Great catch, by U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt.

Left it all on the field.

Republicans win 11-2

Honored to be named MVP. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/5vZtOifN2n

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) June 11, 2026

Here's his Wikipedia page. I see he's 50 years old.

"Republican leaders were able to garner enough support for their procedural maneuver to kill the resolution after Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana flipped their position..."

"... and joined the effort to stop it from coming up for a vote. The shift brought about a 50-50 tie, which was broken late Wednesday in favor of Republican leadership by Vice President JD Vance, in his role as president of the Senate."

From "Republicans Block Effort to Check Trump’s Power in Venezuela/G.O.P. leaders succeeded in pressuring fellow senators who initially supported the measure that would have limited President Trump’s military authority in Venezuela" (NYT).

That was close. Sufficient garnering occurred.

"[Rand] Paul, the sole Republican to cosponsor the resolution, said that he too had spoken with Mr. Trump but was unmoved. He criticized party leaders for 'playing games' and accused the administration of misleading lawmakers. 'Oh, it’s a drug bust. Oh, we’re going for drugs. Oh, it’s not really drugs, now it’s oil,' he said. 'So see, the bait and switch has already happened.'"

"Senate Republicans reacted with alarm and dismay to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s decision to nominate Representative Matt Gaetz... for attorney general..."

"... and several said they were skeptical that he would be able to secure enough votes for confirmation....  Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, raised his eyebrows when reporters informed him of Mr. Trump’s choice. 'I’m still trying to absorb all this,' he said, adding: 'I don’t really know him, other than his public persona.' Mr. Gaetz, who has been one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest attack dogs on Capitol Hill, has routinely used his position on the House Judiciary Committee to question the motives of Justice Department officials and rail against what he has called the 'deep state.'... Mr. Trump has called on Senate Republicans to allow him to circumvent the confirmation process by calling recesses during which he could install personnel without Senate approval. It was not clear whether Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican elected as majority leader on Wednesday, would be willing to do so for Mr. Gaetz, or other nominees who might struggle to draw enough support to be confirmed...."

The NYT reports.

"Well, stand your butt up then"/"You stand your butt up."

Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) just tried to fight a witness at a hearing. pic.twitter.com/MeVv61AsWs

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) November 14, 2023

"The Senate's move to relax its unofficial dress code has led to a surprising development: an official dress code."

NPR reports.

It's not the way it always goes, but it shows the risk of seeking a new rule. You may end up with a reinforcement of the old rule. More precisely, it shows the risk of ending the enforcement of an informal practice. It led to the formalization of the old practice into an official rule.

In this case, the change that backfired was all about accommodating one person, John Fetterman, a man with mental problems — he was recently hospitalized for depression. It is, it seems, especially important to him to wear hoodies and gym shorts, and what is the big deal? Let the unfortunate man have what he seems somehow to need. 

But he's in one party, and there's the other party, and it was a ripe opportunity to drag out the age-old argument: What if everybody did that? And we easily picture the Senate full of unlovable oldsters dressed as if they're about to attend a backyard barbecue. Can't have that. And so, John Fetterman must be forced into a suit and tie, at whatever cost to his fragile mind.

They even resorted to teasing him, calling the new rule "The SHORTS Act" (for "SHow Our Respect To the Senate"). That resolution was introduced by Mitt Romney (along with Joe Manchin). Mitt Romney, teasing a man with mental problems? Fetterman still has the option of standing in the doorway in his hoodie and shorts and participating without entering the room.

Good thing they got that done... as a symbol of all the things they haven't got done. 

"The suit turns a man into a compact, easily readable visual unit over which the eye skims quickly, uninterrupted by embellishments or intricacies of silhouette."

"Suits, therefore, homogenize men’s bodies, making variations of weight, even height, less noticeable, focusing attention on the face. Men’s suits say 'we are heads, not bodies.'... Women are still the adorned, visible, bodily sex whose physicality gets staged by clothes. Accordingly, women’s fashion — including even business attire — requires a near-infinity of daily micro-decisions from head to toe.... Leisure wear for women risks depriving them of gravitas, making them look 'off duty,' and hence outside the space of authority.... [W]omen’s dignity and authority remain, alas, more socially precarious than men’s — harder to construct sartorially and far easier to lose. Taking away the dress code might exacerbate this inequity. What’s more, formal business attire offers some of the most gender-neutral fashion options, thereby enhancing sartorial equity for nonbinary individuals...."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "What We Lose When We Loosen Dress Codes/Allowing senators to wear what they please on the Senate floor may seem like liberation, but abandoning the dress code could wind up symbolizing the failure to achieve consensus" (NYT).

