Against Feckless Senate Recusal

Do not sacrifice the Senate’s autonomy to protect an ephebophile coke fiend.

President-elect Donald Trump, ever America’s Caligula, wants his lickspittle former Representative Matt Gaetz confirmed as Attorney General via a recess appointment.

It seems unlikely the Senate votes itself into recess as its first order of business. Liars suggest they would not need to vote for adjournment because Mr. Trump has the right to adjourn the Senate. He does not. Or rather, the dotard only has this power as a tie-breaker if the House and Senate both hold a vote on recessing and come to an impasse.

To pursue this option, the House and Senate would have to vote away the Senate’s Constitutional mandate to advise and consent on Cabinet appointees. Politicians usually do not vote away their power and autonomy (only ours).

Mr. Trump is asking that the Senate willingly debase and neuter itself—slice off its testicles, render itself impotent—in exchange for elevating the coked-up sex pest ephebophile Mr. Gaetz, who is unanimously disliked by the body, to a position that some Senators might feel more qualified for. I doubt I would agree to half as much even for someone I adored.

Senate Republicans may agree to bypass confirmation hearings to make an accused sex trafficker into the Attorney General, like some sick mash-up of My Fair Lady and Being There, but if events transpire in that way, we know we are nearing the real end of America’s Republic period.

House Speaker Mike Johnson disgraces the already shameful Republican House majority with his weird insistence that Mr. Gaetz, who resigned his position in the House two days short of an ethics report being released, is somehow a private citizen. What poor precedent does it set that a man under an ethics investigation may have the results of that ethics investigation used to scrutinize him? This is not a monkey’s paw, where I should be fearful of my wish. If the Congress’s business took it through someone’s dirty laundry, that work product was paid for and belongs to We the People, who should be ready to riot if the House knows Mr. Gaetz did worse than merely Venmo teenagers but said nothing to the Senate because of Speaker Johnson’s disingenuous propriety.

Future schoolchildren, who hopefully will never meet Mr. Gaetz, will chortle when they get to this page in the history books. Here, America waits while the Senate debates surrendering our system of checks and balances so their beloved Mr. Trump might appoint men they oppose to positions of command. To advise and consent is the Constitutional role of every Senator; one who willfully votes to give away that power for no reason but slavishness is no Senator.

My friends tell me the hour is very late, that every Republican leader, to a man (excluding the goodly Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, of course, and perhaps Former-Republican Leader “Cocaine” Mitch McConnell) has already decided to effectively dissolve and subsume his own will into that of a leader whom they openly call stupid. Very well. They should resign.

If Speaker Johnson believes that every Congressperson is entitled to keep his sex parties secret so long as his career is on an upward trajectory, he is unfit. Anyone in DC countenancing this scheme must go home and leave the business of governing our great nation to Americans of character.