Handed Over

“James Madison’s design — ‘ambition must be made to counteract ambition’ — assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive. He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.”
The Week, quoting Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.

I understand Mr. Zakaria’s point, but I feel it somewhat obscures an important factor. For many Republican lawmakers the congregants in “the personality cult of one man” are the people whose support they need to be reelected. No matter how well a lawmaker’s chosen policies might serve the nation as a whole, they cannot implement them if they are voted out of office.

Donald Trump controls the Republican Party because he is able to influence it’s activists and primary electorate to vote in accordance with what he understands his interests to be, because those voters believe that those are also their interests. And this is due to a long history of “the political establishment,” as it were, paying lip service to making people’s lives better, but sacrificing their direct interests at nearly every opportunity. Donald Trump only needed to have just enough credibility to get people to think that “this time might be different,” and he was in.

Republican members of Congress have the ability to neither counteract the ambition of the President with their own ambitions nor to jealously guard their powers against the executive, because any ambition other than using their powers to be an instrument of the President’s will is punished by the “MAGA” base. And a public airing of the missteps that brought Congress to this place won’t do anyone any good. As long as those people who are motivated to turn out for Republican primary elections believe that if President Trump stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone to death, that it would be the best thing for them and the nation at large, the Republican party doesn’t need to “surrender its institutional ambition;” it has already lost any ability it may have had to retain it.

The best way to save a home from a fire is to prevent ignition. Once hoses are being taken from the hook-and-ladder and attached to hydrants, the question isn’t “Will the structure burn?” but "How much of it will remain once the flames are extinguished?”

Mr. Zakaria’s point, at least as quoted by The Week, starts with noting that for partisans, corruption isn’t about what is being done, but about who is doing it. This interpretation of The Rule of Law is nothing new at this point. This is a function of the fact that holding a member of one’s own “tribe” accountable comes with costs. People who understand impartial application of the rules to be fundamentally unaffordable are predictably unwilling to pay what it asks.