'Do something': How Tim Kaine has found a way to slow Trump's agenda (with the help of a few Republicans)

Tim Kaine no longer wears his Senate member lapel pin to work.

Instead, the Democrat has been sporting one with Virginia’s seal, which he said serves as a daily, physical reminder to be “on guard against tyranny.”

“It's a woman emphasizing virtue, standing atop a monarch who's been knocked over and his crown has fallen off. [It's] the only state that has a motto that, instead of being a positive celebration, is more of a warning or rebuke,” Kaine said. “The phrase is ‘Sic semper tyrannis’ or ‘Thus always to tyrants.'”

The small, physical gesture represents a larger warning—and goal—for Kaine in the Senate: President Trump is “essentially a tyrant,” he argued in a sit-down interview with National Journal. And Democrats in Congress, he says, need to get creative about using all the tools in their toolbox.

Now, Kaine has emerged as one of the most recognizable Democrats fighting against the Trump administration. No, that isn’t because he ran for vice president on the ticket with Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016. Rather, it’s a wonky Senate procedure that has given him a spotlight: privileged motions.

Michael Thorning, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Structural Democracy Project, explained that these motions are “privileged, meaning they’re sort of exactly like it sounds, that whatever that item of business is, it can be brought up at essentially any time where a member can be recognized and that becomes the business of the Senate.”

Kaine said the idea to pursue privileged motions came from lessons learned during Trump’s first term, when the senator in 2020 pushed a resolution to block the president from further attacking Iran. It passed with several Republican votes.

Though Trump ultimately vetoed that resolution, it ignited the spark in Kaine’s mind “once the dust settled in November” to push more of these votes this time around, which he can introduce as a member of the minority party and also force his Republican colleagues to go on the record.

Trying to bring Republicans on board

The resolutions are legislatively privileged to challenge executive action, and Kaine is largely using them to challenge Trump’s authority, particularly his emergency declarations related to executive orders.

Thorning said privileged motions have been used in the past but are “not the routine business of Congress.”

“And that's for good reason. These situations come up rarely, and Congress seeks to weigh in on them itself fairly rarely,” he said, explaining that the privileged mechanism was created because Congress believed “these matters—defending their Article One role in our checks and balances—of such high importance that it would be necessary for Congress to have an expedited path to consider these items when a member brought them up, and that they were more important than whatever the normal business of the Senate was at any given time.”

The first one Kaine introduced in this Congress, with Sen. Martin Heinrich, challenged the energy emergency Trump declared on his first day in office.

“There's no energy emergency, and we produce more energy than we ever have,” Kaine said. “We couldn't get any Republican votes on that [resolution], but we kind of established that when we can challenge, we will.”

It failed.

But in his next effort, Kaine found bipartisan success. In early April, four Republicans joined Democrats in passing a resolution that would effectively repeal the tariffs Trump had slapped on Canada. Democrats had finally found enough GOP resistance in Congress against Trump’s sweeping executive actions, and on a topic on which Americans were fast-splintering away from Republicans and Trump.

“There's a little bit of a hangover period where you're still using the tools that you’re used to in the majority, but they're not effective because you're not the majority,” Kaine joked from his Senate office last week. It was just hours before his colleagues would vote, and somewhat unexpectedly fail to pass, another privileged resolution he sponsored to terminate the emergency Trump declared in imposing the sweeping tariffs on most countries.

That was not the outcome Kaine had anticipated, given that the resolution was also on tariffs and had bipartisan support.

The resolution died mainly because two anticipated supporters—Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell—were absent. McConnell, the longest-serving Republican leader in history but a skeptic of tariffs, had voted to advance Kaine’s first tariff resolution nearly a month earlier.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer defended the decision to still hold the vote, even though the two absences, which became clear earlier that day, led to a 49-49 tie vote. “It was a win-win, either way. If we won the vote, it was a good win, like we won the Canada vote,” Schumer told reporters the next day. But if Democrats lost with the GOP largely voting against, “Republicans own it. … And we wanted to have the vote to show the contrast with Trump on the 100th day.”

The following day, Kaine told National Journal that he was “not happy” about the vote failing due to the two absences. But he said that forcing Republicans on the record and forcing Vice President J.D. Vance to break a tariff-related tie was a win and a "clarifying vote for the public.”

“They had to drag the VP out to drive across town to cast a tie-breaking vote on a motion to table a motion to reconsider, and it shows how much the GOP is embracing Trump's tariff idiocy, even on a day with the economic news shows that it's wrecking the American economy,” Kaine said. “The American public will have no doubt about who is causing the damage and who is standing up against the damage, and so that was still successful.”

