President Donald Trump has so crippled Congress, Republican lawmakers are coming forward to denounce everything from the gridlock to the president’s obsession with unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Now a breaking report reveals that they literally feel the climate under Trump is such that the Senate has become a place where good ideas are simply impossible to implement.
“The Senate just seems to be a place where good ideas are going to die,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) told Semafor's Burgess Everett and Nicholas Wu on Thursday. Similarly Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) argued that while he would like to support a clean stopgap funding bill, “I’m just saying: I don’t know if it’s a practical plan.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Semafor that “I’m worried about our ability to pass things in general.” Another staunch Trump supporter, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), observed to Semafor that “going home and telling the voters: ‘I can’t get this done because of our own rules, that we can change,’ is not a real satisfactory answer. But yes, they’re content to do that.”
The Semafor reporters said that Trump has tried to get around this legislative logjam by doing away with the filibuster, which allows senators to ostensibly deliver indefinite speeches (or, in practice, simply say they will do so) to stop policies that they oppose. A filibuster can only be broken if 60 or more senators vote against it, which Republicans have struggled to do as they only have 53 seats in the Senate.
“But the filibuster isn’t going anywhere, despite Trump’s constant cajoling on social media and in speeches to abolish it,” Everett and Wu reported. “Ditto the voter ID SAVE America Act.”
To get around the political problem poised by his legislative failures, Trump is widely believed to be attempting to steal the 2026 midterm elections.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet in June. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
Vicuña concluded, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”