The sight of a dozen Republican senators supporting a Democratic resolution to overturn Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border has got some people in the nation’s capital excited. On the Washington Post’s Web site, on Thursday, a column about the vote was headlined “The GOP Senate’s Biggest Rebuke to Trump.” Another Post headline read, “Trump Is Losing Control: 12 GOP Senators Defect.” Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, hailed the Senate vote, and another one, earlier in the week, that demanded an end to U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen, as “green shoots,” and expressed the hope that some Republicans “are beginning to constrain the president when he goes too far.”

Coming just hours after the House of Representatives unanimously supported a resolution demanding full publication of the Robert Mueller report, the latest vote in the Senate was certainly striking. And some of the Republican dissidents, particularly Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, gave memorable speeches. “After a Revolutionary War against a king, our nation’s founders gave to Congress the power to approve all spending so that the president would not have too much power,” Alexander said. “This check on the executive is a crucial source of our freedom.”

But, even though it was encouraging to see some individual Republicans acting in this way, there is still no reason to suppose that the G.O.P. as a whole is getting ready to rein in Trump, or to start distancing itself from him. To the contrary, the vote demonstrated that the vast majority of elected Republicans are still too cowed by the President and his supporters to oppose him, even when they know what he has done is wrong, a majority of the public agrees with them, and the outcome of the vote is largely symbolic.

Before Thursday’s vote, everyone on Capitol Hill was well aware that the numbers weren’t there to override a Presidential veto. In other words, would-be Republican dissidents could register an objection to Trump’s end run around Congress in the knowledge that their votes wouldn’t have much, if any, practical impact. Once Trump issued his veto, his plan to divert more than six billion dollars from the Pentagon budget to the construction of steel border fences would go into effect anyway.

Even under these circumstances, most of the Republicans, including the Party leadership, buckled. The Senate resolution was very similar to one that the Democrat-controlled House passed last month. Of the two hundred and fifty elected Republicans who were asked to vote on either one of these resolutions, just twenty-five—twelve senators and thirteen representatives—voted yes. To put it another way, nine out of ten elected Republicans registered their support for Trump’s authoritarian gambit, or, at least, their acquiescence in the face of it.

It is no coincidence that recent polls show that Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters is also approaching nine out of ten. (Eighty-nine per cent in the latest Economist/YouGov survey; eighty-six per cent in a recent Monmouth University poll.) Confronted with figures like these, most Republican politicians are running as scared as ever from anything that smacks of criticism of Trump—especially those who are up for reëlection next year.

Pause, for a moment, over the pitiful spectacle presented by Thom Tillis and Cory Gardner. In the past few weeks, Tillis, the first-term North Carolina senator, has emerged as a vocal critic of the national-emergency order, and until Thursday afternoon he was indicating that he would support the Democratic resolution. Then, faced with threats of a possible primary challenge, he did a U-turn and voted against the bill. Colorado’s Gardner, another critic of the executive order, also voted against the resolution—prompting the Denver Post to print an editorial saying its endorsement of him in 2014 was a mistake.

Of the twelve Republican senators who defied Trump, just one—Susan Collins, of Maine—is up for reëlection next year. Alexander is retiring. The other ten—Roy Blunt, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, and Roger Wicker—aren’t up until 2022 or 2024. By then, Trump might well be out of office. Even if he isn’t, the dissidents will have had plenty of time to grovel their way back into his good graces.

Perhaps that is unkind, but the record of the past two years gives little ground for optimism about the Republican Party’s willingness to plot a course separate from Trump, even as the midterms have left him severely weakened. Yes, the Party includes a few people who occasionally assert their independence, with Collins, and Murkowski prominent among them. But more representative of the Party are the humiliating reverse of Tillis, the fawning bromides of Mike Pence, and the servile maneuvers of Lindsey Graham, who on Thursday prevented the Senate from following the House in voting on a resolution to insure that the special counsel’s report is made public.

Graham refused to allow a vote to proceed unless the Mueller resolution was amended to include a call for the Justice Department to appoint another special counsel to look into the F.B.I.’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the Bureau’s application for surveillance warrants for Carter Page, a Trump campaign operative. What happened after Graham engaged in this absurd and outrageous diversionary ploy? Did Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, march down to Graham’s office and object? Did Graham’s other Republican colleagues rush to the Senate floor and register their protests? They did not.