Billionaire Elon Musk contends that the Senate “must respond to the will of the people” and pick a leader to replace Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who was approved by President-elect Donald Trump.
No, they must not. Literally.
It might come as a surprise to young voters and political neophytes that the Constitution created three equal branches of government. It’s right there near the top of the document. The separation of powers prevents any branch from abusing its position. This doesn’t change because your favorite candidate won the Electoral College or even the imaginary “popular vote.” Contra Musk, the Senate was specifically built to be a “necessary fence,” as James Madison put it, against fleeting majoritarian impulses.
If the president is allowed to pick the Senate leader, that leader will be a feeble sycophant who spends his time mollifying the man who got him his job. That’s what partisans desire. It’s the opposite of what the Senate is built to do.
Yet, the debate over the next Senate leader seems to be centered on who will be more loyal to Trump. Charlie Kirk, who has considerable sway over the party, recently posted on X an attack on Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who is running for Senate leader. The post didn’t highlight any policy disagreements. The problem is Thune, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 general election, had the temerity in 2020 to say he hoped someone else would run for the presidency.
So what? In the 2008 primaries, future Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) endorsed Hillary Clinton over former President Barack Obama. Howard Baker Jr., Senate minority leader in 1980, ran against former President Ronald Reagan in the primaries. There are scores of examples of similar intraparty debates. This might be the first time a party has demanded loyalty oaths.
In the end, a GOP senate and president will have numerous aligning interests. They will mostly be on the same page, but they will always have diverging interests. Senators should be girding themselves for a fight against White House efforts to weaken their institution or undermine conservatism — the ideology most Republicans claim to advocate. Their disposition on these matters should remain constant through every president.
Recall that after the GOP failed to overturn Obamacare in 2017, Trump, then-president, took to X and lambasted Republicans, demanding McConnell end the filibuster rule.
If the Senate leader had listened to Trump, Democrats would have spent the first two years of the Biden administration passing generational federal reforms with simple majorities. Like Obamacare, they would have been impossible to repeal. Among them would have been a single-payer plan and sweeping electoral “reform” that would have overturned thousands of state laws and decimated election integrity. The country would have been in a far worse place.
Presidents have short-term agendas. They tend to abuse power. Trump is more mercurial than most. This is why we don’t let them pick Senate leaders. We don’t need any more Schumers cheering on President Joe Biden as he kept pushing unconstitutional debt “forgiveness” on student loans. If the Senate had the spine to defy George Washington, it could say no to Trump on occasion.
Partisans often convince themselves that their victories are unique epoch-changing realignments. It is almost never the case. Trump can accomplish many positive things, but he is not functioning under a once-in-a-century “mandate,” as Musk and others have contended. Obama, for example, not only had a bigger Electoral College victory in 2008 (365-312), sweeping every swing state, but a bigger Senate majority (57-52 seats.) Obama’s minions, unopposed, ran their party into the ground. Within two years, Democrats began losing seats by the hundreds. From then on, the president relied on unilateral executive actions to press his agenda, and there was not a peep from the Senate.
However, an executive legacy is temporary, which Trump proved when he decimated Obama’s.
Then again, even if Trump had captured the most earth-shattering landslide in American history in 2024, there really is no such thing as a “mandate,” which suggests the White House is now imbued with some extra power. Congress still passes the bills. Presidents still sign them. The Senate still makes its own rules and picks its own leaders in the manner it chooses.
Trump does have a mandate to name administration officials who are loyal to him and promise to champion his agenda. It is probably useful to have dissenting voices in any administration, but there’s certainly nothing unique about desiring allegiance from your key hires. Last time around, Trump was not only at war with executive agencies, which undermined or ignored the duly elected president at every turn, but he was also at war with his own appointees. Constantly firing staff makes for good television but unstable governance.
No one is stopping Trump from using his executive power to defang federal agencies and deregulate.
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Now, I’m sure many people find the above argument antiquated, stultifying, and naive. They know “what time it is,” and I do not. I have no doubt whoever the Senate ends up picking will be acquiescing to Trump’s demands. Even now, when the president-elect insisted the Senate use recess appointments to push through his nominees right away, all three candidates for leadership, Thune, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), quickly agreed.
However, bending to every whim of one man, even a man you agree with most of the time, is no way to govern.