When you've lost George Will...

Remember when George Will was the Conservative's conservative?

The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.

[...]

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), [...] wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded.

[...]

Congressional Republicans (congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents) have no higher ambition than to placate this president.

  George Will

Perhaps, but Democrats have never had a president so in need of placating as this one.

Recently Sen. Bob Corker [...] proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices. Corker’s measure would have required Congress to vote to approve any trade restrictions imposed in the name of “national security.” All Senate Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance and true to the Constitution’s structure. But the Senate would not vote on it — would not allow it to become just the second amendment voted on this year.

This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president.

[...]

[J]ust as a magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.

In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him.A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.

I don't know about that. And why is it a good thing to have a Congress whose job is to "gum up" its own machinery? But I take his point: vote Democratic this fall.

"Vesuvius of mendacities." I rather like that.

But, Paul Ryan never had any dignity to wager.

And, hey, George is cheating. You know he doesn't still look like this:

That looks like the picture on his Newsweek columns 40 years ago.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.