The Senate Proves Once Again That It’s the World’s Most Useless Deliberative Body

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 the 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 stance 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 unqualified and ideologically vindictive senior appointees after some desultory airing of objections before C-SPAN cameras.

This is a rank perversion of the “advise and consent” powers relegated to the Senate as a coequal branch of government in the Constitution. The Senate apparently learned nothing after it royally fucked up the confirmation of the plainly inept xenophobic demogogue Noem. Now it’s confirming Mullin as a buffer and more rhetorically belligerent entry in the same administrative product line. The case for turning down Mullin should have been clear after the nominee pointedly refused to rule out dispatching ICE agents to voting precincts this November, and for good measure failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory as he defended the DHS’s baseless investigation of 2020 election results in Arizona. Yet Mullin cruised into confirmation on a 54–45 vote; Democrats Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and John Fetterman voted with the Republican majority, while Ruben Gallego of Arizona abstained, even as Mullin endorsed DHS’s duplicitous assault on voting rights in his home state. Unsurprisingly, Paul was the only Republican to break ranks and vote against Mullin’s confirmation.

This travesty of oversight is par for the course in the US Senate. During the Trump White House’s run of depraved and sycophantic cabinet nominees, mostly drawn from the Fox News lineup, the nominal leaders of the Senate opposition couldn’t be bothered to withhold unanimous consent—the body’s somnolent routine of suspending the rules of debate to expedite votes—in order to shed proper and sustained public attention to the gallery of rogues, grifters, and MAGA sycophants now entrusted with making and administering policy in every sphere of public life. Apart from a failed and half-hearted effort to forestall the confirmation of supreme MAGA ghoul Russell Vought as head of the Office of Management and Budget, Senate Democrats politely connived in creating the impression, during the critical formative days of the second Trump administration, that this would be a more or less ordinary White House operating on the same protocols of Senate complaisance that all prior presidencies had enjoyed.

This do-nothing posture yielded the insane 100–0 confirmation of Marco Rubio as secretary of state, setting American foreign policy on its fateful course of rudderless unconstitutional intervention for no coherent aim or objective, all propped up by Rubio’s vile and lethal mendacity. In lieu of continuing to adhere to the hoary and delusive “greatest deliberative body” tagline, the Senate should heretofore take to calling itself “the legislature that looked at Marc Rubio and shrugged.” Instead of heeding Project 2025’s dictum that “personnel is policy,” Senate leaders ensured that the foundation of the second-term Trump agenda was laid without interruption; no Democratic senator holding forth at a No Kings rally should be allowed to forget that when the mandate to disrupt normal order was most urgent, the party’s conference’s de facto mantra was, “What next, my liege?”

Now that Mullin’s nomination has sailed through, the Trump White House is resuming its full-court press to secure the Senate’s passage of the White House’s pet voter-suppression bill, the SAVE America Act. Even some Senate Republicans are withholding support for the measure, since it could disenfranchise many key MAGA constituencies. So in a Hail Mary maneuver, GOP leaders are trying to broker a deal to end the DHS shutdown in exchange for an improbable bid to force a SAVE America vote under budget reconciliation protocols that would permit it to bypass the filibuster and pass on a straight-majority vote. Of course, there’s no sane interpretation of budget politics that would bring voting-rights crackdowns under its domains. But that’s the call of the Senate parliamentarian—with the likely connivance of Senate majority leader John Thune, who’s been loath to break any sort of protocol for a SAVE Act vote. Or to put things another way: Senate Democrats are leaving the most fundamental exercise of political agency in our formal democracy to recondite rule-making decisions in which they play no meaningful part. Just business as usual in the world’s most worthless deliberative body.