[ed. Unfortunately, not this country.]
Announcing a new round of tariffs that he planned to implement on unspecified “countries that were ripping us off for decades” (to replace his previous tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down), Trump breezily said, “Congressional action will not be necessary.” He predicted that his executive orders on prescription-drug pricing would never be overturned by any future administration, but then he turned to Senator John Thune, the majority leader, and Representative Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, and casually added, “John and Mike, if you don’t mind, codify it anyway.”
About halfway into his record-setting 107-minute address, Trump challenged every member of Congress to stand if they agreed with the principle that America should first protect its citizens rather than “illegal aliens.” While the Republicans stood, clapped and hooted, Trump leaned over the lectern and glowered at the unanimously seated and stone-faced Democrats. “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up,” he told them. The Democrats, he declared later in his speech, were “pro-crime.” They were “sick people.”
A few House Democrats, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, openly jeered the president. Another, Representative Al Green of Texas, was escorted from the chamber by Capitol security officials for holding up a sign that read, “Black People Aren’t Apes!” (in reference to the president’s Truth Social post that month of a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes). More notable, however, were the empty seats: Roughly half the Democrats in both the House and the Senate chose to boycott the address.
That so many members of Congress refused to take part in their one annual public event counted as yet another first of the Trump era. “I went because I’m an institutionalist,” Representative Terri Sewell, an eight-term Democrat from Alabama, later told me. “This body can still be a powerful voice for good. That’s the reason why I did it. But it’s increasingly harder to stomach, to be honest.”
The Republican members, for their part, dutifully issued statements praising Trump’s address. “Last night, President Trump highlighted the wins of his administration and the Republican-led Congress for the American people,” began the news release of Representative Dave Joyce, a seven-term congressman from Ohio and an appropriations subcommittee chairman. But Joyce offered a more somber assessment a few months later, when I asked him if he felt that Congress had assumed an overly submissive posture toward Trump.
“I think we have, unfortunately,” Joyce replied. He recalled the first State of the Union address he attended, in 2014, just after President Barack Obama had threatened to use his pen to sign executive orders and take other executive actions to pass his agenda if Congress failed to do so. “I was sitting next to a Democrat, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ But we’re just as bad. We continually cede power to the executive. The president blows things up, and then we just go home,” Joyce said. On occasions when Trump has expressed displeasure over a legislative matter — as he did over the release of the Epstein files and the failure to pass voter restrictions — Republican congressional leaders have complied by going into recess rather than holding votes they knew would anger the president.
“At this point,” Joyce concluded, “there’s no will to overtake that.”
The question is whether that will has been permanently extinguished. On Nov. 3, American voters will decide which party controls the House and the Senate for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. In theory, at least, the outcome of their decision should be enormously consequential. If the Republicans somehow manage to defy the current ill portents — an unpopular leader, a sluggish economy and a costly war with no end in sight — then the president will have a final two years to place his indelible stamp on American life. Should the Democrats regain control of both chambers, or at least the House (as they are expected to do), then Trump’s opposition will possess the legislative and investigatory tools to bring the president’s agenda — and potentially the entire Trump era — to a decisive halt.
But the two scenarios rest on the assumption that Congress still functions as the founders planned when they devoted Article I of the Constitution to the legislative branch. Among those functions, described in Section 8 of Article I, are the exclusive power to impose taxes, fund government agencies, declare war, regulate commerce with foreign nations and, above all, “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing Powers.”
Few Americans — including members of Congress themselves — believe that the legislative branch is fulfilling its duties as the founders intended. As Representative Jim Himes, a moderate Democrat from Connecticut who has served in the House for 18 years, told me in June, “Congress is somewhere between dysfunctional and irrelevant — and is despised by the people.”
Congress was already unpopular decades before Trump became president. Since 1974, according to Gallup polling, its approval rating has averaged a dismal 28 percent. As of July, Congress has the lowest favorability ranking, 9 percent, of any institution in America. A low regard of this magnitude cannot be ascribed to one person.
Trump has nonetheless taken an already weak legislative body and made it subservient. He left office in 2021 only after his followers violently raided the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a failed effort to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results and keep him in office. The fact that a majority of House Republicans voted against certifying the election mere hours after the riot, coupled with the role of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader at the time, in acquitting Trump of impeachment charges weeks later, created a permission structure for Trump’s eventual return to power. That ugly episode also left its mark on Congress, Himes said: “It’s a huge unhealed wound that continues to separate the two sides of the aisle.”
