Fred Kaplan thunders that we're seeing Congressional abdication by both parties. Our elected leaders are afraid to do the job they were elected to do.
Got to stay after those Congresscritters.... the majority of members of the 21st-century Congress—in both parties—don’t want the responsibility of going to war, mainly because they don’t want the blame if the war goes badly, as wars often do.
Trump and his crew are taking advantage of this shirking to push their powers further, and they are counting on Congress to let them. Yes, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump, but the Senate will almost certainly acquit him—and might not even hold a trial, by any meaningful sense of the word. And even when the House was holding its impeachment hearings, the Democratic chairmen declined to enforce their subpoenas of witnesses and documents, declined to hold no-shows in contempt of Congress, and declined to have marshals arrest them, which might have made everybody take the proceedings a bit more seriously.
Trump, Pence, Esper, and the others are using Congress as a doormat. They scoff and smirk at the questions they’re asked—at the notion that anyone outside the White House, the Pentagon, and Foggy Bottom has the right to ask questions. And they’ll keep heaving their contempt on Congress, on whatever articles of the Constitution they don’t much like, on any Americans who didn’t vote for their boss, until a majority of legislators take their own jobs seriously—or the voters replace them with candidates who say that they will.
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