Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., is not exactly a paragon of senatorial excellence. His main contribution since taking office in 2021 has been to be a team player for the MAGA wing of the caucus, give the most confounding sound bites possible, and annoy his colleagues with his stunts. And yet it was still a surprise to see a post from him on X where he calls President Joe Biden a “garbage human being.”
It’s a sentiment that would have been a scandal in its own right not too long ago. But Tuberville is unlikely to face any sort of consequences for it. Instead, it reflects how the Senate, which has long prided itself on its gentility in comparison to the “vulgar demeanor” of the House, has become a much crasser place.
The Senate has rules that cover a lot of things, but in this case, Tuberville seems to be in the clear. For one, the body’s rules only apply to debate in the Senate chamber. During those debates, senators cannot “directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” It also bars them from offensively referring to other states.
Now, if Tuberville went to the floor and said, for example, that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is a “garbage human being,” the chair would gavel him down. Likewise, if he said during debate that neighboring Georgia is a “garbage state,” he’d be called out for it. But even though Biden is a former senator, there don’t seem to be rules against speaking ill about the president during speeches. And as a fellow public figure, the bar would be pretty high for Biden to take legal action for defamation or anything of the sort based on Tuberville’s post.
There are also Senate rules on the use of official social media accounts. The Senate Ethics Committee has further made clear that there can’t be “any linkage from a Member’s official website or social media to any campaign website or social media.” But Tuberville was using his personal X account to attack Biden, and it doesn’t appear that his official account interacted with the post at all.
It feels limiting though to say that the rules governing how a senator comports themself are limited to their time on the Senate floor. This made more sense in a time when senators relied primarily on open debate to make their views known. Interviews with the press tend to prompt politicians to smooth out their rougher edges, for better or worse, to appear more respectable to their intended audience.
As we can see from Tuberville’s account, that’s not the case in an age when the GOP base is expecting even 69-year-old senators to sound like keyboard warriors. I’ll admit that it took me a second to really register how bizarre a thing it is for him to post, as it’s the kind of internet-fueled hyperbole that has become the norm. It’s entirely possible the communications staffer running his account didn’t think twice before firing off an incendiary statement about the president.
As we can see from Tuberville’s account, that’s not the case in an age when the GOP base is expecting even 69-year-old senators to sound like keyboard warriors.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any kind of official fix that could be applied here. The Senate could theoretically alter its rules to cover personal social media accounts as well. I’m not sure though if the Senate’s constitutional mandate to write its own rules and “punish its members for disorderly behavior” would clash with the First Amendment speech of its members here. I somehow doubt there’d be much enthusiasm among senators to find out.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., or one of his fellow members on leadership could also step up to take Tuberville to task. But McConnell is preparing to step down as leader in November, leaving him a limited amount of political capital to expend on something like this. The race to replace him is likely to be close, leaving the main candidates likely unwilling to alienate a potential vote over a statement that many of their own constituents would support.
Unfortunately, it seems this is just the world we live in now. The norms and gravitas that the Senate has cloaked itself in are a poor bulwark against the lowered standards that former President Donald Trump has set. It has become an expectation among many Republican voters for their elected officials to cast political opponents in the harshest terms possible. Tuberville, whose track record on leadership as a senator is lacking, isn’t the first person to call Biden a “garbage human being.” It’s not even fair to say that he’s being a bad role model for his constituents. He’s just giving them exactly what they want, no matter how poisonous it is for the country’s political health.
