The Senate Proves Once Again That It’s the World’s Most Useless Deliberative Body |
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The Senate Proves Once Again That It’s the World’s Most Useless Deliberative Body
Despite his denying the legitimacy of Biden’s election and making violent threats, Markwayne Mullin breezed through his Senate confirmation to become the new head of the DHS.
Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) takes the oath during his confirmation hearing for secretary of Homeland Security on March 18, 2026, in Washington, DC.
As the US Senate seeks to end the Department of Homeland Security funding shutdown by finding a workable compromise on reforms to the unconstitutional and murderous Immigration and Customs Enforcement putsch in American cities, it found time to confirm a new head of the DHS who is almost certainly going to expand ICE’s reign of terror. The legislative chamber that likes to call itself the “world’s greatest deliberative body” mostly phoned in the confirmation of Oklahoma GOP Senator Markwayne Mullin as new DHS edgelord. The most nettlesome sticking point in his confirmation hearings was Mullin’s comments that a neighbor’s rib-breaking assault on his conference colleague Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chair Rand Paul of Kentucky was probably justified.
Mullin, true to form, refused to apologize and accused Paul of conducting “character assassination” from his committee chairman’s perch—a classic Trumpian plaint converting a delusional bout of aggression into fodder for grievance. Given Mullin’s previous violent threats in Senate—he infamously challenged Teamster President Sean O’Brien to a fistfight over a string of derisive tweets in a 2023 committee hearing—Paul’s opening challenge to Mullin should have prompted a searching inquiry into the nominee’s character. Instead, the committee shrugged it off, together with Mullin’s troubling standing as an election denier at a moment when President Donald Trump is threatening to deploy ICE thugs to election precincts as part of the GOP’s authoritarian crackdown on ballot access.
After the Trump administration ditched former DHS Director Kristi Noem for her clueless sanctioning of lethal ICE attacks on peaceful protesters and detainees (compounded by the unforgivable MAGA thoughtcrime of implicating Trump himself in ICE’s brownshirt assaults), senators were insisting that her successor initiate an across-the-board policy reset in an agency that’s targeting immigrant communities and fundamental First Amendment protection under the bogus guise of detaining and deporting violent criminals and dangerous predators. Yet the Senate did what it’s done throughout the second Trump term: inertly rubber-stamp the administration’s wildly........