Almost immediately after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape rocked the 2016 presidential campaign, Sen. Mike Lee made headlines with an unexpected reaction to the controversy. In a Facebook video that’s no longer online, the Utah Republican urged Donald Trump to end his candidacy and allow GOP officials to nominate someone else.
“Step down,” Lee said a month before Election Day 2016. “Allow someone else to carry the banner of [conservative] principles.”
At the time, the Utahan still appeared eager to present himself to the public as a serious and principled lawmaker. Eight years later, Lee has adopted a dramatically different partisan posture in the wake of Trump’s criminal conviction. The Associated Press reported:
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, circulated his own letter in which he suggested it was the White House that “made a mockery” of the rule of law and altered politics in “un-American” ways. He and other senators threatened to stall Senate business until Republicans take action. “Those who turned our judicial system into a political cudgel must be held accountable,” Lee said.
It is, by any fair measure, a curious document. The day after a jury of Trump’s peers held him accountable for his crimes, Lee took the lead in circulating this one-paragraph statement. On social media, the GOP senator declared, “Strongly worded statements are not enough. … We are no longer cooperating with any Democrat [sic] legislative priorities or nominations, and we invite all concerned Senators to join our stand.”
It was signed by seven other far-right senators, including Florida’s Marco Rubio and Ohio’s J.D. Vance: Republicans rumored to be in contention for the party’s vice presidential nomination. (The total number of signatories soon after grew to 10 when Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson added their names to the list.)
The text of the circulated letter blames the Biden White House for a local district attorney’s office prosecution — a baseless claim unsupported by evidence — which Lee and his cohorts use as the justification for a Senate tantrum.
In other words, in response to a made-up conspiracy theory, for which Republicans have no proof, several GOP senators have declared they will stop “cooperating” with Democratic legislation and nominations.
At this point, I know what you’re thinking. “Hold on,” you’re saying. “What difference does it make if some of the Senate’s most far-right members stop ‘cooperating’ with the Democratic majority? It’s not as if any of these GOP members were known for being constructive and bipartisan members anyway. It sounds like they’ll simply keep doing what they were already doing before Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies.”
The procedural nuances matter. The Senate, on a day-to-day basis, functions in large part by unanimous consent. Yes, the institution often appears slow and sclerotic, but determined members still have the capacity to make matters even worse through tactical delays. And it appears that Lee and his far-right colleagues intend to do exactly that — not because Senate Democrats have done anything wrong, and not because the White House was responsible for Trump’s prosecution, but because of an imaginary conspiracy that Republicans prefer to treat as true. Or put another way, Lee and nine other Senate Republicans will deliberately stand in the way of their institution doing the people’s business because local prosecutors held a private citizen accountable for his crimes. These GOP senators apparently believe their job is to elevate Trump’s interests above the nation’s interests. What’s less clear, however, is the possible remedy. What, exactly, do Lee and his cohorts expect to happen? What ransom do they expect to be paid in order to allow the Senate to function as it should? If the answer is that federal officials will somehow meddle in a local criminal matter, intervening to free Trump from accountability for his felonies, that isn’t going to happen — because it can’t.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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