And that’s the “theory of the case,” Kaine said. “We have to do things that give Republicans the ability to say, ‘I don't want that. We should go a different direction.' So I'm going to keep doing as many of these as I can.”

Dismissed as a 'political exercise'

But Kaine’s strategy hasn’t moved all moderate Republicans to join him—yet.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a critic of tariffs who faces a tough reelection campaign, dismissed Kaine’s resolution as a “political exercise,” telling reporters the resolutions amounted to “messaging bills.”

But Kaine is already onto the next. The Senate is expected to vote early next week on a resolution under the Foreign Assistance Act related to El Salvador, as the Central American country comes under fire for accepting deportees from the U.S. and imprisoning them in a maximum-security prison. This includes Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a wrongly deported Maryland man who is still being held in El Salvador despite the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that the administration must facilitate his return.

Kaine's privileged motion would require the State Department to produce a report on the human rights conditions in El Salvador, as well as the steps the administration is taking to comply with the courts' rulings on wrongful deportations, within 30 days.

“It's designed like the other privileges are designed, to enable the Article One branch to check executive overreach,” Kaine said at a press conference in front of the Capitol. If no report is produced within 30 days, he said, the “law specifies that all security assistance to El Salvador will be cut off.”

And if a report is produced and the senators still want to, Kaine said, they have another privileged motion they can bring up to terminate security assistance to El Salvador, but that one would “need to be acted on by both houses, and survive a presidential veto.”

That has been a high hurdle for Kaine to clear. His impending resolution on El Salvador does not need House or presidential approval, but others do—and have previously faced the wrath of Trump’s pen or preemptive roadblocks from House Republicans.

“In the first Trump term, when I did that Iran resolution, I got it passed in both houses, it went to President Trump's desk, and he vetoed it. I couldn't override it, but it was a data frame,” Kaine said. Trump had said, “‘I'm going to veto it’ and [Republicans] vote for it anyway. He saw that and [Trump] backed away from some of the aggressive actions with Iran, because he saw how skeptical even Republicans were of a war against Iran.”

Kaine argued that even if these resolutions face hardships ahead, he will keep introducing more, because constituents want Democrats to “do something.” That's a message, he said, he’d heard from his travels through the commonwealth.

Kaine’s constituency has been hit particularly hard by the actions of the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed the jobs of thousands of federal workers—many of whom live in Virginia.

'What happens the next day?'

“By ‘do something,' [people] didn’t mean [to] write a letter to the administration, because the administration's not answering my letters,” he said.

“Normally, if I introduce a bill, it gets assigned to a committee. But I'm in the minority, so the majority may not take it up. Do a press conference? That's great, but what happens the next day?” Kaine said.

Democrats have struggled to find an effective way to legislate and message against Trump and Republicans, who have spent the past 100 days using sweeping executive authority to drastically reshape the federal government. Polling has consistently shown Democrats underwater, largely due to Americans wanting them to do more to fight against Trump.

A recent survey from CNN found Democrats at 27 percent approval—a decade low for the party.

Letters have been sent to the administration on a slew of issues. Some progressives have taken their message on a road trip. Sen. Cory Booker made headlines with a floor speech that broke records, and Democrats, in both chambers, are holding press conferences almost daily to rail against the administration.

But Kaine’s strategy has shifted, and he argues the threat is more serious now than it was when he campaigned against Trump nine years ago.

“My message has changed because the circumstances changed. Trump, term one, would do stuff, but he and his team wanted to have a credible legal rationale before they did it. And even if I disagreed with the rationale and disagreed with what they did, they were trying to come up with a rationale,” he said. “Now they're doing stuff regardless of whether there's a legal rationale, and they're sort of daring the courts to say ‘no.'”

But Kaine said that not everybody in the Democratic conference was on board with his strategy to force the votes.

“I got some real pushback the first two times, because I'm not in leadership,” Kaine recounted about his efforts in the beginning. But he noted that more senators—including Schumer—cosponsored the resolution they tried to pass last week.

Polling for Democratic leadership, in particular, has been troublesome, and Schumer, with a 17 approval rating in that CNN survey, puts him at the lowest approval rating than any other congressional leader.

But Kaine, 67, said he is currently not seeking a leadership position.

“Leadership with the small ‘l,’ not with the big ‘L,'” he said. “There's no position I'm running for.”

So Kaine says he’ll keep exercising his right as a member in the minority to “force all senators, including Republicans, to have to declare” their positions on issues.

“We're supposed to be a check against executive overreach. We're supposed to be a check against bad policy. And I just am trying to get the Senate to be what we're supposed to be.”