Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) has introduced a resolution calling on the Senate to censure Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) for threatening two Supreme Court Justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
The resolution has 14 Republican cosponsors, but won’t ever pass the Senate, even though the Republicans have a majority there.
The reason: too many Republican senators, such as Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), are opposed to the move because they fear it would ignite a tit for tat by Democrats, who then would demand that the Senate censure President Trump.
Graham’s concern is legitimate and understandable, but he’s wrong. Whatever the merits of the case for censuring Trump because of his misconduct vis-à-vis Ukraine, the stark reality is that what Sen. Schumer did is clearly and obviously wrong and deserves to be censured.
This isn’t a matter of partisan politics, or at least is should not be a matter of partisan politics. Instead, this is matter of institutional integrity and ensuring that standards of conduct and behavior are maintained and enforced.
For any institution, but Congress especially, this matters. Public trust and confidence can only be maintained if institutions police themselves and discipline their own.
Institutional Integrity. In fact, one big reason the public holds Congress in low regard is that, as Yuval Levin explains in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), it doesn’t see Congress maintaining or promoting an institutional ethic that shapes its members in a reliable and responsible way.
Levin has written a new and important book, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. And while his aforementioned comment to NPR wasn’t directed at Congress or Schumer in particular, it nonetheless applies here.
How can the public trust Congress if the institution doesn’t stand for anything more than the will of the majority? And how can public confidence be maintained if standards of propriety, decency and respect are routinely flouted to secure rank partisan gain?
As Levin succinctly puts its: “We trust an institution when we think that it forms the people within it to be trustworthy.”
Rule of Law. Moreover, as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy points out, censure is necessary to bolster the rule of law.
Schumer, after all, issued his threats on the steps of the Supreme Court while playing to a mob trying that was trying to shape or influence a Court decision that should be immune or indifferent to political considerations.
What should guide the Court’s decision, exclusively, as McCarthy observes, is the rule of law and applying the law dispassionately, without fear, favor or prejudice, to the particular case at hand. Yet, Schumer used political intimidation tactics and threats explicitly to undermine the Court and the rule of law.
“That should rate censure,” McCarthy argues. “Case closed.” He’s right.
Censure, as the Senate explains on its website, is
less severe than expulsion [and] sometimes referred to as [a] condemnation or denouncement. [It] does not remove a senator from office.
It is a formal statement of disapproval, however, that can have a powerful psychological effect on a member and his/her relationships in the Senate.
In 1834, the Senate censured President Andrew Jackson – the first and only time the Senate censured a president. Since 1789 the Senate has censured nine of its members.
Censure. It is long past time for the Senate to censure its tenth member, Charles E. Schumer—not as a form of partisan warfare or political retribution, but rather as a statement of institutional honor and integrity.
No American, and certainly no member of the United States Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body, should ever threaten a sitting justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Surely, all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, can agree that this is unacceptable and beyond the pale.
Let the Senate, then, demonstrate to all Americans and to the world that it expects and demands better. It expects and demands of itself and its members professional conduct, respect for the Constitutionally prescribed powers and authority of the Supreme Court and the judiciary, and civil discourse, dialogue and debate.
As it concerns Sen. Schumer, the way to demonstrate this commitment is through the power of the censure, which should rarely be used, but also not disused. Indeed, there are times when the censure is needed and necessary, and now is one of those times.
Feature photo credit: News Metropolis.