With Risch’s subservience, Idahoans’ rights go undefended | Opinion
Tuesday was particularly embarrassing for the U.S. Senate, especially for Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho. At a number of committee hearings throughout the day, executive branch officials made wild, ludicrous claims as Republican senators politely smiled and nodded.
In Republican-controlled Senate hearings, words have come to mean their opposite. For example, the word habeas corpus normally signifies the inalienable right of every person to require the government to prove that it is entitled to take rights away from a person through the presentation of evidence and due process.
But in the ludicrous upside-down world of the U.S. Senate, it has another meaning, we learned this week.
“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday.
Kind of like how the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment protects the government’s right to draw and quarter, and how congressional oversight means blindly praising everything President Donald Trump has done, plans to do or might someday do.
(Not all recent hearings have worked this way. To Rep. Mike Simpson’s credit, he took his oversight obligations more seriously, getting a commitment from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum that funds appropriated to his agency by Congress will be spent — in other words, that he will obey the mandates of the Constitution.)
But a particularly servile display was put on at Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which Risch chairs.
At the start of the hearing, where senators questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Risch performed the necessary ritual supplications.
“Under President Trump and your work at the department, this administration has accomplished incredible things in a short period of time. To name a few: a secure border, a cease-fire between India and Pakistan, continued pressure on both the Russians and Ukrainians to end the war, and the return of American hostages from the clutches of Hamas,” Risch gushed.
Some of those things are true. Some American hostages have been returned. And an uneasy ceasefire between India and Pakistan appears to be holding for the moment.
But, for an issue supposedly closest to Risch’s heart, the fate of Ukraine, another in a long line of betrayals by Trump would become public before the end of the day.
Previously, a Russian ceasefire had been considered a starting point for diplomatic talks. But after a two-hour phone call with Vladimir Putin, around the same time Rubio was testifying Putin “hasn’t gotten a single concession,” Trump abandoned that demand, a major concession that allows Russia to continue attacks and efforts to take territory while slow-rolling peace talks.
Risch’s previous policy stance toward Ukraine was to help it in its just fight for freedom. Now the policy seems to be that Russia can have whatever it wants as long as we can pick minerals from Ukraine’s bones.
Like vultures do.
Risch could not be bothered to raise such questions. And he asked no questions about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has been wrongfully abducted to and sent to El Salvador, and who the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ordered the executive branch to facilitate the return of.
Rubio made it clear he has no intention of complying.
“That guy is a human trafficker, and that guy is a gang banger,” Rubio shouted.
Of course, Rubio can say that about anyone. He can say that about you. The difference between having the rule of law and not is whether he has to prove it in court. And he asserted, without challenge from Risch and others in the GOP, that he does not.
Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen challenged Rubio on these disappearances disguised as deportations, and on the decision to revoke visas for engaging in protected political speech.
“You’ve openly flouted judicial orders,” Van Hollen said.
“The judicial branch cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy,” Rubio asserted. “No judge can tell me how I need to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them.”
Risch intervened only to keep Rubio from being interrupted.
“I’m sorry that there were intemperate remarks,” he said near the end of the hearing.
So, just as habeas corpus means the government gets to deport from the country whoever it wants without judicial review, checks and balances mean the executive branch can set aside a judicial decision whenever it likes by calling it foreign policy.
And congressional oversight means they get a pat on the back for doing it.
Our founders believed they were creating a system where Congress would fight back when the executive exceeded and abused its powers.
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison in Federalist 51. “The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”
It seems Madison failed to anticipate a legislative branch controlled by people like Risch, whose only evident ambition is submission to Trump. That leaves us without any branch committed to and capable of defending our rights.