Budowsky: Warning to Senate Republicans

The midterm election landslide restoring Democrats to control of the House of Representatives offers an urgent warning to Senate Republicans. If they single-mindedly back President Trump as House Republicans did in 2018, they will end up in the same position, which is where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appears to be leading them today.

Senate Republicans must confront and address the fact that Trump has spoken more outright falsehoods than every previous president combined and does not govern as the president of the United States. He governs as the president of the Trump base, to the exclusion of all other Americans who he repeatedly and aggressively ignores, insults, berates or treats as enemies.

This is a formula for political disaster as House Republicans learned the hard way in 2018, Trump will learn the hard way in the 2020 elections, and Senate Republicans will learn the hard way unless they heed the warnings that are loud and clear from American voters.

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Consider the Trump government shutdown, so-named because the president is on tape claiming ownership of it during a meeting with Democratic leaders, caused by the infamous “wall” that is an unpopular fraud built on a proven lie, which House Democrats won a decisive mandate to defeat in the midterm elections.

Trump’s midterm campaign barnstorming brought a strident, hostile and obsessive attempt to create fear and hatred against the so-called migrant caravan, based on the fraud that it represented a supposed invasion of America by an army of Latin American criminals that required an unpopular wall on the Mexican border which, according to the great lie repeatedly told, would be paid for by Mexico.

House Democrats won a massive wave election mandate against this, and in favor of their call for stronger border enforcement without the wall.

Senate Republicans are now placed in the politically disastrous position of being asked to support a horribly wrong and unpopular shutdown that the president claimed credit for on tape, to support a terribly wrong and unpopular wall that many of them privately deplore.

If McConnell refuses to bring up any shutdown or immigration bill that Trump will not support, he is setting up Senate Republicans for a disastrously losing proposition.  Already Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has strongly and publicly warned about the dangers of Trump, while a growing list of Republican senators has called for ending the shutdown without demanding the wall.

The smart move for Senate Republicans would be to pass a clean bill to end the shutdown without funding the wall, or a short-term bill to keep the government open and begin to expedite dramatic negotiations to enact substantially increased border spending without the wall, tied to ending to the cruel policy of separation of migrant families and providing decisive relief for the “Dreamers.” 

When McConnell refuses to support protection for special counsel Robert Mueller, he is setting Senate Republicans up for historic disaster if Trump fires Mueller — which would be a 20 megaton political bomb exploding in the hands of all Senate Republicans.

Senate Republicans should be alarmed and appalled that Trump named an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has radically asserted that the Supreme Court is an inferior branch of government, and proposed a nominee for attorney general, William Barr, who appeared to lobby for the post by aggressively criticizing the special counsel investigation of the Russian attack against America and allegations of financial corruption by players under investigation.

Two senior Republican senators, Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) and Pat Roberts (Kan.), have already announced their retirement. Other major and dramatic retirement announcements are almost certainly coming.

While I would advise House Democrats to investigate wrongdoing assertively but withhold discussion of impeachment until the special counsel investigation is concluded, Republican leaders should seek a confidential meeting with the president to strongly warn him against actions that would destroy his presidency and his party in Congress.

Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Ark.), who was chief deputy majority whip of the House of Representatives. He holds an LLM in international financial law from the London School of Economics.