Trump’s deep thumbprints on the Republican-controlled 119th Congress are unmistakable. It achieved a near historic low last year in the number of bills passed, with prioritization placed on Trump’s tellingly named One Big Beautiful Bill tax legislation. This year, the president has strong-armed the House into funding an unpopular war in Iran after having vowed on election night, “I’m not going to start a war — I’m going to stop wars.”
At the same time, Trump has defied congressional authority through his tariffs and his National Guard deployments, by tearing down agencies and erecting new federal buildings — all with the barest of pushback by Republicans on Capitol Hill. Those in his party who have occasionally stood up to Trump — such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, by forcing him to agree to release the Epstein files, and Senators Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, by, respectively, voting to impeach him and suggesting in 2023 that Trump’s “time has passed him by” — have been harried out of office.
“They’re just petrified of Trump,” said Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who served in the House for 36 years before voting to impeach Trump in January 2021 and subsequently deciding not to seek another term. “Name the issue. It’s just amazing. No one’s got a spine.”
Upton elaborated further on the fear among Republicans: “Look, I know the pressure. If you signal you’re going to vote the wrong way, leadership calls you in. Then the White House starts to turn the screws. Then you start getting threats on social media. I’ve had very serious threats to my home. We put in security cameras that connected directly to the Police Department. And now they have trackers who look for you in restaurants. Today it’s worse than ever. Remember, Trump has the command over the Republican Party in every state and county. There’s no anti-Trump Republican bastion.”
But Trump’s bullying influence on the legislative agenda, and on legislators themselves, does not adequately capture how he has shaped Congress. It is his pugilistic, attention-seeking conduct that now permeates the Capitol, and hardly by coincidence. Trump has backed candidates in his own image and has set off a state-by-state redistricting war of attrition in which centrist swing districts have been replaced by hyperpartisan ones. Most of all, Trump has reshaped Congress by example — by showing how bragging, lying and name-calling can amount to a formula for success.
“There’s a degree to which Trump has normalized disreputable behavior among people who’ve been here for a long time,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who came into office two years before Trump’s first term and is now leaving after unsuccessfully running for the Senate. “But it’s also attracted disreputable people. Under Trump, the quality of my colleagues has noticeably decreased.”
Moulton made clear to me that he wasn’t just talking about Republican colleagues and that Trump’s lovers and haters alike have taken on his self-absorption. His view is shared by members on both sides of the aisle. “What you see now are too many people who come in viewing Congress as their green screen,” Joyce said. “And they’re going to make a name for themselves and don’t give a damn about anything else.”
In seeking to understand how Trump has left his mark on Congress, which I’ve been covering for more than a decade and a half, I interviewed more than 30 current and former members from both parties and chambers, as well as congressional aides from both parties. In response to a request for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Olivia Wales, wrote in a statement: “President Trump and the White House have worked closely with our partners in Congress to deliver on many important promises to the American people.” She added: “President Trump will continue working with Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, lower costs for working families and deliver on the commonsense, America First agenda that Republicans were elected with an overwhelming mandate to enact.”
Its current noisy state of brokenness is complicated to untangle. If Trump bears some responsibility, so do the lawmakers who have sublimated themselves to him — and so, for that matter, do the voters who maintain that they want Congress to work together to solve the nation’s problems but then send to Washington individuals who have no interest in doing so. “Internecine warfare is what has become vogue,” said Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who has decided not to seek another term after serving for 22 years. “You’re elected not to get along with the other side and get good things done for the country. You’re elected to fight and kill the other side.”
by Robert Draper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Derek Brahney[ed. I've got nothing against Republicans, some of my best friends are so afflicted haha... and truthfully, there were once some very reasonable and honorable people in the party going all the way back to Eisenhower, Ford, and, in his own way, Bush senior (not to mention folks like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol). But if you're voting for the Republican party as it exists today, or because that's the way you've always voted (or just hate liberals), then you're as complicit as the rest of these spineless jellyfish who move in whatever direction the tide tells them to. I actually have a somewhat shameful admission to make, and that is not being fully invested in the next election (stolen or not). If Republicans win, we'll get the full Monty, and even true believers (and future generations) will be hard pressed to want to revisit that hell. The party might get set back for decades. But if Democrats win they'll be cursed like always to come in after a Republican administration and try to clean up the messes it created and get blamed for those hard choices. Rinse and repeat.]
