Today we are forced to seriously admire Trump ally Tom Cotton. That’s how bad it all is

Over the weekend, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced that he would lead the Senatorial pack in contesting the January 6 Congressional certification of the American election. Wednesday’s certification is the final hurdle in a months-long process that leads the American people to the certain destination of a Joseph R. Biden, Jr. presidency. The future, of course, is already written in stone: federal judges, the Supreme Court, and over 80 million voters have already seen to that. But a group of petulant Senators (and one relentless president) will not give up the ghost of one presidency present. 

On Sunday, The Washington Post revealed that they had come into possession of a taped recording of President Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in an attempt to persuade him to “find” a “missing” 11,780 votes, so that Trump could win the long-gone state of Georgia. Perhaps it was this obvious act of sedition that convinced Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas to make a Sunday evening announcement stating that “the Founders entrusted our elections chiefly to the states — not Congress,” and that “if Congress purported to overturn the results of the Electoral College, it would not only exceed that power, but also establish unwise precedents.” As a result, Senator Cotton wrote in his statement, “I will not oppose the counting of certified electoral votes on January 6.” 

Promises of retribution came from Trump on Monday morning.

It’s hard to look to Senator Cotton — the same man who penned an op-ed in The New York Times last year suggesting that the United States take military action against protesting civilians — as a beacon of ethos and morality. But his stand against the Senate’s unraveling says something larger about the current political moment. The body politic is so bad, in fact, that even Senator Cotton, ever the Trump defender, has refused to enter the fray. That’s how far from the norm this proverbial “cooling” Senatorial saucer to the normally hot-tempered teacup of the House has deviated. 

The Senate, once the perceived adult in the room when it came to American politics, has devolved into a squabbling pack of unpatriotic teenagers, enacting their attention-seeking behaviors on a tired public. They know that their acts of angst are futile (even a rudimentary read of the Constitution offers no safe place for Republicans at the end of this tired battle: the House must agree to any disputes in the electoral certification, and, even in the outrageous scenario in which a Democratic-led House of Representatives were to entertain this charade, when the President and Vice-President’s roles expire on January 20, that would make the third-in-line, or Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the pro tempore President of the United States. Not exactly the preferred outcome for Republicans attempting to claw a hole through democracy).

If the world feels upside-down right now, that’s because it is. Devin Nunes — a man who tried to sue a fake cow — is about to receive the country’s top civilian honor, and because Tom Cotton has become some unlikely measure of decency in the Senate, when we know that he is mostly indecent.

That second point demonstrates how far, indeed, the Republican half of the sober, law-making body of this country has tacked. We must now consider decency incrementally, on a case-by-case basis. We must take instruction from a man who called for military action against protesters, itself a perspective so fundamentally un-American that the op-ed that defended the position caused the head of the New York Times’ opinion section to step down from his role as editor.

Normalcy in politics has been dirtied and subverted so fully that down is up and up is down. I guess that today I am in admiration of Senator Cotton for not choosing the most available, most obvious scenario of sedition, even if this choice is a result only of clear self-preservation in the wake of the transparency of the President’s self-sabotage. This is how bad it is.

It would be a pointless act, of course, to call the removal of — or for Congress to refuse to seat — the traitorous Senators who, unlike Senator Cotton, intend to challenge the results of the election on January 6. But it is incumbent upon us to consider how far we have fallen when our admiration finds footholds in the likes of Cotton. We know, then, that the Republican Senate is nothing more than a death rattle, gasping, heaving, and, hopefully, expiring before us.