Congressional Republicans remain the political actors best positioned to stop Donald Trump’s aggressive deployment of presidential power. Yet, instead, they have used the power of the majority to create a firewall to protect the president as he deports without due process, defunds scientific research and higher education, threatens and ignores the judiciary, and imposes a chaotic tariff system that has created the real possibility of recession in the United States.

In contrast to the limited tools that the federal courts have, Congress can leverage and direct the budget to create pressure on the administration or to stop policies. Congress can pass legislation that would reassert its authority over trade policy. Congress can conduct lengthy, high-profile televised hearings that can shine a negative light on Trump’s efforts and seize valuable attention away from him. The Senate could stall confirming judicial appointments. And Congress maintains the ultimate power of impeachment.

By refusing to use any of this power, as in most of Trump’s first term, congressional Republicans have intentionally insulated the president from being held accountable for his actions.

As incredible as this possibility feels today, throughout congressional history, there have been points when legislators prioritized the health of democratic institutions even when there was significant political risk. This was even true at the height of one of the most dangerous periods in America’s past, the Second Red Scare in the early Cold War, when Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his right-wing allies ran roughshod over constitutional liberties. In 1954, a group of courageous Republicans finally stood up to him.

McCarthy was the product rather than the cause of the anti-communist frenzy of the early Cold War. After the triumph of communism in China in 1949, right-wing organizations and politicians who were determined to use anti-communism as a political bludgeon against liberalism intensified their efforts. “Who lost China?” became their rallying cry. While there were certainly communists situated in certain pockets of the U.S. government, most of the attacks during the Red Scare revolved around blanket accusations that were disconnected from evidence of national security threats. In his excellent book Red Scare, journalist Clay Risen shows that McCarthy was part of a much larger culture war that unfolded in response to changes brought by the New Deal.

Elected as a U.S. senator in 1946, McCarthy gained national attention during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Feb. 9, 1950, in which he claimed to possess a list of 205 “members of the Communist Party” and a “spy ring” within the State Department.

On June 1, Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith delivered a 15-minute oration on the chamber floor in which she denounced her colleague. After criticizing the Truman administration for “its complacency to the threat of communism,” Smith gave a warning to her fellow Republicans: “I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

Unfortunately, she was pushing against the tide. McCarthy’s anti-communist demagoguery excited segments of the electorate. Democratic Sen. Millard Tydings, who conducted hearings into McCarthy, lost reelection. In the lead-up to the vote, McCarthy’s staff disseminated a manipulated image of Tydings standing next to the former leader of the American Communist Party. In 1951, Democratic Sen. William Benton’s effort to expel McCarthy failed.

McCarthy’s ongoing attacks destroyed the lives of many Americans and had a chilling effect on politics. Republicans who denounced his tactics in private tended to say nothing publicly, too scared that doing so would cost them their political careers, as Tydings had learned. Many prominent Democrats, moreover, were just as afraid to appear “weak on defense.” When voters reelected McCarthy in 1952, Washington perceived the results with trepidation. It seemed that his style and agenda had gained electoral legitimacy. That year, Republicans regained control of Congress, and Republican Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency in a campaign that stressed the weakness of Democrats on national security.

As chair of the Committee on Government Operations and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy launched multiple hearings into executive branch institutions where he said communists were lurking. Working with Roy Cohn, his counsel, the committee became one of the most feared panels in Washington. McCarthy also took advantage of a journalistic profession that privileged the norm of objectivity, realizing that reporters would print his smears without much pushback. Republicans did nothing. For the time being, he served a useful purpose. He was their attack dog. He would go after liberals and progressives in a way that they might not feel comfortable doing themselves.

McCarthy finally went too far in April and June 1954, when he investigated alleged communists in the U.S. Army. The Army fought back, charging that McCarthy had attempted to receive special treatment for a Harvard-educated attorney, David Schine, who had been on his staff. The Senate set up a special committee to investigate the matter. With millions of people watching on television, McCarthy charged that Fred Fisher, an attorney who was working for the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, had worked for the National Lawyers Guild, which was said to have ties to communists. Welch seized the moment. He fired back: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy tried to talk over the lawyer, but Welch did not cede the stage to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” Welch said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” McCarthy’s approval ratings plummeted.

On June 11, Republican Sen. Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution to remove McCarthy from his committee chairmanship. “The conviction grew that something must be done about this,” he later recalled, “even if I had to do it myself.” Flanders had compared McCarthy’s tactics to those of Hitler as he aimed “to strike fear into the heart of any defenseless minority.”

But even after the Army hearings, Flanders discovered that most Republican leaders and even senior Democrats did not support taking such a big step.