I understand that to mean that John Fetterman's dressing in a sweatshirt and shorts is an exercise of male privilege.

"Putting any kind of public pressure on Ms. Feinstein has been criticized by the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and others as sexist."

"'I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way,' Ms. Pelosi said last month. It’s true that the Senate, which has always been entirely or mostly male, has experienced long absences by some of its male members. In the 1940s, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia was absent for four years because of heart trouble. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota had a stroke in 1969 and never really came back in the following three years. In 2001, when he was 98, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was wheeled to the Senate floor to cast votes, despite widespread concern about his mental fitness. In all of those cases, as with Ms. Feinstein, the senators ignored concerns about their capacity and pleas from their colleagues as long as they could. This Senate tradition should have been discarded long ago. Senate seats are not lifetime sinecures...."

Writes the NYT Editorial Board, calling on Dianne Feinstein to resign from the Senate.

But isn't Pelosi right? Something has been done badly by men for a long, long time, and suddenly it just has to stop... because a woman is doing it? Pick a different occasion for standing on lucid, sensible policy! Dianne Feinstein is no more in the way than Glass and Mundt and Thurmond. They received an old-fashioned sentimental Senatorial respect. Perhaps that respect is ridiculous. Perhaps it's just inconvenient. But use this newfound principle first against a few men or it's evidence of sexism. Pelosi's right.

She waited until Warnock won, but Kyrsten Sinema just left the Democratic Party.

CNN reports. 

"The Senate held a key test vote on Wednesday on legislation to allow federal protections for same-sex marriage, with 12 Republicans joining all Democrats..."

"... to help move it through the 50-50 chamber. In one of their first major agenda items in the postelection session, Democrats moved fast to enact the bill — which would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex couples — while their party still controls both chambers. Should the bill pass the Senate in a vote that is expected after Thanksgiving, it would need to pass the House in its revised form before being sent to President Biden to be signed into law. The push in Congress to pass marriage protections came after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested in an opinion overturning abortion rights that the court 'should reconsider' past rulings that established marriage equality and access to contraception."

From "Live Updates: Senate Takes Crucial Step Toward Protecting Same-Sex Marriage Rights/Democrats are moving quickly to enact federal protections while their party still controls both chambers. Republican senators voted to keep Senator Mitch McConnell as their minority leader; the party is on the brink of capturing a majority in the House" (NYT).

Why are they only just now getting around to repealing the Defense of Marriage Act? Anyway, it's good to see this happening at long last. Maybe they didn't think they needed to do it until the Democrats lost the House, or maybe they chose not to do it so that it wouldn't be an issue in the elections. But, really, what kind of people want there to be a threat to existing marriages? 

And it's nice to see Wisconsin Senator — and former student of mine — Tammy Baldwin featured on the front page of the NYT on this issue, which I strongly support.

And thanks to all the Republicans who voted for this: Susan Collins of Maine, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — the co-sponsors — and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Mitt Romney of Utah, Richard Burr of Virginia, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Todd Young of Indiana, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

RCP's midterm prediction for the Senate.

Final weekend. @RealClearNews Senate map. RCP average for each race on left. Then factors in polling error from last three elections. Adjusted estimate on right. Bottom line: Predicts 54-46 GOP control. Experimental; GOP would be ecstatic if correct. https://t.co/wnUsin4aKB pic.twitter.com/DFRRXtfgsZ

— Byron York (@ByronYork) November 5, 2022

 

Compare FiveThirtyEight here. And betting odds here.

"Democrats Can Win This Fall if They Make One Key Promise... Give us the House and two more senators, and we will make Roe law in January 2023."

Writes Josh Marshall (in the NYT).

Democrats hope to make November’s midterm elections a referendum on Roe v. Wade.... But you can’t make an election into a referendum on an issue if you can’t point to anything winning the election would accomplish. To make the 2022 elections a referendum on Roe, Democrats have to put protecting Roe and abortion rights on the table. 

Here’s one way to do that: get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass the bill and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.... 

If... there are 48 Senate Democrats ready to make that pledge... That is, all current Democratic Senators except Manchin and Sinema. they need two additional Democratic senators in the next Congress.

There needs to be a specific commitment to an explicit statutory text and to changing the filibuster rule.

