In today’s newsletter: the Trump Administration is threatening to push the Senate from ineffectiveness to obsolescence. The Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Reagan-Bush style Republican, insists he’ll push back. Plus:

The Senate’s Age of Irrelevance

David D. Kirkpatrick 
A staff writer, Kirkpatrick reports on national and global politics.

I started reporting a Profile of the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, based on a simple premise. With Democrats shut out of power in Washington, the fate of Donald Trump’s sweeping plans was in the hands of congressional Republicans, and no one would have a more significant role than Thune in determining the outcome.

But Trump, from his first weeks in office, has instead threatened to render Congress almost irrelevant. He has governed by fiat, through executive orders, defying congressional spending statutes and daring the courts to try to stop him. With the help of Elon Musk’s buzz saw, Trump has mounted an unremitting assault on the legislature’s exclusive authority to control federal spending, which is its main leverage over the executive branch in the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Trump appeared unlikely to face open resistance from the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson—happy to be known as MAGA Mike—whom I had written about last year for the magazine. I found Johnson to be a politician of exceptional agility. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, he had endeared himself to Trump by selling his House Republican colleagues on a politically elegant, if legally questionable, way to reject Joe Biden’s victory without having to endorse Trump’s demonstrably false claims of widespread fraud. And since becoming Speaker he has astonished Washington with an uncanny ability to hold together both the squishily moderate and hard-right factions of the raucous House Republican Conference while building an ever-closer alliance with Trump.

Thune seemed different. Whereas Johnson first entered the House, in 2016, on Trump’s coattails, Thune is a Republican of the Reagan-Bush vintage, first elected to the Senate, from South Dakota, in 2004. After the 2020 election, he declared that Trump’s demand to reject the results “would go down like a shot dog” in the Senate. In a party led by a President notoriously careless about the truth, Thune is invariably described by even his Democratic opponents as unusually honest. Former Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and a friend of Thune’s, told me “you don’t think of guile when you think of John Thune.”

I hung around the U.S. Capitol’s Ohio Clock Corridor, just outside Thune’s office, for months for a chance to ask him how he handled his relationship with Trump: “Very carefully,” he told me, with a chuckle, when we finally sat down. But he also insisted that “the Senate has a unique role in our democracy, and our job is to defend that role, and at times, if necessary, to push back.” He has vowed to preserve the Senate filibuster, a rule that would enable the Democratic minority to severely curtail efforts to engrave into law Musk’s cuts and the rest of Trump’s agenda. In the end, Thune’s “pushback”—hard to discern at the moment—may determine the relevance of the Senate, and of the separation of powers.

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