J. D. Vance and the Yahoo Caucus
His campaign was terrible, but his first year as a senator is worse.
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When J. D. Vance first ran for office, he impressed some observers as a bridge between red and blue America. I was less impressed, but as a senator, he’s worse than even I expected; he’s become part of a caucus of panderers who are betraying the people they claim to represent.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
From Hillbilly to MAGA Senator
I wrote about J. D. Vance during his Senate run back in 2021. I was appalled at his campaign and his rhetoric, but he has turned out to be even worse as a legislator than he was as a candidate.
Vance initially tried to position himself as a reasonable man from humble origins, someone who understood the angst of rural, Forgotten-Man America. He wrote a book about it, and in 2016 he warned the public—in The Atlantic, no less—that Donald Trump was “cultural heroin.” When he moved back to Ohio and stepped into the GOP Senate primary, Vance was running behind Josh Mandel, the hyper-ambitious former treasurer of Ohio, who was saying and tweeting unhinged things as a way of pulling out all the stops to capture a coalition of the most extreme primary voters. For a short second, Vance tried not to jump into the same septic tank.
But when you’re getting millions of dollars in support from Peter Thiel, losing to someone as off the wall as Mandel isn’t noble—it’s just losing. And so Vance retooled both his approach and his personality. He pledged his sword to Donald Trump, who duly endorsed him and lifted him to a win in the primary. Vance then ran as the MAGA candidate, appearing onstage with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and accepting their endorsements. This combination of pusillanimity and shamelessness, along with Trump’s support, helped Vance defeat the centrist Democrat Tim Ryan, and he headed back east to Washington.
Once in the Senate, Vance shed the MAGA clown costume and became a responsible center-right legislator, advancing the interests of the poor and forgotten in Ohio and … I’m kidding, of course. Vance did no such thing. What he once wore as electoral camouflage is now tattooed all over him, in yet another fulfillment of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s warning that, eventually, “we are what we pretend to be.”
In politics, you pay at least some of the debt you owe for a crucial endorsement, but Vance is paying it all—including a brutal vig. It’s one thing to hand-wave about supporting the nominee; it’s another entirely to speak up when staying quiet would be just as effective, and perhaps more sensible. But when you’re writing articles defending Donald Trump’s foreign policy—a radioactive subject many Republicans would rather ignore—you’re not just paying off what you owe the sharks; you’re begging to be part of the crew.
Some credit where it is due: After a major train derailment in Ohio, Vance teamed up with his senior colleague Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown to advance a rail-safety bill. But that was an easy call; when I worked in the Senate many years ago, we called similar legislative proposals “apple pie,” as in “Mom and apple pie and the American flag,” a bill or resolution that any legislator could support without hesitation.
But Vance couldn’t resist the intoxicating call of performative irresponsibility, and he has managed to latch on to almost every MAGA hot-button issue in his short time on the Hill. (He even fawned over Tucker Carlson after he was fired by Fox News; most other Republicans quietly treated Carlson’s canceled show like a barrel of industrial sludge that they allowed to sink in a dark lake without trace or comment.) Last week, Vance responded to Trump’s indictment on 37 federal charges by vowing to put a hold on all Justice Department nominees.
For those of you unfamiliar with this tactic, many senior posts in the U.S. government constitutionally require confirmation by the Senate. A smaller and less hierarchical body than the House, the Senate does much of its business, including scheduling votes on nominees, by “unanimous consent.” The current rules of the Senate allow any single senator to put a “hold” on a nominee by withholding such consent, thus preventing the chamber from acting on the nomination. This is a fairly routine maneuver most of the time; sometimes a senator places a hold because of a particular concern or question—or sometimes, because of a political vendetta.
But Vance is just shilling for Trump by preventing the entire Senate from voting on any and all nominees to the Justice Department. This puts him in the exalted company of another Senate giant, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, who is holding up the promotions of some 200 senior U.S. military officers because he’s upset about expanded abortion provisions for service members. (He is also feuding with the Pentagon over various other culture-war grievances.) Vance and Tuberville are engaging in “blanket” holds not against any one person, but against an entire class of nominees.
This is not the Senate’s “advice and consent”; this is the howling of the Yahoo Caucus. As Jill Lawrence noted today in The Bulwark, the GOP is engaging in a “full-on trashing and undermining of the government,” creating “a civic and physical hazard to America” merely to defend Trump from even mild criticism. (Meanwhile, over in the House, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky is a good choice to be parliamentarian of this Yahoo Caucus, tweeting today that “no member of Congress can be prosecuted for reading aloud on the floor any of the documents Trump allegedly has copies of.” Massie, apparently, thinks it would help Trump’s case to read top-secret documents live on national television.)
Tuberville has repeatedly shown, much like Trump himself, that he does not understand how the American government actually works. Vance (a graduate of Ohio State and Yale) and Massie (who holds a degree in engineering from MIT) both know better, and that makes their actions even more odious. These legislators are showing contempt not only for their constitutional duty but for their constituents by treating them like credulous rubes in order to harvest their anger and their votes.
Tuberville, perhaps, never had a chance to be a better legislator. Massie might simply be an engineer who knows a lot about one thing and almost nothing about anything else. But Vance is different: He’s an intelligent and educated man who has chosen a shameful path in Congress as if his lifetime of opportunities and second chances never happened.
Related:
Today’s News
- A global cyberattack hit multiple U.S. federal-government agencies by exploiting a vulnerability in a commonly used software, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
- In a 7–2 vote, the Supreme Court rejected claims that sought to invalidate parts of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, effectively protecting the preference for Native American families to foster and adopt Native American children.
- A major heat wave has struck much of the southern U.S., bringing dangerous and record-breakingly hot conditions to Texas, Florida, and all the states in between; conditions are expected to persist through the weekend.
Dispatches
- Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf probes what happens when science outpaces ethical norms.
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