Trump and Republicans Have Finally Broken the Senate

Normal people have no reason to understand or appreciate the extraordinary individual and collective self-regard traditionally enjoyed by the Senate. Created by the Founders for the explicit purpose of restraining popular control over policy-making, the upper chamber has forever valued long, windy debates; operated according to arcane rules that limit the prerogatives of the majority; and treated individual senators as though they wear actual togas and defer to no one other than the gods (and occasionally constituents, though six-year terms provide quite a bit of job security). Senators typically look down on their theoretically co-equal House counterparts as grubby lilliputians stampeded through party-line votes by all-powerful leaders and spending every waking hour running for reelection.

In truth, Senate traditions have been eroding for a good while now. The chamber has been forced to create multiple loopholes inhibiting the power of the filibuster to obstruct both legislation and confirmations (the latter being a unique Senate responsibility) of judges and executive-branch appointees. For all the mythology of senators as independent actors, partisan polarization has affected them just like everyone else in American politics. They’re vulnerable to disciplinary actions by partisan activists, powerful lobbyists, and most especially the White House with its ability to control and sometimes direct disbursements of federal funds.

But while both major parties have played a role in the gradual transformation of the Senate into an institution that often resembles the House, the Republican-controlled 119th Congress, operating under the whip of the president, may be finally breaking the Senate as we have known it.

The very appellation given to the budget-reconciliation bill utilized to enact Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signified the radical centralization of power in the White House and a handful of congressional leaders, at the expense, in particular, of Senate committees and individual senators, even those in the majority party. Most Republican senators, in fact, objected to the one-bill framework from the get-go, to no avail. But it’s not just that Trump and his allies deployed to the maximum extent possible the tools available for draining senators of power and purpose; they created new tools that made a mockery of Senate traditions, most notably in blowing up the system (relying on nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office numbers and rulemaking by the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian) for ensuring that budget reconciliation bills don’t increase budget deficits (to the tune of trillions of dollars in “free” tax cuts).

The Senate’s current management has at the same time made colleagues from the minority party as impotent as their House colleagues. With the filibuster off the table for most legislative content, the only pressure point Senate Democrats have had is the unsavory option (which just enough of them chose not to exercise) of forcing a government shutdown when stopgap spending bills ran out. Indeed, after initially promising to restore “regular order” in the construction of spending bills that would require bipartisan support, Senate Republicans have gone along with the demands of Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, to claw back previously approved spending through a process that just requires majority approval. And it appears that when the current stopgap spending measure expires at the end of September, they will again dare Senate Democrats to shut down the government if they don’t accept a Republican blueprint dictated by the House.

Democrats have responded to all this wild partisanship and violation of Senate traditions by taking advantage of their time-honored ability to slow-walk confirmations, already made a bit of a joke by the Senate GOP’s abject cowardice about challenging grossly unqualified Trump nominees for a host of offices. Are their Republican colleagues responding with offers to respect their own institution’s traditions a bit more faithfully? No, as the New York Times’ Carl Hulse reports, they’re looking at killing the traditions altogether:

Senate Republicans are actively exploring unilateral changes in Senate rules to speed confirmation of Trump administration nominees in the fall after they failed to break stiff Democratic resistance to executive branch picks before leaving on their August recess …

Triggering a rules change through majority muscle is known in the Senate as going nuclear because of the extreme partisan nature of such a move, as well as the cloud it can cast over the institution. An incendiary rules fight next month could poison relations just as Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline for funding the government and the Senate is making rare progress on individual spending bills.

Did Democrats force Republicans to “go nuclear”? It actually seems like they’ve been engaged in good-faith negotiations despite massive pressure from party activists to “fight” and “stop” Trump at every opportunity:

In an initial round of talks, Democrats offered to clear the way for about 25 relatively noncontentious nominees. In exchange, they wanted the White House to release an array of funds it has held up, including $5 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $50 million for combating AIDS overseas and $142 million for UNICEF programs along with $300 million in humanitarian assistance for Gaza.

When Republicans then pushed for more confirmations, Democrats countered with a demand that the White House commit in writing that it would not try to force any more spending cuts through Congress before Oct. 1.

Negotiations broke down and Mr. Trump lashed out at Mr. Schumer on social media, telling him to “GO TO HELL!” Mr. Thune adjourned the Senate and sent lawmakers home.

While Thune may have been willing to play ball, his Lord and Master pitched a temper tantrum and renewed demands that the proud U.S. Senate be run like Mar-a-Lago — and, for that matter, like Mike Johnson’s House, but with bigger offices.

The odds are pretty good that Republicans will hang onto the Senate in 2026 thanks to an exceptionally friendly landscape. But they may find themselves controlling the empty shell of an institution with as much tradition and dignity as the cheesy gilded White House that rules it.