It isn’t just that the Republican-controlled Senate failed to pass President Trump’s initiative to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Congressional Republicans were nearly unanimous in passing a bill to limit the president’s ability to remove sanctions against Russia.
Republican Senators are livid over President Trump’s public humiliation of their former colleague Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Since Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump and this is the thanks he gets, senators are thinking that Trump is quite willing to stab his own supporters in the back, so why support him? The Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, says that if Trump fires Sessions, he won’t hold hearings to confirm a successor.
And if Trump fires special prosecutor Robert Mueller for investigating his administration’s Russia connections, Republicans say they will pass a veto-proof law establishing the special prosecutor and re-starting the probe.
George Will, in a column harshly critical of the president, says that it’s healthy that Congress is finally trying to check and balance the presidency, which has become increasingly powerful and dominant over the other branches of government. So if the presidency is diminished under Trump, with the legislative branch moving into the vacuum to govern the country, that is a good thing.
What do you think?
From Noah Bierman and Brian Bennett, Obamacare vote isn’t the only sign of GOP resistance to Trump:
Nearly every Republican in Congress voted with Democrats this week to approve legislation tying the president’s hands on a major foreign policy issue, making it harder for him to ease sanctions against Russia amid lawmakers’ concerns about Trump’s friendly posture toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Late Friday, the White House put out a statement saying Trump would sign the legislation; his veto would have been easily overridden.
Since Wednesday, some of the most conservative Republicans in Congress, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have pushed back at Trump’s surprise announcement on Twitter of a ban on transgender people in the military. The critics, including McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and an array of conservative senators, objected both to the substance of the ban — which threatened the status of thousands of active-duty service members — and to the way in which it was unveiled.
Perhaps the most broad opposition came in response to Trump’s continued public humiliation of his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Conservatives from Congress who’d served with Sessions when he was in the Senate, delivered clear messages to Trump in Sessions’ defense in the media and throughout the country.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Trump would have “holy hell to pay” if he fired Sessions, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned that he would refuse to hold hearings this year to confirm a new attorney general.
[Keep reading. . .]
Photo of President Trump addressing a joint session of Congress by Office of the Speaker [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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