No ambiguity, no haggling, no living in Senator Manchin’s head for a year. You give us this, and we’ll give you that. That tells voters exactly what will be delivered with a Democratic win. It also defines what constitutes a win: control of the House and two more Senate seats.

I don't know if that strong position would win them the majority they'd need to follow through. What if their commitment to ending the filibuster ends up inspiring Republicans — if Republicans, as predicted, take the majority — to end the filibuster and pass some things they like — including anti-abortion legislation?

"But if we can all agree what the GOP agenda has been, I remain utterly mystified by the Democrats. They have the votes to confirm [Ketanji Brown Jackson]..."

"So what are they afraid of? I wrote earlier this week about the utter failure on the part of Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to connect this hearing to what is going to be a catastrophic series of progressive losses at the Supreme Court this term, and the almost staggering inability to lay out any kind of theory for progressive jurisprudence, or even a coherent theory for the role of an unelected judiciary in a constitutional democracy. My colleague Mark Joseph Stern wrote today about a broadside attack on the whole idea of unenumerated rights, substantive due process, and the entire line of cases that protect Americans from forced sterilization, indoctrination of their children, and penalties for using birth control, and afford them the right to marry whom they want. More mysterious than this coordinated GOP project... was the almost complete silence from Senate Democrats on these issues of substantive due process, privacy, and bodily autonomy. On the simplest level, the hearing might have been an opportunity to explain why Roe v. Wade is in fact the tip of the constitutional iceberg [sic].... I understand that the decision was taken to just get the nominee confirmed. Take the win. But for those of us watching and waiting to see Democrats support and back the nominee, there was an immense sense of underreaction."

Writes Dahlia Lithwick in "Cory Booker Aside, Democrats Stranded Ketanji Brown Jackson" (Slate). 

Here's the Cory Booker performance:

 

Sen. @CoryBooker to Judge Jackson: "I'm not letting anybody in the Senate steal my joy...Don't worry, my sister. Don't worry. God has got you. How do I know that? Because you're here and I know what it's taken for you to sit in that seat." pic.twitter.com/m7cGjLrftZ

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 23, 2022

Do I need to explain my "[sic]" on "the hearing might have been an opportunity to explain why Roe v. Wade is in fact the tip of the constitutional iceberg [sic]"? Lithwick cannot have wanted to characterize Roe and related cases as the iceberg. Aren't we rooting for the ship?

ADDED: I think I can solve the mystery of what the Democrats are afraid of. They're afraid of the electorate and that to lay out a "theory for progressive jurisprudence" would only alienate people. It's better to hold back, blandly honor the historic!!! nominee, and wait for the Republicans to create the opportunities to call them meanies. I strongly suspect that Lithwick knows this very well.

"You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’re just seeing, a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure, pure demagoguery."

"A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power." 

Said Mitch McConnell, quoted in "McConnell rips Biden’s voting rights speech as ‘profoundly unpresidential’" (NY Post). 

I didn't watch Biden's speech — I can read the transcript — but I did overhear it, and I said out loud, What is he yelling about? Why is he scolding us? He's using a ridiculous "tough guy" voice. 

You can criticize me for not attending to the substance, but he wasn't trying to use substance. He was using emotive sound effects. It was like a Trump rally — but no. A Trump rally would have humor and fun. 

And I don't think Trump ever relied on the argument that you're a racist if you don't agree with him. The anti-Trump rejoinder: Trump never called his opponents racists, because his between-the-lines message was always come all you racists and follow me. 

The immortal Feinstein.

I'm reading "California Recall: Unpredictable Election Has Democrats Concerned About Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Seat" (CBS, San Francisco):

It’s the Democrats’ doomsday scenario: California Gov. Gavin Newsom loses his recall race this fall, and a Senate vacancy is later filled by a GOP governor. And the 50-50 Senate, currently controlled by Democrats, is run again by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

Nobody wants to talk about it openly, but Dianne Feinstein is 88 years old.

In an interview with CNN, Feinstein made clear the recall election won’t affect her plans to serve out her full six years — no matter the outcome of the race. “Why would I?” Feinstein said when asked if she would consider resigning in the period between a Newsom loss and before a GOP governor could be sworn in. Feinstein added: “It doesn’t affect me — the recall is just against him.” Asked if she had even considered stepping aside as the recall campaign has gotten underway, Feinstein said: “No.”

That's Ruth Bader Ginsburg style grit.

Now, maybe she'll cave to pressure if Newsom actually loses. There could be a 38-day period before the new GOP governor takes office. 

