This really has been the week for Republican senators sticking their thumbs in the eyes of President Trump but hurting the cause of good conservative governance far more than they hurt the obstreperous billionaire.
Four senators in particular have been obnoxiously obstructionist: two on judicial nominees and two on foreign policy.
I’ve written several times this week about how South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott and outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona have been blocking Trump’s judicial nominees. (I think that practical politics dictate that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should bow to Flake’s demands, but that doesn’t make Flake right: He is directly contradicting his own expressed conservative beliefs by blocking dozens of conservative would-be judges.)
What Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and retiring Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee are doing on other matters is almost as counterproductive.
Paul has been exercising a legislative “hold” that blocks passage of legislation codifying a long-term military aid program for Israel. The aid package was negotiated by former liberal President Barack Obama and conservative Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and it enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress.
Corker, like Flake an bitter critic of Trump who in effect was pushed out of office by the president, is working with disgraced Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to curtail the power of Trump’s incoming director of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. The USAGM oversees the crucial Voice of America service that broadcasts American news abroad to counter foreign propaganda, along with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcast Networks.
Paul at least can claim a sort of ideological consistency, even if unevenly applied. He long has opposed foreign aid in general, and he regularly kicks up a fuss against it. But some have said he seems to inherit from his infamously quirky father a particular animus against the Jewish homeland. Whatever his aims, his specific efforts here to block this one bit of aid — one of the few that earns such bipartisan agreement aside from him — hits a key ally of the United States just when it again has been under attack from Palestinian terrorists.
As for Corker, he and Menendez are trying to attach a provision to a “must pass” spending bill that would prohibit incoming USAGM chief Michael Pack (not confirmed yet, but expected to be) from evicting holdovers from the Obama era. It is not clear what Corker is trying to accomplish, or why. These American information agencies play crucial roles in promoting freedom and U.S. values around the globe — and Pack himself is a highly skilled filmmaker and communicator. He’s also an engaging, good-natured guy (I have crossed paths with him numerous times in the past quarter-century), hardly the type of hard-edged personality to attract fierce detractors.
Many conservatives and Republicans can find fault with Trump. But where his agenda advances conservative values and American interests, it takes pettiness and short-sightedness to block those helpful agenda items in order to press for satisfaction in other, oft-unrelated disputes.
All four of these senators should cease their obstruction. They aren’t teaching Trump a lesson. They’re just making things generally worse.
