When I covered Congress for The Times a quarter century ago, there was a sense that the House and the Senate weren’t just at opposite ends of the Capitol. They were at opposite ends of the earth.
The House was where tempers were supposed to flare, where decorum reliably disintegrated, less a preciously regal sanctum than a proudly ragtag mosh pit. Small wonder that Matt Gaetz found his political home there. While the House has certainly known its share of statesmen and stateswomen, it has long put out a welcome mat for cads.
But the Senate? It prized, or at least preached, dignity. Its members considered themselves a more even-keeled, erudite sort. And most (though not all) were. While a randomly interviewed House member was as likely to spew inanity as insight, most senators had something substantive to say. That was essential to their ethos and integral to their airs.
Not anymore. For decades now, the Senate has been losing its august way, and a second Trump administration will reveal just how shamefully far from its onetime description as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” it has strayed.
Yes, its Republican members owe a degree of deference and robust measure of cooperation to Donald Trump, whom a majority of American voters just elected. But they don’t owe him Gaetz as attorney general, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services or Mehmet Oz as the overseer of Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare.
They’re under no obligation to turn the upper echelons of the federal government into the green room of “Fox & Friends.” Doing so isn’t allowing Trump the tools he needs to effect change. It’s allowing him the fools he needs to turn governing into some obnoxious amalgam of end-zone touchdown jig, “Candid Camera” knockoff and Devil’s Night toilet-papering of the neighbors’ houses.
If senators are honest with themselves, they know that many of Trump’s voters weren’t calling for that; he achieved victory with the crucial help of Americans who wanted lower prices, stronger borders and less wokeness, not bedlam, buffoonery and Elon Musk.
And if senators have any regard for the “advice and consent” charge that the Constitution gives them, they’ll recognize the difference between supplication and service, the incompatibility of obsequiousness and honor. They won’t confirm Trump’s most egregiously inappropriate nominees, and they’ll push back against any attempts by him to circumvent the Senate confirmation process by making those nominees recess appointments.
Those are big ifs, given most Republican senators’ behavior in the time of Trump. For those of you just tuning in to the program, Lindsey Graham didn’t used to be a simpering toady like this. Ted Cruz once fought against Trump.
Mitch McConnell — oof, what to say about Mitch McConnell? He disparaged Trump in private, made all those damning remarks about Trump on the Senate floor after his second impeachment, then didn’t do the one thing necessary to prevent Trump from roaring back: vote to convict him and encourage other Republican senators to follow suit. A man supposedly devoted to the institution of the Senate could — given the way Trump wants to ride roughshod over it now — go down as the handmaiden to its greatest degradation. That’s the stuff of Greek tragedy, though Greek tragedy is too grand an allusion for today’s Senate.
“The Senate’s modern decline began in 1978,” George Packer wrote in a lengthy elegy in The New Yorker, “The Empty Chamber,” in 2010. He said that the increased influence of money in politics, the arrival of C-SPAN cameras in the Capitol, a new breed of conservative warriors and an intensifying partisanship had changed everything.
About three years after Packer’s article, Harry Reid, the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, got rid of the filibuster for presidential nominees other than Supreme Court justices. Roughly two and a half years after that, McConnell, the Senate’s Republican majority leader, refused to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee for a vacant position on the Supreme Court. Those were mile markers on the Senate’s journey toward House-caliber acrimony. The chamber has lurched closer to that destination since.
Some of its newer members may hasten that arrival. Take Senator Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican who was elected to the chamber in 2022. A former mixed martial arts fighter, he challenged Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, to a brawl during a Senate hearing in 2023, telling O’Brien to “stand your butt up.”
Or take Senator-elect Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican who defeated Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, on Nov. 5. The rags-to-riches autobiography that Moreno peddled on the campaign trail was an audaciously lavish fiction, and the Senate is his first elected office, achieved with the help of his considerable personal wealth and the chief MAGA magnate.
“I wear with honor my endorsement from President Trump,” Moreno said this year, singing a song with a melody much different from the one he warbled in 2016, when he referred to Trump as a “lunatic” and a “maniac,” or in 2019, when he said that there was “no scenario” in which he would support Trump.
He’s obviously not much of a fortune teller. But he’s one heck of a sycophant, and he’ll find bounteous Republican company in a deliberative body whose remaining capacity for real, responsible deliberation is about to be put to a defining test.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Times, Dave Kim puzzled over his young son’s affection for “Heidi,” published in 1881. It’s “the three-toed sloth of children’s books; it moves so slowly, with such little action, that whole ecosystems could flourish undisturbed between its pages,” Kim wrote. (Thanks to Devra Small of Huntington, N.Y., and Phillip Hammond of Eustis, Fla., among others, for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, Guy Trebay explained the cultural significance of People magazine’s choice of John Krasinski as this year’s “sexiest man alive”: “In a nation battered and exhausted by a grueling political season, Mr. Krasinski was the ideal middle-of-the-road ticket, visually coded as preppy adjacent, in affect both familiar and humorous, evidently secure in his heterosexual identity and so generally inoffensive as to be the Switzerland of onscreen virility.” (Ambika Kelerchian, Hornby Island, British Columbia, and Frances Pelzman, Durham, N.C., among others)
And Maureen Dowd sized up the bromance — certain to be short-lived — of Trump and Elon Musk, both reckless destructionists: “For now, the two men are just a couple of bros with chain saws making googly eyes at each other.” (Gene Drumm, Denver, and Tucker Spencer-Wallace, Los Angeles, among others)
In The Guardian, Gaby Hinsliff sought the saner side of social media: “I switched to Bluesky back in August when Musk used the Southport riots to promote the idea of civil war in Britain. So far, it feels like swapping stilettos for trainers: Initially you worry about wimping out, then you wonder why you ever put up with crippled feet for so long.” (John D.B. Grimshaw, Lake Forest, Calif.)