"The FBI has found 'scant' evidence the Jan. 6 insurrection was the result of an organized plot..."

"'Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,' an anonymous former official said of the nearly 600 people who have been arrested for their involvement in the attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. 'Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages."'  

Writes Joel Mathis at The Week in "The Jan. 6 'plot' that wasn't." Mathis strains to patch together something like a conspiracy theory:

There didn't need to be a secret conspiracy. Instead, it sounds more like self-radicalization as a mass phenomenon. The term "self-radicalization" has been used in recent years to describe the underlying causes of lone-wolf terror attacks like the... Orlando's Pulse nightclub, or the Pensacola shooter... [or] Dylann Roof.... What is Jan. 6, if not a similar phenomenon... only with all the wolves gathered in a single, very important location for the same purpose? None of this gets Trump off the hook.... The people who came to Washington D.C. on Jan. 6 did so at Trump's invitation, and then marched to the Capitol at his behest. He didn't have to plot with anybody — he just had to rile up his followers, then point them in the right direction. 

They were protesters, though, not killers! They behaved like protesters, going to the place where the thing they were protesting was happening. If they'd been like Roof or like the Pulse or Pensacola shooters, they'd have done something much more violent than trespassing on the building.

By the way, I've been wondering what might have happened if the Senators had not all gotten the same idea at the same time and run out of the Senate chamber, leaving it to the protesters. What if a Senator or 2 or 3 had stayed in place, where they belonged and the protesters had to face them? 

We've been encouraged to think the protesters would have brutalized them. But what if one Senator had the nerve and the presence of mind to stand his (or her) ground and confront them with words? I'm thinking of something about law and civilization....

 

"A man just naturally can't take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin' everybody in the world, 'cause then he's just not breaking one law but all laws.... It's the very conscience of humanity..... Your husband, Donald." (I left the "Your husband, Donald" part in the otherwise heavily elided quote, because... it surprised me... weirdly.)

"Some Democrats scoffed at the notion that the GOP would ever be able to deliver 10 votes needed to clear the filibuster. As of Wednesday night, they were at 11 — a number that appears likely to grow."

From "POLITICO Playbook: The inside view from the West Wing on infrastructure."

NUMBER OF THE DAY: 21. That’s how many senators now support the bipartisan infrastructure framework proposed by Sens. KYRSTEN SINEMA, JOE MANCHIN, ROB PORTMAN, BILL CASSIDY, MITT ROMNEY and the other members of their centrist group. This is big....

What does this do to the Democrat side of the equation? The fear that Sinema and Manchin will oppose a larger reconciliation package stuffed with the left’s top priorities is real.

Essentially, Democratic leaders are letting their centrists eat dessert without the veggies....

What is the dessert and what is the veggies? Seems to me the Sinema/Manchin set have a bill with just the veggies and they're saying no dessert for you lefties.

Metaphor is challenging!

It was at precisely the 9-minute mark that I turned off the Bruce Castor opening statement, because I didn't need to watch someone else's nightmare.

 

He's revealed that he changed what he was going to say because the House Managers' presentation was so good and rambled about how we all feel emotional when we've witnessed violence and — seeming to want to discourse on the subject of the specialness of U.S. Senators — he takes us back to his childhood, when he used to listen to a record — an old-time LP on a record player, remember those things? — and his parents had a record of Senator Everett Dirksen, I bet some of you remember Everett Dirkson, oh, my, he had a deep, resonant, sonorous voice, he would intone, intone with such seriousness, about gallant men... that's what the record was called "Gallant Men," though of course, today, it would need to be "Gallant Men and Women" — chuckle, chuckle — because, you know, women, women are gallant too. Shall we talk about gallantry? Gallantry is important in this world, and Senators can be gallant! Some folks say ga-LANT, accent on the second syllable, but whether you say GAL-lant or ga-LANT, whether you be Democrat or Republican, male or female, Kansan or Nebraska — whoever, wherever, from whatever walk of life that may lead you here today to this great chamber, this chamber that was breached — breached! — on that horrible day, you know that violence is wrong, violence is terrible, and violence against the most gallant, most serious, resonant, sonorous-voiced chamber that has ever graced the face of this earth, from the great, gallant Everett Dirkson, through the ages, down to you, you most sonorous and gallant denizens of this sacred chamber, it was a most awful event that occurred that day, January 6th, and it made me think of that time when I was but a little boy, barely able to operate the record player, with its tone arm and its revolutions per minute setting, but I would work oh so hard to cue up that voice, that wonderful voice of Everett Dirkson, why that man, speaking of gallantness — gallantry — it reached me in the depth of my being — though I was but a little boy — and I thought someday, perhaps I too, could find my way to the Senate Chamber and I could stand before it and open my mouth and speak, speak in my voice, a voice that would perhaps have matured in the deep, warm, chilling depth of the deep voice of Everett Dirkson, and I would be standing there, speaking, and... oh, my God, please, let me wake from this nightmare!

