Donald Trump’s lame obsession with Elon Musk is actually helping Senate Democrats get stuff done.
As the current Senate majority races to approve all of President Joe Biden’s pending judicial nominations during what remains of the lame-duck session, five GOP senators missed confirmation votes on Tuesday—including Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty who had been invited to watch a SpaceX starship launch with Trump in Texas.
Even though he’d so obviously gotten in his own way, Trump jumped on Truth Social Tuesday to demand that more senators show up to “hold the line” against Biden’s judicial nominees.
Tensions among Senate Republicans have been at an all-time high as they find themselves momentarily helpless against the Democrats’ lame-duck blitz. Without a majority, playing a numbers game on who shows up is their only hope. Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Ohio Senator JD Vance were among the several Republicans who missed Senate votes that stretched late into Monday evening.
“I’m a bit frustrated,” West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito told reporters Tuesday. “After last night’s voting extravaganza, I wonder what we are doing.”
“If we don’t show up, we lose,” said North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis at a GOP policy luncheon Tuesday. “I don’t care what the reasons were. We have fewer than 15 scheduled legislative days. You have to show up. Period. End of story. There’s nothing more important.”
After the luncheon, North Dakota Senator John Hoeven stressed that it was important that as many Republicans as possible were present for these votes. “Because, you know, we could win possibly some of those votes if we have all our folks here. Particularly in the circuit court,” he said.
Not everyone is open to that kind of criticism. When a right-wing pundit tried to call out Vance for missing the votes Tuesday, he had a complete meltdown, claiming he was way too busy to bother showing up and that it wouldn’t make a difference if he did. Within an hour, he had deleted the temper tantrum, as it was explicitly at odds with what Trump had demanded.
Vance has since returned to Capitol Hill to drum up support for Trump’s unfavorable Cabinet nominees Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, who are both facing allegations of sexual misconduct. Cruz, however, has remained MIA. He and Indiana Senator Mike Braun were the only two Republican senators absent Wednesday, while their Democratic colleagues confirmed two more judges on Wednesday by 50–48. So it’s plausible that if Cruz and Braun had actually been in attendance, they might’ve been able to block those confirmations, seeing as Vice President Kamala Harris is on vacation and not available to break a tie.
There are currently 45 judicial vacancies and 17 pending nominees.
JD Vance arrived on Capitol Hill Wednesday with the bleak task of drumming up support for Trump’s would-be attorney general, Matt Gaetz.
“Donald J. Trump just won a major electoral victory. His coattails turned a 49-51 senate to a 53-47 senate,” the vice president–elect wrote on X. “He deserves a cabinet that is loyal to the agenda he was elected to implement.”
Trump has now named multiple people accused of sexual misconduct or consciously allowing sexual misconduct to his future Cabinet. Gaetz, a former Florida representative and MAGA hard-liner, has been the subject of ongoing investigations from the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department regarding allegations of sex trafficking and having sex with a minor at a sex party in 2017. Gaetz attempted to end the probe by resigning from Congress last week just before the House Ethics Committee was set to release its finding. Many people now want that report released, and Senate Democrats on Wednesday requested records from the FBI’s own Gaetz investigation so that these could be considered during confirmation hearings if need be.
“This is what the Radical Left Lunatics do to people. They dirty them up, they destroy them, and then they spit them out,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social. “They are trying that right now with some great American Patriots who are only trying to fix the mess that the Democrats have made of our Country. WE WILL WIN!!! MAGA.”
This defense comes as evidence continues to mount against Gaetz. ABC News is reporting that the House Ethics Committee has documents that show Gaetz paying over $10,000 to two women between July 2017 and January 2019—women who later served as witnesses in the House and Justice Department probes against Gaetz.
The House Ethics Committee is spending Wednesday debating and voting on whether or not to release the report.
Donald Trump’s plan for using the military to carry out mass deportations is already drawing opposition from the Pentagon and even from at least one Republican senator. Several officials in the Department of Defense spoke to The Intercept anonymously, with one calling Trump’s proposal “absolutely insane.”
“I never thought I’d see the day when this was a ‘serious’—put that in scare quotes—policy,” the official said, adding that there were significant logistical and legal obstacles to the “unrealistic and unserious” plan. Another official called the idea “insanity.”
Senator Rand Paul told Newsmax Tuesday that such a military deployment would be a “huge mistake.”
“I’m not in favor of sending the Army in uniforms into our cities to collect people,” Paul said in a possible nod to his libertarian roots. “I think it’s a terrible image, and that’s not what we use our military for, we never have, and it’s actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring the Army into our cities.” (The Brennan Center for Justice recently published a recap of the legal problems with what Trump is proposing.)
Paul stressed that he wasn’t opposed to mass deportations but believed they should be carried out by government agencies or local law enforcement instead of the military. “I will not support an emergency [declaration] to put the Army into our cities—I think that’s a huge mistake,” Paul said, later adding that “I really think us, as conservatives who are supportive of Trump, need to caution him about sending the Army into our cities.”
Trump’s plan involves declaring a national emergency to use members of the military to carry out his ruthless deportation effort, unprecedented in its scale. Some of his senior advisers, such as Stephen Miller, have said that even some immigrants in the country legally, such as those under DACA and temporary protected status, would also be deported.
Tom Homan, Trump’s........