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Andrew Coyne processed Americans’ 2024 decision. “Now that the people of the United States have elected a fascist to lead them — a felon to ‘take care that the laws are faithfully executed,’ an insurrectionist to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,’ a rapist, a racist and a narcissistic psychopath to hold the country’s highest position of honor — the question on everyone’s lips naturally is: What does it mean for Canada?” he wrote. (Toby Zanin, Toronto)
In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols pondered Tulsi Gabbard’s paean to Vladimir Putin during a 2022 appearance on Sean Hannity’s television show: “Even Hannity blanched at Gabbard floating off in a haze of Kremlin talking points and cheerleading for Russia. When Hannity is trying to shepherd you back toward the air lock before your oxygen runs out, you’ve gone pretty far out there.” (Patrick Forristal, Loch Lomond, Calif., and Susan Gannon, Bedminster, N.J., among others)
In The New Yorker, David Remnick characterized Trump’s proposed cast for key posts in his second administration as “men and women of perfect jawlines, dubious reputations and rotten ideas.” (Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)
In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell evaluated the naming of Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as heads of a new government agency: “How can you tell Donald Trump’s plan to improve ‘government efficiency’ is off to a promising start? Because his first step was appointing two people to do the same job.” (Gerard Farrell, Summit, N.J., and Bruno Momont, Manhattan)
Also in The Post, Ruth Marcus took in Trump’s galling choice for attorney general: “No mother says to her son, ‘Why can’t you be more like Matt Gaetz.’” (David Sherman, Arlington, Va.) Her Post colleague George F. Will called Gaetz “an arrested-development adolescent with the swagger of a sequined guitarist in a low-rent casino.” (Korleen Kraft, Portland, Ore., and Bill Tanski, Stratford, Conn., among many others)
In that column, Will further noted that while some politicians have taken intellectual issue with the Constitution’s separation of powers, “Trump merely regrets the separation viscerally, as a hound regrets the leash.” (Max Sinclair, DeKalb, Ill., and Paul Mesches, Austin, Texas, among others)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
On a Personal Note
Friends curious about college life today ask me if, as a professor at Duke, I feel like I’m tiptoeing across a minefield of latent microaggressions and worry that the slightest misstep will land me in a stockade outside the campus Sweetgreen. I tell them I lack the litheness for tiptoeing, my entire personality is a microaggression and there’s no campus Sweetgreen. Though there is a campus Panera.
They ask me if students are obsessively concerned about a good job after college. I ask them if they’re obsessively concerned about Trump as president again. Some anxieties aren’t disorders; they’re proof of consciousness. The economy is fickle, Trump is Trump and alarm is in order.
What’s most remarkable about my students isn’t their wokeness or pre-professionalism. It’s their sogginess. They drink water constantly. They carry water everywhere. If the young people who fought in World War II were the Greatest Generation, the young people pursuing their bachelor’s degrees today are the Moistest one. They live on the cusp of some imagined desert, beside an oasis that’s their last call.
Sometimes I glance at the desks in a lecture hall or the big table in a seminar room and think I’m looking at an art exhibit of Exotic Cylinders. There are improbably tall, slender water vessels and squatter, wider ones, though almost all taper at the base, the better to fit into the cup holders of cars and cardio equipment. They are shiny and matte, turquoise and lavender, their provenance imprinted on them in distinctive fonts. Here a Corkcicle or an Owala, there a Stanley or a Yeti.
Those brand names are a clue that part of what I’m seeing is pure commercialism: If you build it, they will fill it with water. Canny entrepreneurs have turned the frumpy canteens of yesteryear, associated with cowboys and mountaineers, into the spiffy fashion statements of today, dangling from student knapsacks and essential for any vigorous Peloton session.
But there’s more to it than that. There are principles, politics: The refillable Hydro Flask or ThermoFlask replaces the disposable plastic receptacle and represents scrupulous stewardship of the environment. There are economics: A beloved, portable vessel with water from a tap obviates an Evian or a Dasani from the convenience store refrigerator case.
And there is self-care, an ineluctable phrase that didn’t exist — or had negligible exposure — when I attended college. My students correctly wager that health-wise, including skin-wise, hydration is best, so lugging around liquid sustenance is a kind of personal optimization. It abets peak performance. Along with a dewy complexion.
I reflect on my desiccated youth — when there were old-style water fountains rather than newfangled water stations, and I had to bend over and slurp up enough to last me several hours — and feel foolish and cheated, the improbable survivor of a parched and primitive time. I now understand why my fellow boomers and I made a mess of the world, and the generations after ours should cut us some slack.
We were thirsty.
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