Firm, Principled Republican Opposition to Donald Trump, a Progress Report
By 
“Somehow, someone’s always looking the other way”
Because we could all use some dark comedy today, Tim Alberta revists Freedom Caucus [sic] opposition [sic] to Donald Trump:
Mulvaney is one of them. In June, he conceded there had been surprisingly little conservative opposition to Trump
But I was told the entire American establishment stood resolutely opposed to Donald Trump! Somehow “the entire American establishment except any Republican of any influence” seems less compelling.
but promised that Freedom Caucus members would hold the Republican nominee to the same standard as they did to Obama — particularly on the issue of executive power
Yeah sure.
“I’m not concerned about Donald Trump shredding the Constitution, because I know the people who stand in the House between him and the Constitution,” Mulvaney told me at the time. “We’ve been fighting against an imperial presidency for five and a half years. Every time we go to the floor and push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see that it was a principled objection in the first place. So we actually welcome that opportunity. It might actually be fun, being a strict-constitutionalist congressman doing battle with a non-strict-constitutionalist Republican president.”
The beauty of the phrase “strict construction” is that it doesn’t mean anything. So you can magically discover that every action taken by a Republican president is consistent with a strict construction of the Constitution, especially Article XII.
And now, the punchline:
Instead, he’s joining Trump’s administration. Mulvaney was recently named director of the Office of Management and Budget, the powerful agency that supervises and coordinates the government’s financial planning.
Checks and balances! That is, Trump and Congress will write each other blank checks and the balance will accrue to the .1%, with Trump generously skimming off the top.