“What does July 4th mean to me? Freedom,” Sen. Ron Johnson chirruped on Twitter on Independence Day.

For the Wisconsin Republican, it meant, specifically, the freedom to spend July 4 in Moscow with seven other Republican lawmakers posing for propaganda photos with Russian officials. On the same day it was reported in Britain that two more people had been poisoned by a Russian nerve agent British officials say came from Vladimir Putin’s regime. On the day after the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump.

Johnson and his colleagues apparently exercised their freedom not to meet with opposition or civil society figures (those whom the Putin regime has not imprisoned or killed), avoiding the risk of offending their hosts. They also exercised their freedom to soft-pedal their criticism of the Russian government, leading Russian politicians and state media to mock them as supplicants.

Yet despite this lavish display of the freedom to kowtow, they didn’t get the meeting they hoped for with Putin himself. He was busy, the Kremlin said.

There was a time, in the pre-Trump era, when Republicans would have erupted in fireworks over an Independence Day visit by submissive American lawmakers to the country the 2012 Republican presidential nominee called “our number one geopolitical foe.” (Relations have worsened considerably since then.) They called Jane Fonda “Hanoi Jane” and a traitor when she went to North Vietnam in 1972. After Democrats visited Iraq in 2002, Republicans ridiculed them as “Baghdad boys.”

So, what do we call these Red Square Republicans? My interlocutors on Twitter suggest “Moscow Mules.” Or, given the position they put themselves in before our masters in Moscow, perhaps they should be called the Prostrate Eight: Sens. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), Steve Daines (Mont.), John Hoeven (N.D.), John Neely Kennedy (La.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), John Thune (S.D.) and Johnson, plus Rep. Kay Granger (Tex.).