When the history of this dystopian era is written (assuming we survive to write it), and the awards for Republican gutlessness are handed out, the grand prize winner may well be Ben Sasse.

Sasse, in case you haven’t made his acquaintance, is a Nebraska Republican senator who has long marketed himself as a high-minded deep-thinking plain-speaking ethicist and conservative defender of the rule of law. He played that role on Saturday. After Donald Trump bypassed Congress and signed dubious executive orders that purport to solve the Covid economic crisis, Sasse went ballistic. He called Trump’s actions “unconstitutional slop,” mocked Trump for “trying to solve bad polling,” and said that “under the Constitution, (lawmaking) power belongs to the American people acting through their members of Congress.”

He’s been fuming a lot this year. After Trump’s teargassing farce in Lafayette Square, Sasse said: “I’m against clearing out a peaceful protest for a photo op that treats the Word of God as a political prop.” After the news broke that Russia was offering bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan, Sasse demanded to know: “Who knew what when? Did the commander in chief know and, if not, why the hell not?” When the news broke that Trump was pulling U.S. troops out of Germany, Sasse denounced Trump for serving the interests of dictators: “Chairman Xi and Vladimir Putin are reckless – and this withdrawal will only embolden them.”

But rarely in modern politics has such withering rhetoric been twinned with such spineless inertia. Because when the chips were down, when Sasse was offered the perfect opportunity to oust the author of “unconstitutional slop,” to remove Putin’s western asset, he dutifully caved like a coward and voted to keep Trump in office.

What’s the point of denouncing the Trump malignancy after you’ve given it a blank check to to metastasize?

Sasse, a veritable Republican metaphor, has been playing bait and switch for a long time. He said two summers ago that Trump has negotiated with Putin “from a position of weakness.” When the news broke last summer that Trump had squeezed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for dirt on Joe Biden, Sasse professed to be outraged. He said that the transcript of Trump’s phone call to Zelensky contained “terrible stuff,” and warned that “Republicans ought not to be circling the wagons and say there’s no ‘there’ there when there’s obviously a lot that’s very troubling there.”

But after the House presented devastating testimony, after a succession of heroic public servants put their careers on the line to detail all the terrible stuff, thus teeing up a Senate trial, Sasse dove for cover. He voted not to call any witnesses. His purported reasoning: It was not the Senate’s constitutional duty to conduct an “open-ended” trial “just nine months before election day.” Then he voted for exoneration. He said that removing Trump from office was “the wrong decision” because to do so would imperil “the long-term civic health of the country.”

How’s that “long-term civic health” working out for us?

Granted, Sasse and the other Trump enablers couldn’t have known back in February that Trump’s malignant incompetence would soon kill tens of thousands of Americans and crash the economy. But for Sasse to wax indignant now, about Trump’s “unconstitutional slop,” about Trump’s unconstitutional teargassing of protestors exercising their First Amendment rights, and about Trump’s weakness on the Russian bounty revelations…well, it does prompt the question:

What the heck did he think would happen, after giving Trump free reign?

And if you’re wondering whether Sasse has assailed Trump’s hide-in-plain-sight plan to cripple the post office and grease the wheels for a rigged victory, your guess is correct that Sasse hasn’t uttered a peep.

Actually, we don’t even need to wait for historians to render their verdict on the Sasses who’ve sold out this country. Martin Luther King said it all seven decades ago: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”