"Let’s get one thing straight: there’s nothing 'respectable' about representing Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. Trump doesn’t have any legal right..."

"... to be represented by a lawyer in this context: it’s not a criminal trial, and if no real lawyer is willing to represent him, well that’s just too bad.  The notion that someone like Trump has a 'right' to have lawyers help him out in this context is a particularly perverse abuse of the concept of the right to counsel. If you represent Trump in this context it’s either because you think what Trump did on January 6th was affirmatively good, or you like money — or more realistically the promise of money — enough to overcome your distaste for murderous sedition."

Writes lawprof Paul Campos, (at Lawyer, Guns & Money). He finds it "funny" that Trump's "entire legal team quits. He's laughing at Trump's loss of legal representation and condemning any lawyer who would step up to provide representation. He says it's perverse and abusive even to think that there is a right to counsel at this thing called a trial that is to take place in the Senate. Everyone already knows in advance that Trump is guilty of "murderous sedition." 

It's very creepy, this aggressive enthusiasm for seeing one's enemy deprived of a defense.

Is Trump pathetically lawyerless or is he planning the power move of all time — representing himself on the Senate floor?

The conventional wisdom is, of course, that you never want to represent yourself — but that's in reference to the conventional setting, where you are in court and it's a law-based affair. Trump faces a trial in the midst of 100 Senators, with no Chief Justice presiding — no separate decision-makers of law and fact — and a complete tangle of law and politics, with politics taking precedence over law. 

Think about the stakes: What does Trump risk if he loses? Disqualification from running for office again? The real stakes are history — who writes it and whether Trump, in this next chapter, is a has-been holed up in Florida or the biggest, ballsiest man in American history, fighting 100 pompous politicos on the floor of the Senate. What a wildly entertaining movie! You say he's a narcissist? A reality-show star who somehow burst into the highest level of politics, where he boldly, recklessly proceeds on instinct and optimism? 

I'm sketching out these thoughts after seeing this glaring headline at Drudge this morning:

That links to a milder headline I'd seen yesterday: "First on CNN: Trump's impeachment defense team leaves less than two weeks before trial" (CNN).

Why do you think he's using these lawyers, then sending them on their way? Do you think they are abandoning him because he wants them to do things that they can't ethically do?

Former President Donald Trump's five impeachment defense attorneys have left a little more than a week before his trial is set to begin, according to people familiar with the case, amid a disagreement over his legal strategy. It was a dramatic development in the second impeachment trial for Trump, who has struggled to find lawyers willing to take his case.... 

He's down. His enemies see him as already defeated. Pathetic. Even his lawyers won't touch him. The 100 Senators are setting up to destroy his reputation, to write him down in history as The Worst President....

"There is no authority granted to Congress to impeach and convict persons who are not 'civil officers of the United States.' It’s as simple as that."

"But simplicity doesn’t mean unimportance. Limiting Congress to its specified powers is a crucial element in the central idea of the U.S. Constitution: putting the state under law.... The interpretation that persons are subject to impeachment and conviction even if they are not civil officers would greatly expand the Senate’s ability to prevent future office-holding.... [If] removal is irrelevant, any person who was once a civil officer might be impeached and convicted and by this means disqualified from any future office. Is it really compatible with the system of democratic representation...?... [P]runing the disqualification penalty away from its basis in removal creates a bill of attainder, a punishment levied by a legislative body without a criminal trial. An impeachable offense, it is well established, does not have to be a statutory crime. Thus disqualification standing alone and not as appurtenant to removal is precisely the sort of attainder envisaged by the Framers. Is it consistent with the American system of laws, to say nothing of the prohibition on attainders in Article I, Section 9, to allow Congress to impose such draconian penalties without a jury trial—in the absence of the removal of the officer by the Senate...?"

Writes lawprof Philip Bobbitt in "Why the Senate Shouldn’t Hold a Late Impeachment Trial" (Lawfare).