Donald Trump may have aligned himself with Putin's Russia over our nation's own law enforcement officials, endorsed a Russian plan to allow Russian agents to see the evidence Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI have assembled against him and to allow the Putin government to interrogate some of the regime's most hated whistleblowers, and generally humiliated himself and his nation in Helsinki yesterday, but that doesn't mean any of the Republicans currently attempting to distance-themselves-but-not-really from Trump are going to do anything about his surrender to Putin's whims.
And the reason, says GOP strategist Mike Murphy, is because there's nothing in it for them.
Sure, Trump may be making noises about sharing secrets of the Russian espionage investigation with the Russian spies who did it, but what's really important here is maintaining my wee little fiefdom of political power. Of course.
An "on background" excuse from another anonymous Republican, this one a senator, was gleaned by reporter Robert Costa. That senator bravely said they would "wait and see what they hear from McConnell and Trump allies at lunch today before saying more on record."
That lunch came and went. Oh, but it turns out the Russia-Trump summit didn't come up. It appears to have slipped their minds.
Sens. Susan Collins and Chuck Grassley, meanwhile, continue to be profiles in whatever the opposite of courage is—dish soap, perhaps? A muddy puddle?
And that seems to be the general refrain the Republicans have decided on as a party. Yes, the sitting president may be dangerously out of control and harming national security in very direct ways, but there's nothing that can be done about it. Our hands are tied; if Donald Trump wanted to nuke Kansas City tomorrow and ship the rubble to Moscow to be used as footing in a new series of Russian dog parks, we could at best hold another round of hearings or something.
AT THE END OF THE DAY, senior Republican aides and lawmakers told us yesterday, it’s up to the president to conduct foreign policy. The Hill can -- and does -- criticize and conduct oversight.
So don't expect much. In fact, don't expect anything. Sen. Rand Paul is already planning a new trip to Moscow to further soothe relationships between the two countries—perhaps he was irritated that his Republican colleagues left him behind when they visited Moscow on the Fourth of July—and is angling perhaps to patch over the whole election-bending Russian espionage against the United States thing with a bit of light ballet.
If you're looking for the party to rise to the moment, don't bother. They're not going to. It may be structurally impossible for them to do so; voting them out and replacing them with lawmakers less willing to endorse treason for the sake of political gain would be far more effective than waiting for any of these cowards to find a bare shred of decency.