A guardrail holds

Four years ago, just days into the Biden administration with the Senate divided down the middle, the senior senator from South Dakota rose in eloquent defense of deliberation and compromise.

“Our Founders recognized the importance of putting safeguards in place to ensure that majorities wouldn’t curtail or eliminate minority rights,” said John Thune, a Republican, from the Senate floor. “They made the Senate smaller and senators’ terms of office longer, with the intention of creating a more stable, more thoughtful, and more deliberative legislative body to check ill-considered or intemperate legislation or attempts to curtail minority rights.” 

Those words are freshly relevant. Mr. Thune is the newly elected leader of the incoming Republican Senate majority. In one of his first statements in that role, amid a hail of controversial Cabinet picks from Donald Trump, he vowed to preserve the filibuster – a legislative tool that compels consensus. 

That decision was unlikely to curry favor with the president-elect, who prizes loyalty and has urged the Senate to abdicate its constitutional role of weighing nominations through “advice and consent.” But it reinforced a guardrail. Last week, his first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew after Republicans in the Senate expressed their unwillingness to overlook the former Florida congressman’s alleged criminal misconduct.

The Senate’s early gestures of independence underscore that governing rests on ideas as much as it does on the people who hold powerful jobs. The framers of the American Constitution established a system of checks and balances among three equal branches. In the Senate, that equilibrium draws on what James Madison called “the stability of character.” 

Its mandate of consent for appointments to senior positions in the executive and judicial branches upholds a moral agency to reject or approve. When the late Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole was asked how he approached his work in Congress, he described it this way: “Well, I’m going to sit back and watch for a few days, and then I’ll stand up for what I think is right.” 

“America has never achieved greatness when Republicans and Democrats simply manage to work together or tolerate each other,” Mr. Dole wrote in an op-ed published in The Washington Post shortly after his death in 2021. “When we prioritize principles over party and humanity over personal legacy, we accomplish far more as a nation.” 

Republicans claimed a broad mandate after winning the White House and both chambers of Congress. Yet unified government is no guarantee of unanimity in governing. In the three weeks since, many in the Senate have tempered party allegiance with individual reason.

“All Americans, whether or not they’re in the majority, deserve to be represented,” Senator Thune said four years ago. Deliberation “requires more thought, more debate, and greater consensus.”