George F. Will recently came out in support of Senator Darline Graham’s opponent, radical pediatrician and failed House candidate Annie Andrews. Clearly, his antipathy for Donald Trump is motivating his position (perhaps combined with a similar antipathy for Graham’s late brother). He bemoans that “Graham promises she will not be senatorial, as the Framers understood that adjective,” because she has said that she’ll “have President Trump’s back 100 percent.” Will goes on to list his litany of policy disagreements with the president, from tariffs and the Iran war to the deportation of illegal aliens.
Will loathes the president and disagrees with his policies. That’s fine. But he makes the mistake common among many conservative commentators of confusing the practice of governing in the system devised by the Founders with the ideals the Founders espoused. Yes, the role of the Senate is to be the more “independent” house of Congress. But if you think that “independence” means consistently subverting and obstructing the presidency of a given senator’s own party, you will be sorely disappointed.
When Trump won in 2024, there was a lot of chatter among that Senate Republicans would block the cabinet picks whom the commentariat didn’t like. At the time, a very senior, very sober Republican senator came to the Senate floor’s back wall (where leadership staff milled about) and gave a history lesson on just how historically aberrant that proposition was. It simply wasn’t something that actually happened, and people would be insane to assume that it should; the Senate runs on custom as much as anything else.
That doesn’t mean that the Senate doesn’t show independence when it counts. Matt Gaetz is not attorney general. The filibuster still stands. When to show independence and when to fall in line is a matter of judgment, and — as the senior senator reminded us in 2024 — it is not a judgment call to be taken lightly based on the urgings of the Washington Post. Yes, the Founders intended the Senate to be independent — but also responsive to their voters, the American people. Republican senators who heed the siren song of the conservative commentariat to show their “independence” with insufficient regard for that democratic check soon become retired senators.
Stepping aside from abstract institutions to practical governance, Will’s position shifts from naïve to malicious. While I have often found myself scratching my head at Will’s policy and political positions in recent years, one area where he has been a stalwart is the courts. Will alone, it seems, actually watched Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings and realized that she would shift the Supreme Court to the right in a principled way but not turn it into a right-wing super-legislature. He has, accordingly, been a bold and fearless defender of what he would probably term the McConnell Court. That’s a good thing.
There is no greater threat to the McConnell Court than Democrats’ winning Senate seats. If you want Trump checked, like Will, the very likely Democratic House will do that. The marginal benefit of a Democratic Senate vis-à-vis Trump is negligible. The damage a Democratic Senate can do to the judiciary, however, is considerable. Will, therefore, a defender of Mitch McConnell and the McConell Court, is somehow arguing that the gavel of the Judiciary Committee should go to a blue-blooded, monomaniacal conspiracy theorist — Sheldon Whitehouse. Will isn’t advocating that the Senate stop Trump’s tariffs or end deportations, because it won’t (and can’t) do either of those things. What he’s advocating is a two-year, open-ended investigation of the conservative legal movement and the conservative justices on the Supreme Court whose independence from Trump he claims to prize. You can lard that up with all the ethereal paeans to the Founders’ view of the Senate, but by supporting Annie Andrews, you’re not supporting James Madison; you’re supporting Chairman Whitehouse.
The danger posed by Democratic senators to the McConnell Court is even starker in the middle term. Senators serve six-year terms. That means that the person you elect in 2026 will be in office in 2028 and 2030. Democrats have made it abundantly clear that their policy goal, come a potential 2029 trifecta, is Court-packing: the Supreme Court’s “independence” from Trump being insufficient for their utopian goals. This means that every Republican elected today would be a brick in the wall that the American people must erect against that catastrophe. A Democratic senator elected today in South Carolina would be one fewer seat Democrats need to flip to pack the Supreme Court — or, from the opposite perspective, one more seat Republicans need to flip to protect it.
This is the case not only as to the existence of a Democratic majority but the size of a Democratic majority. I doubt that Will thinks Tommy Tuberville has been great shakes as a senator, but had he not defeated the “reasonable” Democrat Doug Jones, I have no doubt that Chuck Schumer would have succeeded in abolishing the filibuster and enacting far more of the progressive agenda demanded by his perennial primary threat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Bemoaning the Senate is easy, but protecting institutions like the Senate and the Court is a hard battle of inches. Every seat matters. That’s why McConnell set up the Senate Leadership Fund and spent a decade harping on “candidate quality”: to win Senate seats in that battle.
Will’s peevish fixation on the president ignores that fundamental point about protecting the institutions he claims to support. By supporting Andrews, he thinks he’s striking a blow against the Orange Menace. In reality, he’s lighting a torch with which to set the McConell Court ablaze. To quote that court’s godfather, he should hide his head in a bag.