On July 30, Flanders proposed a resolution to censure McCarthy to broaden senatorial support. The U.S. Constitution vested in the Senate the power to discipline members. While expelling a senator required a two-thirds vote, censure only required a majority. During this era, censuring a colleague was seen as a dramatic step. Only 11 senators had ever been disciplined, only four of them censured. Flanders warned that McCarthy’s reputation “casts a blot upon the reputation of the Senate itself. It also makes plain the impossibility of controlling exhibitions of innate character by any change in the rules. The senator can break rules faster than we can make them.”

The Senate established a bipartisan committee to work on the censure. Republicans appointed Sen. Arthur Watkins to chair the committee. Watkins was a quiet and disciplined senator who was elected to the chamber the same year as McCarthy. Though not physically imposing, the senator was not easily intimidated. Democrats appointed three members, including Sen. John Stennis, who were seen as right of center. The final membership included former judges and governors and one former reporter. No senators had been appointed who could reasonably be accused of being partisan, leftist, or interested in running for president. The committee agreed to prohibit television cameras to prevent the frenzied atmosphere that McCarthy thrived on. “Let’s get off the front pages and back among the obituaries,” Flanders quipped.

Realizing that he could be in jeopardy, McCarthy, who had called Flanders “senile,” fought back the way he knew how. He toured the nation, speaking to loyal supporters and rallying them to his cause. He decried the Senate process as an illegitimate one, dismissing it as a political putsch and deriding it as a “lynch party.” He called Watkins “stupid” and an “unwitting handmaiden of the Communist Party.”

McCarthy still had vocal supporters in the Senate. Republican Everett Dirksen, who in 1959 would become the minority leader, warned that “no conservative will be safe in this body” if a colleague like Flanders, who he charged was in “bed” with communists, could do this to McCarthy.

Toward the end of September, weeks before the midterm elections, the committee released a report recommending a formal censure for misconduct. The vote was 6 to 0.

The censure focused on how McCarthy broke with Senate protocol rather than the substance of his accusations. In November 1954, shortly after Democrats regained control of Congress in the midterm elections, the lame-duck Republican-led Senate gathered to debate a vote of censure against McCarthy. Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who would soon be the majority leader, rounded up Democratic support, thereby allowing the Republican Party to take the credit so that the punishment would not be considered partisan outside of McCarthy’s most loyal supporters. The committee had expanded the resolution to include the attacks that he had made on committee members.

During the Senate debate before the final vote, McCarthy said: “I would have the American people recognize, and contemplate in dread, the fact that the Communist Party—a relatively small group of deadly conspirators—has now extended its tentacles to that most respected of American bodies, the United States Senate; that it has made a committee of the Senate its unwitting handmaiden.”

On Dec. 2, the upper chamber voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy for acting “contrary to senatorial traditions.” Forty-two Democrats, 22 Republicans, and 1 independent voted in favor; 22 Republicans voted against the censure.

McCarthy became a marginalized figure within the Senate. Eisenhower, who had remained quiet throughout the process, invited Sen. Watkins to the White House as a public show of appreciation. The president certainly was not happy that a few days after the censure, McCarthy apologized for having campaigned in support of Eisenhower and criticized the fact that he “on the one hand congratulates the Senators who hold up the work of our Committee, and on the other hand urges that we be patient with the Communist hoodlums who at this very moment are torturing and brainwashing American uniformed men in Communist dungeons….”

During a meeting with Republicans in the spring of 1955, Eisenhower repeated a joke circulating throughout Washington: “It’s no longer McCarthyism—it’s McCarthywasm.” Once Democrats took control of the Senate in 1955, McCarthy lost his chairmanship. Nor did Republicans give him a significant position of authority. He died two years later, at the age of 48. The term “McCarthyism” entered into the political lexicon as a permanent reminder of the dangers of demagoguery.

Historians have rightly noted the limitations of the censure. Senators did not condemn the anti-communist crusade, which remained a feature in conservative politics. As historian Robert Griffith argued in The Politics of Fear, the censure did not erase the fact that many Republicans had stood by silently during McCarthy’s worst hours because they had perceived him as a useful attack dog.

But in retrospect, the censure was still highly significant. It removed a dangerous political force from the scene. It was not surprising that the high intensity of the Red Scare in the first half of the 1950s, which had swept up almost every part of American society, would start to calm.

Today, a censure would not mean much, certainly not to Trump. In an age when shame no longer has much currency, a rebuke from the Senate would be virtually meaningless. Given the enormity of the threat that the president poses, bolder action would be necessary if Republicans wanted to show that they were serious about containing this imperial presidency.

Nonetheless, McCarthy’s censure still serves as an essential historical marker when party members did what was right for the country rather than being guided only by self-interest. Enough Senate Republicans had come to the realization that their colleague’s ongoing attacks were eroding the nation’s democratic institutions.

In 2025, that kind of thinking is desperately needed once again.