CNN Interview with Corker

The nomination of a figure like Trump, a clear threat to both the professed beliefs of his party’s leaders and to basic competence in presidential government, is the sort of shattering event that in the past would have prompted a real schism or independent candidacy. But Romney couldn’t talk Kasich into being that independent candidate, all the other possibilities demurred — and then as a group, the Republican resisters declined to endorse anyone, neither Hillary Clinton nor the Libertarian ticket nor Evan McMullin, making their opposition a private matter rather than a public challenge to the nominee.
 
Now, almost a year into the Trump presidency, a similar dynamic is playing out. There is a small but significant Republican opposition to Trump, but its leading figures still don’t want to go to war with him directly, preferring philosophical attacks and tactical withdrawal to confrontation and probable defeat.

Bob Corker, part of the dying-in-the-dark-isn’t-so-bad caucus during the primary campaign (and when he seemed to hope for a cabinet appointment), has become a fierce Trump critic — but only after deciding to retire from the Senate. George W. Bush and John McCain have each given speeches that read like broadsides against Trump — but very general critiques of his worldview, not political attacks on the man himself. And now Jeff Flake of Arizona has delivered a barnburner of a Senate address about the civic costs of the Trump presidency — while simultaneously declaring that because he can’t win his primary in a Trumpified party, he won’t even stay and fight it out.

To the extent that there’s a plausible theory behind all of these halfhearted efforts, it’s that resisting Trump too vigorously only strengthens his hold on the party’s base, by vindicating his claim to have all the establishment arrayed against him.

But the problem with this logic is that it offers a permanent excuse for doing nothing, no matter how bad Trump’s reign becomes. (“I’d criticize him for accidentally nuking Manila, but you know, then Fox News would just make it all about me …”) In the end, if you want Republican voters to reject Trumpism, you need to give them clear electoral opportunities to do so — even if you expect defeat, even if it’s all but certain. And an anti-Trump movement that gives high-minded speeches but never mounts candidates confirms Trump’s claim to face establishment opposition while also confirming his judgment of the establishment’s guts and stamina — proving that they’re all low-energy, all “liddle” men, all unwilling to fight him man to man.

If Corker really means what he keeps saying about the danger posed by Trump’s effective incapacity, he should call openly for impeachment or for 25th Amendment proceedings — and other anti-Trump Republicans should join him. If Flake really means what he said in his impassioned speech, and he doesn’t want to waste time and energy on a foredoomed Senate primary campaign, then he should choose a different hopeless-seeming cause and primary Trump in 2020. George W. Bush should endorse him. So should McCain, and Corker, and Romney, and Kasich, and Sasse, and the rest of the anti-Trump list. They should expect to lose, and badly, but they should make Trump actually defeat them, instead of just clearing the field for his second nomination.

With national attention focused Tuesday morning on a mushrooming feud between President Donald Trump and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., followed by a feud in the afternoon between Trump and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., the Senate gift-wrapped the biggest present Congress has so far bestowed upon Wall Street in the Trump era.

With a razor-thin margin, the Senate passed a resolution to nullify a signature regulation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which banned forced arbitration provisions. Such clauses, tucked into the fine print of contracts that nobody reads, deny consumers the ability to contest claims through a class-action lawsuit and can allow banks and other financial institutions to rip off their customers with virtual impunity.

Both Corker and Flake, along with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., joined in the effort to give Trump a major win, even if it will hurt many of their own voters. Consumer advocates had hoped that moderate Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine would block the GOP effort. They did not.

Only GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Kennedy of Louisiana bucked their party — but a no vote when the measure passes is not much of a bucking. In a sign of how far the Democratic Party has come in recent years, all 48 members of the Senate caucus voted to keep the arbitration rule.

The vote was split 50-50, which required Vice President Mike Pence to break the tie.