ON COMPLACENCY AND COOL TEA

John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are current but soon to be former Senators from Texas and North Carolina, respectively.  

Cornyn's departure will have been involuntary.  He was defeated earlier this year in a Republican primary by Texas's ethically-challenged but Trump-loving (and Trump-endorsed) Attorney General, Ken Paxton. 

For his part, Tillis is leaving on his own accord.  

Sort of.  

He announced he would not run for reelection in June of last year.  At that time he was one of only two Republican Senators opposed to the administration's Big Beautiful Bill and was being vilified by Trump for that bout of legislative independence. In resigning, he avoided what almost certainly would have been a Trump-supported primary opponent, most of whom wind up doing rather well in today's MAGA/Trump controlled GOP.  

Just ask . . .

John Cornyn.

In any case, either armed or freed by incipient irrelevance to ignore Trump's on-going corruption, both men recently announced they would not vote to advance Trump's nomination of Todd Blanche as Attorney General out of the Judiciary Committee and onto the Senate floor.  

If it did not get out of committee, the nomination would have died.  

If it did, the GOP's 53-47 control would make Cornyn's and Tillis's opposition irrelevant.

This was a big deal and was driving Trump crazy.

In this corrupt Wizard of Oz presidency, Blanche is the guy pulling the strings for Trump. 

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, his "I'm his lawyer, was his lawyer" Freudian slip broadcast his subservience to Trump. 

Far more damning, however, were the  on-going reprisal prosecutions Blanche as the acting head of DOJ has accelerated against Trump's enemies and the "settlement" Blanche rubber-stamped last May of Trump's bogus suit against the IRS.  

That law suit, which the federal judge in Florida overseeing it later condemned as "improper" and brought in "bad faith", became the artificial basis for the unapproved settlement that created the now-infamous $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund for J6 insurrectionists and granted Trump, his children, his other relatives, his trusts,  his companies and any affiliated entities or individuals immunity from any on-going audits and penalties for tax liabilities. The immunity may be worth as much as $100 million.

Almost immediately after the anti-weaponization fund was announced, it was broadly condemned. 

AOC called it "outright corruption", and if you think her reaction was just left-wing hyperbole, Mitch McConnell said it was "Utterly stupid, morally wrong -- take you pick." Five lawsuits were filed to stop it and in one, a federal judge in Virginia preliminarily enjoined it. 

At that point, Blanche pretended the gig was up. DOJ announced it would comply with the court order and on June 1 Banche told the House they "were not moving forward with the fund, period." Given the source, however, the court was not satisfied. It demanded that assurance in writing, which the administration would not provide. 

Meanwhile, Blanche made clear that the tax immunity settlement was alive, and on July 13, the judge in Trump's IRS lawsuit (which Trump had discontinued the day before the "settlement" was announced but the court had subsequently reopened) issued an order stating the case and settlement were "the product of collusion". It found that Trump and the other plaintiffs had "pursued [the] lawsuit in bad faith for the improper purpose of  dishonestly advancing a political narrative" and referred the lawyers involved to their respective bars for disciplinary hearings.

In this context, Blanche appeared before the Senate Judiciary committee on July 15. At that hearing, though Blanche claimed the anti-weaponization fund was dead, Cornyn noted that "the president of the United States, who's the plaintiff in the lawsuit, ha[d] not agreed in writing to delete" it.  Later, a July 30 vote in the Judiciary Committee was postponed because both Cornyn and Tillis also wanted "clarification" on the immunity deal.

On Monday, the two holdouts said they had gotten the needed clarification and agreed to allow Blanche's nomination to go forward.  This apparently came in the form of two documents Blanche posted on Sunday night.  In the first, which he signed, Blanche formally rescinded the anti-weaponization fund.  In the second, an unsigned DOJ statement, the department said the immunity deal was only retroactive and only covered the plaintiffs in Trump v. IRS and not any unnamed parties or relatives.

This is what passes for courage in the Republican party these days.

In fact, however, it is just complacency.

According to behavioral psychologists, complacency is "a natural byproduct of the brain's tendency to automate repetitive tasks."  As Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli-American expert in this field, explained in his Thinking, Fast and Slow,  we are hard-wired to turn thinking that must be deliberate and analytical (or slow) into that which can be made routine and automatic (or fast). Usually this works.  Our careful and deliberate assessment of a new situtation can over time become more immediate as it recurs. 

This can be true even in relationships.

Where initial analytic hesitancy can be replaced by automatic routines borne of repeated trust.

The criticism that first created an "I wonder if she really like me" can much later turn into a "She's saying it because she loves me."

Sometimes, however, we get it wrong.

We substitute routine for analysis.

The fast for the slow.

And we fail.

John Cornyn and Thom Tillis just failed.

The promise they got is riddled with holes that both Trump and Blanche in the future will willingly exploit.  On the anti-weaponization front, that agreement between Trump and the IRS is in a writing that says it can only be modified in another writing.  Trump and the other plaintiffs never signed any modification.  Trump has appealed the Florida decision (which prohibits the parties from calling their deal a "settlement" and refers the lawyers to state bar disciplinary committees), and still thinks all the J6 insurrectionists who ransacked the Capitol in the service of his 2020 election lie were victims who deserve compensation. The J6 insurrectionists themselves are anxious to cash-in on this insistence and Trump can just as easily pay them via tort claim settlements as through his now (supposedly) defunct anti-weaponization fund.

The immunity deal is even worse.

Even as limited by the department's unsigned Sunday statement, it is a massive, underserved windfall to Trump, his two sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the entire Trump Organization. Cornyn's and Tillis's demand that its retroactivity be confirmed was in truth pointless since by its terms it already was, and the "get" they got in the form of restrictions to just the plaintiffs does not remotely minimize the deal's inherent corruption.

So why did Cornyn and Tillis give up?  

Both of them are leaving office and Trump had no continuing leverage over them.

The answer is . . . 

Complacency.

They decided that  the routine act of blocking a nominee in committee could result in what otherwise would be the needed concessions.  

Because with any other president it would have.

But not this one.

A deliberate analysis would have made clear that the needed concessions were (i) eliminating any possible payments to J6 insurrections and (ii) tearing up any immunity deal of any sort. It would have entailed  a long, slow process in which  Trump would have had to cave and save Blanche's current nomination but give up both the anti-weaponization and immunity deal, or he would have had to take his chances on retaining control of the Senate in order to renominate Blanche next year. 

Neither of these options appealed to Trump, mostly because, however much he cared about compensating J6 insurrectionists or retaining his personal attorney as the nation's Attorney General, he cared much more about preserving his windfall tax immunity.  And it is not clear that any lawyer other than the hopelessly compromised Blanche would be willing to preserve it.

The Senate is supposed to be the enemy of complacency.

It is slow by design.

During the founding era, Thomas Jefferson reportedly called upon President Washington. As the two drank tea and Jefferson poured his into a saucer, he asked "Of what use is the Senate?"  Washington explained that Jefferson was "answering [his] own question" and then asked "Why do you pour your tea into the saucer?" When Jefferson said "To cool it," Washington replied "The senate is the saucer into which we pour legislation to cool."

All Cornyn and Tillis had to do was wait.

But they didn't.

Instead . . .

They threw out the saucer.

And pretended the tea had cooled anyway.