This story was originally published by TheStatehouseFile.com
By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
February 5, 2025
U.S. Sen. Todd Young, R-Indiana, just learned a valuable lesson.
That lesson?
It’s no fun trying to be the designated driver at a drunken spree.
Young contemplated voting against the confirmation of former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence before ceding to overwhelming political pressure and the reality that his party has lost both its will and its way.
Young’s critics cite a phone conversation he had with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as the turning point that prompted the Hoosier senator and former Marine intelligence officer to yield. Musk, who spent more than $250 million on the 2024 presidential election to help President Donald Trump return to the White House, has vowed to fund primary challenges to any Republican who refuses to confirm Trump’s Cabinet picks.
I’m not going to minimize the squeeze a plutocrat such as Musk can put on a senator from a small state.
But I suspect the true decisive moment came when Young’s colleague, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, announced she would vote for Gabbard’s confirmation.
That left Young in the unpleasant position of being the scold calling for decorum at a keg party that already had spiraled out of control.
Only a dullard—and Todd Young is a smart guy—continues to fight when the battle is lost.
The notion of the Senate confirmation process serving as a check on unbridled power in the executive branch—the very thing the founders of this nation feared most—is a twisted joke.
Trump’s nominees have learned an essential lesson from their master: Lying is but a means to an end.
Checks and balances are for sissies.
Trump’s three nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—vowed to the Senate that the Roe v. Wade ruling and the reproductive rights it protected were “settled law” they would not revisit.
Then, once on the bench, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett revisited that “settled law” and unsettled it, denying millions of women control of the right to plan their own families.
More recently, Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised the senators that any possible pardons for the members of the mob involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection would be considered on a case-by-case basis.
As soon as Bondi’s confirmation was assured, Trump issued blanket pardons and commutations for all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
Similarly, Gabbard wrote Young a letter promising him that, despite her history, she would not cozy up to Russia or otherwise compromise U.S. intelligence gathering.
Doubtless, her promises are just as genuine as those of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Bondi were.
Many Republican senators grumbled about the sophistry and disingenuousness of the Trump nominees.
But not one did anything about it.
This only encouraged more duplicity from Trump’s nominees—and more aggressive demolition of the institutions of self-government on the part of a self-pitying and vindictive president restored to power.
The sad thing is that many Republicans know that Trump’s nominees for high positions are not just unqualified, but spectacularly unqualified. Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kash Patel are the president’s middle-finger salute to the belief that expertise, knowledge and achievement matter.
These Republicans also know that much of what Trump is doing will damage not only this country and millions of lives but also wreak havoc with the GOP and its political prospects.
The rest of the world has taken the president’s measure even if his fellow Republicans have not. Other nations’ leaders know that beneath all the Trumpian bluster is a weak man they can roll.
The Trumpian trade war charades provide a clear example.
They follow a predictable pattern. Trump threatens a draconian tariff on products from, say, Colombia. Colombia responds with tariffs that target the rural states—including Indiana—that are Trump’s base. Trump yields, claiming victory because Colombia agrees to continue abiding by a practice already in place.
Trump partisans lap it up, but the rest of the world knows which side blinked in the contest of wills.
And the inebriated destruction of America’s long experiment in self-governance continues, unchecked by what once was the world’s great deliberative body, the U.S. Senate.
“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” the British conservative philosopher statesman Edmund Burke once said.
But if they do nothing, can they still consider themselves good men?
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
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