“You can’t be a senator in private”

This reverse-Chotiner with Brian Schatz is very good:

Various people in the Democratic caucuses within the House and the Senate have said some version of “We can’t respond with full panic to every single thing Trump does. You have to pick and choose.” I know everyone’s got different political incentives, but how are you figuring out what to make a big deal about versus what you may oppose but not freak out over?

I focus on preventing immediate harm. When the Medicaid portal was shut down, when the Head Start money was shut down, when construction money for highways was shut down, that was relatively straightforward because it was both immediately harmful and illegal. [The White House claimed the Medicaid portal was unavailable owing to a technical outage.] And then I’m also focussed on maintaining our American system of checks and balances. That’s different from me making that my primary talking point. But I did swear an oath to the Constitution, and I’m not going to let some pundit dictate whether or not I exercise my obligations as a member of the Article I branch. I’m not suggesting we put it into a television ad.

Wait, what are you talking about with “some pundit”? Who are you referring to?

Oh, David Axelrod, James Carville. I mean, those guys have not been in the trenches legislatively or electorally in a full generation. And there’s a cottage industry out there of Democratic strategists. But in order to be a Democratic strategist, you actually have to do politics currently and not just podcast about it.

You are referring to them criticizing what you’ve done around U.S.A.I.D. by saying foreign aid is not good territory for Democrats to fight for?

Yeah. And you think I don’t know that foreign aid is not as popular as Medicaid? Of course I know that. But there are going to be mass deaths from malaria and H.I.V./AIDS and other preventable diseases and conditions because of what the United States is doing. So do I have to be thoughtful and sometimes clever about how we go about communicating that? Yes. Am I going to wait for a more popular program? No, because what they are doing here is ignoring a federal law.

Not everything in politics can be about campaigning, especially 20 months before the next elections, and nor is it very plausible to think that having a billionaire arbitrarily end U.S.A.I.D going to be some huge political winner from Republicans (particularly since the sporadic voters they rely on won’t know it exists.) And Christ, find some new “Democratic strategists” to talk to.

Have you had any conversations with your Republican colleagues in the Senate, and are any of them even privately concerned about some of the things going on? I know it’s irrelevant in some sense.

I will just say it as carefully as I can. Yes and yes.

Well, I don’t know if that’s heartening or not.

No, and I think you can’t be a senator in private. At some point they have to do something.

I’m preemptively infuriated by Cassidy and the other nominally pro-vaccine Republican senators who will try to claim that they can’t be held responsible for RFK Jr. doing what he has devoted his entire career in public life to saying he’ll do, in the tradition of Susan Collins crying crocodile tears over Roe. These people are worse than useless.