in the world,” has primarily called for the confirmation of Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin as the new DHS overlord. The stickiest sticking point during his confirmation hearings was Mullin’s comments that a neighbor’s violent attack on his conference colleague, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul of Kentucky, was likely justified.

Mullin, true to form, refused to apologize and accused Paul of carrying out a “smear” from his position as chairman of his committee – a classic Trumpian complaint turning a bout of delusional aggression into a matter for grievance. Given Mullin’s previous violent threats in the Senate — he infamously challenged Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to a fight over a series of mocking tweets during a 2023 committee hearing — Paul’s initial challenge to Mullin should have triggered a thorough investigation into the nominee’s character. Instead, the committee ignored that, as well as Mullin’s troubling position as an election denier at a time when President Donald Trump is threatening to deploy ICE thugs to election precincts as part of the GOP’s authoritarian crackdown on ballot access.

After the Trump administration abandoned former DHS Director Kristi Noem for her blind approval of ICE’s deadly attacks on peaceful protesters and detainees (compounded by MAGA’s unforgivable thought crime of implicating Trump himself in ICE’s brownshirt assaults), senators insisted that her successor initiate a sweeping policy reset in an agency that targets immigrant communities and fundamental protections of the former amendment under the false guise of detaining and deporting violent and dangerous criminals. predators. Yet the Senate did what it did throughout Trump’s second term: inertia-approving the grossly unqualified and ideologically vindictive nominations of senior administration officials after a few rambling objections in front of the C-SPAN cameras.

This is a blatant perversion of the “advice and consent” powers relegated to the Senate as a co-equal branch of government in the Constitution. The Senate apparently learned nothing after royally screwing up the confirmation of the blatantly incompetent xenophobic demogogue Noem. Now this confirms Mullin as a buffer and more rhetorically belligerent entry into the same administrative product line. The case for Mullin’s refusal should have been clear after the candidate clearly refused to rule out sending ICE agents to polling places last November and, for good measure, failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory as he defended the baseless DHS investigation into Arizona’s 2020 election results. However, Mullin won confirmation by a vote of 54 to 45; Democrats Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and John Fetterman voted with the Republican majority, while Ruben Gallego of Arizona abstained, even as Mullin endorsed DHS’s deceptive attack on voting rights in his home state. Not surprisingly, Paul was the only Republican to break ranks and vote against Mullin’s confirmation.

This parody of surveillance is common in the US Senate. During the Trump Cabinet’s depraved and sycophantic campaign of nominations to the White House, most of them from the Fox News outfit, the nominal leaders of the Senate opposition did not bother to withhold unanimous consent – the body’s sleepy routine of suspending the rules of debate to expedite votes – in order to bring appropriate and sustained public attention to the gallery of thugs, crooks and MAGA sycophants now tasked with crafting and administer policy in all areas. public life. Aside from a failed and half-hearted effort to prevent the confirmation of supreme MAGA ghoul Russell Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget, Senate Democrats politely related this by creating the impression, during the critical formative days of the second Trump administration, that this would be a more or less ordinary White House operating under the same protocols of Senate appeasement that all previous presidencies had enjoyed.

This posture of inaction resulted in Marco Rubio’s senseless confirmation as Secretary of State, 100-0, setting U.S. foreign policy on its fateful path of rudderless, unconstitutional intervention without coherent purpose or objective, all supported by Rubio’s vile and deadly lies. Instead of continuing to adhere to the hackneyed and misleading slogan of “greatest deliberative body,” the Senate should now call itself “the legislature that looked at Marc Rubio and shrugged its shoulders.” Instead of heeding Project 2025’s dictum that “personnel is policy,” Senate leaders ensured that the foundation of Trump’s second-term agenda was laid without interruption; no Democratic senator should be able to forget that when the mandate to disrupt the normal order was most urgent, the de facto mantra of the party conference was: “What next, my lord?”

Now that Mullin’s nomination has passed, the Trump White House is resuming its efforts to secure Senate passage of the White House’s favored voter suppression bill, the SAVE America Act. Even some Senate Republicans are refusing to support the measure because it could disenfranchise many key MAGA constituencies. So, in a greeting maneuver, GOP leaders are trying to broker a deal to end the DHS shutdown in exchange for an unlikely attempt to force a SAVE America vote under budget reconciliation protocols that would allow it to bypass the filibuster and pass a simple majority vote. Of course, there is no common-sense interpretation of fiscal policy that would result in voting rights suppression in its areas. But it’s the Senate parliamentarian’s call — likely with the connivance of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has been reluctant to break any sort of protocol for a vote on the SAVE Act. Or, to put it another way: Senate Democrats are abandoning the most fundamental exercise of political action in our formal democracy to reconfirm rule-making decisions in which they play no meaningful role. Carry on as if nothing had happened in the most useless deliberative body in the world.