Given that President Donald Trump antagonized a pair of Republican senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, many political observers expected the now-lame duck lawmakers to occasionally stand up to the president. Indeed, when they said they would vote not to confirm acting attorney general Todd Blanche unless he guaranteed Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund to supporters would not occur, it seemed as if they were doing precisely that.
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Now that it has been reported they will vote to support Blanche after he gave them a non-binding statement to not move forward with the fund, political observers are baffled — although one conservative commentator has a scathing theory.
“Understanding why politicians do what they do is easy,” wrote The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio on Monday. “Usually.” Yet as he pointed out, it is far from easy to explain Tillis’ and Cornyn’s decision.
“Three of the usual four motives that drive politicians plainly don’t apply to Cornyn and Tillis,” Catoggio wrote. “They’re at no risk of losing a primary. They owe nothing to their partisan tribe, which chased them out of politics at Trump’s behest. And they no longer need to prioritize keeping the Republican donor class happy.”
He also said that, while it initially appeared Cornyn and Tillis were opposing Blanche’s confirmation out of principle, their capitulation disproved that theory. After all, Blanch merely signed a deal saying that he would not implement the slush fund, but that original deal stipulated that all parties involved — including the IRS, Trump and his sons — need to sign off to modify it, and Blanche is currently the sole signatory. Catoggio also pointed out that the deal still allows Trump and his family to commit tax crimes without fear of consequences.
“Given the near certainty that Blanche will resurrect the fund in some form after he’s confirmed and the absolute certainty that he’ll embarrass the Senate with other corrupt and vindictive abuses of power, agreeing to confirm him amounts to the two senators essentially volunteering to be seen as rubes in hindsight,” Catoggio opined.
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He speculated that the two men are still partisan Republicans, but felt enough discomfort at Blanche’s nomination and anger at Trump turning on them that they felt the need to put on a show of opposing Blanche.
“My best attempt to explain Cornyn and Tillis is that they always intended to support this nomination for knee-jerk partisan tribal reasons but felt obliged by their lame-duck status to make some token show of resistance to it,” Catoggio wrote. “They’re old-guard institutionalist Republicans (which is why they’re out of a job) and so they probably found the idea of the Senate rubber-stamping a figure as grossly unfit as Blanche unseemly. Their colleagues had little choice but to meekly acquiesce—they still answer to Trump and his morally bankrupt voters, after all—but the retirees in the chamber no longer do.”
He added, “So the two found a middle way that happens to reflect the traditional conservative establishment’s general approach to Trumpism dating back to 2016. They made noises about their own authority and holding Trump accountable, and then they rolled over and gave him everything he wanted anyway. That’s what being an “institutionalist” means in a party eroded by fascist sensibilities: Occasionally one must insist on a simulacrum of separation of powers, as a nod to the Founding vision, before completely capitulating.”
Concluding that “it amounts to a hoax,” Catoggio declared that “when the history of this period is written, let’s hope the authors have the sense to understand that it wasn’t the Trumps and Blanches who made it possible, it was the Cornyns and Tillises.”
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