It’s remarkable how quickly principles become liquid when a Senate seat is at stake. Remarkable, also, how completely the G.O.P. is now defined by self-abasement.

Trump suggests Ted Cruz’s wife is ugly. The senator from Texas bends the knee. Trump reads out Lindsey Graham’s cell number at a campaign event. The senator from South Carolina bends the knee. Jeff Sessions? Paul Ryan? Formerly anti-Trump pundits? The entire conservative movement now looks like an immense prostration ceremony. Only it’s in the service of something the novices know at some level is dangerous and unholy…

Tillis and Sasse (along with Colorado’s Cory Gardner), may have spared themselves nomination fights with their vote. But voters can always smell a sellout. Mark Walker should challenge Tillis on the view that North Carolina deserves a man in Congress who is faithful to bad ideas, rather than one who is faithless to good ones. Ditto for Nebraskans, who shouldn’t have to endure Sasse’s high-flown pedantry about the appropriate reach of the 1976 National Emergencies Act before he cravenly bows to political expediency.