What Are the Republicans Thinking?

By Mike Koetting            March 4, 2025

Twice before in my life, I experienced a sensation that our basic political system was in mortal danger. Once in 1970 on the day protestors were killed at Kent State and three years later when Richard Nixon precipitated the Saturday Night Massacre. In both cases, however, the sensation only lasted for a few hours. I found I had a deep-seated conviction that the series of checks and balances would work, even if a bit wobbly for a time.

Today I am finding that confidence waning.

Throughout our history, our system has worked because powerful individuals were willing to be constrained by institutions, by the system of checks and balances that provide some assurance that a small number of individuals can’t ride roughshod over the rest.

It isn’t as if these powerful individuals were all particularly virtuous—some were and others not so much. It was more that they operated in an environment of a shared understanding that if you wrecked the system, what came next would be worse. Democracy is what allows people with differences to work together over time.

So, although there have always been individuals who would have thrown over the institution, other than the Civil War, the broader ethic prevailed. Those who would have done way with these checks and balances have been restrained. A year after the Saturday Night Massacre, a group of Republican Senators told Nixon that he would be impeached if he did not resign.

What is different about today is not so much that Donald Trump would throw over the institutions, but that there are so many people who are willing to let him do so even though they know better.

Many citizens are so deeply alienated by the current moment and feel so powerless they don’t worry about Constitutional considerations. I am disappointed, but I understand.

However, I cannot fathom what is going through the minds of various Republican Representatives and Senators. What is their rationale for allowing Donald Trump so much leeway? It is implausible that they don’t understand they are destroying the checks and balances that have been fundamental to America for 250 years. Do they really believe that putting all the power in the President is a good idea? And while they may be happy that Trump will accomplish some things that they want and whack away at some things they oppose, do they really believe this is a sustainable model for running a country?

What do they think would happen if Democrats won the next time around? Or, is it their model that there won’t be a “next time around”? Or, perhaps, they believe that they can push the “reset” button and then simply resume institutional arrangements later. How is that different from seeing the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a transitional phase. History has shown over and over that if you give someone too much power, if you destroy the institutional system of checks and balances–particularly the intellectual and emotional system of internalized restraints–that the power does not get redistributed without cataclysm.

Or perhaps they believe that the courts will stop the worst of this aggressive behavior and there is no reason they should expose themselves to Trump’s wrath and, parenthetically, endanger their next primary. Perhaps, but that is certainly failing their Constitutional duties.

Maybe they really believe the traditional checks and balances have somehow been perverted because they frequently frustrate the things Republicans want to do. Could they really believe Trump’s implied thought process “He who saves his country does not violate any laws?” To get there they would have to believe that the country is in real peril and that laws therefore no longer apply. This is absurd. Even granting the country has problems, it requires a willful lack of imagination to imagine there is no alternative within the democratic system.

They seem not to recognize that the current situation is a consequence of many Constitutionally democratic actions within the existing framework. Republicans should pursue changing those in a similar democratic way. Of course, not only is that slower, it forces them to be much more transparent about what they are trying to do. No doubt there is widespread dissatisfaction with the current governing. But I haven’t seen any groundswell of enthusiasm for cutting Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid to make Elon Musk and the tech bros richer.

While these Republicans who are declining to protect our institutions may think they are at the beginning of a new era, they are missing an important lesson from history. The people who collaborate in overturning a democratic order are rarely remembered fondly. And the people who stood up for the institutions of democracy are remembered as heroes.

Unfortunately, it sometimes takes history a while to play out. Waiting for it will be unpleasant if Republicans in Congress give up on the Constitution.