The System Works, Sort Of

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

“Don’s double defeat” read the headline this morning at Politico, reeking of triumphalism at the president’s expense.

 

I was mortified. To an Eeyore, a strong dose of unexpected optimism has the same effect that garlic has on vampires. My supernatural power to suck the hopefulness out of any political development was momentarily disabled.

 

But only momentarily.

 

The “double defeat” happened in the span of a few hours Tuesday. First came shocking news that our scummy mafioso Justice Department had asked a grand jury to indict six congressional Democrats over the video they cut last fall reminding U.S. service members not to obey unlawful orders. I thought the FBI’s investigation of the six was essentially for show, going through the motions to appease Donald Trump as he screeched about “sedition.”

 

Nope. The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., led by “Judge Jeanine” Pirro, actually tried to prosecute members of Congress for accurately stating military policy. And then, the even more shocking news: The grand jury said no. Pirro’s office failed at the most notoriously easy task in American law, and not for the first time.

 

The second defeat came in an even less likely forum—Congress.

 

Leaning ever further into his role as Renfield to the president’s Dracula, House Speaker Mike Johnson sought to pass a rule that would bar lawmakers (namely, Democrats) from introducing bills aimed at repealing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs. Twice last year Republicans passed similar rules for specified periods of time; Johnson wanted another extension, hoping to spare his conference from having to tackle a fraught issue that might soon be rendered moot by the Supreme Court.

 

The Republican Party: Offloading its civic duty to restrain the president onto others since 2016.

 

Nearly every member of the House GOP went along with this latest attempt to outlaw, er, legislating, but this time “nearly every member” wasn’t enough. Three Republicans—Thomas Massie, Don Bacon, and Kevin Kiley—voted no, as did every Democrat. The rule failed, 214-217.

 

The first floor vote on a Democratic resolution to undo Trump’s tariffs passed the House today, with the support of six Republicans. There’s a fair chance that this resolution or one like it will eventually make it through the Senate, which has already passed several resolutions under simple majority rules to rescind presidential tariffs. That would be an embarrassing rebuke for a president whose party controls both chambers.

 

Our system worked, in other words. Our legislature and our justice system checked Trump’s attempts to abuse his power. It’s a great day for the rule of law, no?

 

Sure, I guess. If you’re a chump optimist who cares more about moral victories than outcomes.

 

Justice?

 

What is the outcome that our corrupt DOJ sought by pursuing the six Democrats in Congress? Sending them to prison?

 

Unlikely. Trump may have fantasized about that because he neither knows nor cares anything about law, but Pirro and Pam Bondi surely understood that this wouldn’t end in victory for their side. There’s no scenario in which an American, let alone an elected lawmaker, does time for exhorting agents of the state to follow laws they’re already duty-bound to follow. Federal judges would have made mincemeat of the Justice Department’s case if a grand jury hadn’t done it for them.

 

The outcome the DOJ hoped for (besides getting the president off its back by pursuing the case) was to scare Trump’s enemies by showing them how far it’s willing to go in abusing its powers to harass them. Not even members of Congress are safe from vindictive prosecution by the president’s consiglieres, you see.

 

And they got that outcome. America is a more frightening place for Trump’s critics today than it was yesterday, notwithstanding the result of the grand jury proceedings.

 

I’m sure Bondi and Pirro would have preferred to obtain indictments against the six Democrats, if only to save face, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. Antagonists of the president are now on notice: If you cross him, whether you escape the ordeal of criminal prosecution will depend on your luck in drawing a grand jury with a higher-than-usual skepticism of government allegations. The DOJ itself won’t refrain from trying to prosecute you out of any quaint ethical sense that it’s improper to do so when it knows it stands zero chance of a conviction.

 

It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if the sources for yesterday’s news stories about the grand jury’s failure to indict were Trump loyalists inside the Justice Department, not Trump opponents. To effectively intimidate the White House’s critics, the fact that indictments had been sought needed to be publicly known. Well, now it is.

 

If that’s a “victory” for the resistance, the resistance is a cheap date.

 

The essential thing to remember today is that, realistically, there’s nothing that can be done to halt the blatant, ongoing corruption of the DOJ. (Well, nothing outside the agency, anyway.) Last week National Review’s Andy McCarthy proposed defunding the department if it made supporting the president a qualification of employment, but shutting down federal law enforcement is unimaginable politically for Democrats. Every crime in the United States that occurred during the shutdown would be blamed on the left, whether it fell under federal jurisdiction or not. The GOP attack ads about “defunding the police” would write themselves.

 

A Democratic-controlled Congress could impeach Bondi next year, I suppose, as there’s no shortage of grounds—dubious investigations of the president’s political enemies, cover-ups shielding federal agents who have killed Americans, preposterously sweeping claims about the executive’s constitutional power to license illegal conduct, etc. (If egregious hypocrisy were a high crime or misdemeanor, she’d be dead to rights on that, too.) But what would be the point? Senate Republicans won’t vote to remove her.

 

Even if they did, the cultural rot at the Justice Department would persist. For all her faults, the attorney general clearly isn’t the cause of her agency’s corruption. Replacing her with Todd Blanche won’t fix anything and might plausibly make it worse.

 

Yesterday reminded us again that the Justice Department is an unethical disgrace to the country and will almost certainly remain so until 2029, if not longer. Some victory for the rule of law.

 

Tariffs.

 

What about the tariff vote in the House? What outcome were Mike Johnson and Republicans seeking there?

 

Obviously, they were hoping to protect the president’s power to impose burdensome tariffs on Americans based on nothing more than his royal whim. Well, good news: He still has that power today and, unless and until the Supreme Court takes it away from him, will continue to have it no matter what legislation Democrats manage to move.

 

That’s because our country is now in the same constitutional upside-down on trade that it’s been in for decades with presidential-ordered military interventions. Instead of seeking lawful authority from Congress before acting, the White House acts first and then dares Congress to strip it of the authority it has asserted to do so. And that’s nearly impossible: Since the president will veto any bill that tries to curtail his power, the House and Senate are forced to try to muster all-but-unattainable supermajorities to override his objection.

 

In a world where Republican cowards in Congress cared more about protecting Americans from tariffs than they cared about protecting themselves from primary challengers, that’s doable. In the world we live in, it is not.

 

So the closest thing to a meaningful “victory” that happened in the House yesterday is that the aforementioned cowards will now have to go on record as to whether they support or oppose various measures to limit Trump’s tariffs. And that ain’t nothing, in fairness, in the same way that the grand jury declining to indict the six Democrats ain’t nothing. The president’s trade policies have cost U.S. states $200 billion and counting, or about $1,000 per American household per one study, and they’re currently rocking a 37-60 approval rating, according to a recent Pew Research survey. Tariffs will be a liability for the GOP in the midterms.

 

But how much more of a liability will they plausibly be for House Republicans just because they now have to vote on whether to repeal them? Midterms are referendums on the president’s agenda: If the average voter hates a policy like tariffs, he or she is apt to punish their local GOP congressman for it regardless of how that person voted in the House on the subject.

 

And that’s especially true, I think, if the president has bear-hugged the policy and stubbornly doubled down at every opportunity about how supposedly great it is.

 

Last night, for instance, right around the time that the House voted to kill Johnson’s rule, a clip circulated on social media of Trump boasting in a new interview that he jacked up his tariff on Switzerland from 30 percent to 39 percent because he didn’t like the tone that an envoy from the Swiss government took with him on the phone. That’s the sort of “national emergency” that supposedly justifies his power to set trade policy unilaterally and the logic that now informs momentous decisions on which the fate of many American businesses depends. “Arrogance” doesn’t scratch the surface of describing his hubris.

 

Nothing that happens in the House going forward will save Republican members from the wrath of voters outraged at knowing their livelihoods have become pawns in a spiteful lunatic’s petty score-settling. But if I’m wrong about that, then last night’s defeat was arguably a good thing for the House GOP long-term: It means some members of Mike Johnson’s conference will have a chance to distance themselves from the president’s unpopular tariffs before November by casting a symbolic vote to repeal them.

 

So how was it some important victory for “the system”?

 

The proper response to the executive commandeering the legislature’s power to set trade policy under a patently ridiculous claim of a trade-deficit “emergency” is impeachment. Instead, we’re destined for a series of votes on repeal bills with no hope of achieving their intended purpose, a sort of congressional kabuki theater of accountability. Hooray for the rule of law.

 

A silver lining.

 

Here’s where I surprise you with a bit of optimism, though. In a way, Tuesday was a meaningful victory for Trump opponents.

 

In court and in Congress, the president’s allies were forced by the perverse cultish dynamics of Republican politics to defend bad, disliked policies that will damage their public support. Corrupt toadies deserve the people’s scorn, and yesterday increased the probability that they’ll receive it: I’d call that an example of our political system working.

 

It’s possible, as I said, that the House’s actions on tariffs going forward either won’t matter to voters or will give some Republicans an opportunity to register their opposition to Trump’s policies before November. But it’s also easy to see how having to take those votes might hurt them (which is why Mike Johnson wanted to avoid it, of course). Some GOPers will vote against repealing the president’s tariffs because they’re worried about a primary challenge, but that vote will haunt them in the general election. Others will vote for repeal to protect their left flank in the general election but at the risk of antagonizing Republican primary voters, especially with an enraged Trump demanding consequences for “disloyalty.”

 

The White House’s obstinacy on sticking with tariffs despite their unpopularity is a strategic disaster. It’s only fair that his apologists in Congress should suffer for it, and now some of them are more likely to. The system works!

 

It will also work, I expect, regarding the attempted indictment of the six congressional Democrats. Polls taken late last year showed Americans siding with the six against the administration’s attempts to punish them for sedition, but I’d bet good money that the margin has since widened as anxiety about lawlessness by federal law enforcement has risen. “Don’t obey illegal orders” sounds a lot more reasonable now that ICE agents have begun shooting American citizens.

 

My sense, which I hope is based on more than wishful thinking, is that the president and his administration lost the benefit of the doubt as to their good intentions from some critical mass of the electorate over the last six weeks. If so, then the sleazy, discrediting shenanigans in which our renegade Justice Department is presently engaged—which are by no means limited to harassing Democratic lawmakers—should affirm newly minted Trump doubters in their skepticism and gradually harden opinion against him further.

 

And needless to say, the failed indictment should add rocket fuel to left-wing turnout in November. Our system has no means to stop a corrupt DOJ from behaving corruptly, but handing control of the House to Democrats this fall will at least guarantee some uncomfortable investigations and revelations next year of how an operation run by the likes of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel conducts business behind closed doors.

 

So the system worked yesterday after all. It didn’t work the way it’s supposed to, by preventing abuses of power altogether, but it created a modicum of accountability by supplying voters with two separate vignettes illustrating why the party that runs Washington is unfit to govern and shouldn’t be trusted with power. There’s virtue in that.