Democrats confront two major problems: One is how to deal with the Constitutional crisis provoked by the lawless Trump Administration. The other is how to defeat Trump and win back the White House in 2020.
Solving one problem won’t necessarily help solve the other.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s contemptuous treatment of Congress, his flagrant mischaracterization of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the Trump team’s claim of executive privilege to block the release of the full Mueller report require a serious response.
As Jerry Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, put it before a House committee voted to hold Barr in contempt for not complying with a subpoena to release the full, unredacted Mueller report to Congressional investigators, “We must do all we can in the name of the American people to ensure that when the Trump Administration ends, we have as robust a democracy to hand to our children as was handed to us.”
But as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has concluded, impeaching Trump (or even exercising genuine Congressional oversight of an executive branch that seeks to place itself above the law) might not help the Democrats defeat Trump in 2020.
Outside of Washington, D.C., the Mueller report has had no discernible effect on Trump’s approval rating.
And why should it? What did Americans learn from Robert Mueller that they didn’t already know? That Trump is a liar? A self-server? That he is a foul-mouthed bully who pressures the people who work for him to do unethical things?
None of that is news to Trump’s base. Nor does it seem to hurt him.
A few days before Barr made his weaselly appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend his boss and explain away significant evidence of wrongdoing in the Mueller report, Trump came to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to publicly tell some of his biggest whoppers yet.
At the Green Bay arena, Trump transported 10,000 enthusiastic fans to a Fox News-inspired, fantasy parallel universe, claiming that, across the United States, new mothers and their doctors were wrapping newborn babies in blankets, and then discussing whether to execute them. He boasted that he has been sending asylum seekers from the U.S./Mexico border to sanctuary cities, to the dismay of bleeding-heart urbanites who begged him to stop the tide of immigrants—a complete fabrication.
These pronouncements helped push the President over the 10,000 mark for false or misleading claims in the barely more than two years he’s been in office. According to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Trump added 171 lies to his tally during the weekend that included his Green Bay appearance, as well as an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News and a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention.
Calling Trump out on his lies seems like a waste of breath, when the lies just keep getting bigger. How do the Democrats deal with that?
Some, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Independent Senator from Vermont, are trying to talk sense to Trump voters. Sanders also came to Wisconsin in April, during a swing through Midwestern battleground states. Standing in the freezing wind on the shore of Lake Mendota, Sanders told a crowd of about 2,000, “I can understand why people voted for Trump based on what he said. For too long the political establishment did not listen to the needs of working families.”
But “whether you are a progressive or a conservative or a moderate, you are not proud that you have a President of the United States who is a pathological liar,” Sanders added. Trump’s biggest lie of all, he said, was that “he was going to defend the working class of this country and take on the powerful special interests.”
Sanders rolled out a long list of broken promises: Instead of expanding health care, Trump supported the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act that could cost millions of Americans their coverage, proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of Wall Street, and presided over a growing trade deficit.
Other Democratic candidates are also making an appeal to the “forgotten men and women” who voted for Trump. They include former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who, like Sanders, sees a problem with a Democratic Party that seemed to be telling voters “the system is fine” in the last election—leaving the field wide open for Trump.
“He was saying ‘I’m going to blow up the system,’ and we were saying ‘trust the system.’ ” Buttigieg told New Yorker editor David Remnick. “A lot of people, especially people in industrial Midwestern communities like mine, didn’t find our message to be convincing.”
Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg have so far avoided making a strong case for impeachment, on the theory that Pelosi is right: It might just strengthen Trump’s appeal to the same working-class, Midwestern voters they hope to peel off.
On the other side are Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the first Democratic candidate to come out strongly for impeachment, and former prosecutor and presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, who asked some of the toughest questions during Barr’s Senate hearing, exposing Barr’s failure to even check the evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
“If any other human being in this country had done what’s documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail,” Warren declared.
Warren’s position got even stronger after the Barr hearing. Congress has an oversight duty it simply cannot ignore. If the Attorney General can help cover up wrongdoing by the President and refuse to answer for it, if the President can lie with impunity and pressure staff to fire troublesome investigators, and if the executive branch can simply flout subpoenas from Congress as it seeks to investigate legitimate concerns of wrongdoing, we have replaced our Constitutional democracy with an imperial presidency.
Even Pelosi has expressed concern that Trump might refuse to leave office if he loses the election. What should the Democrats do?
Elizabeth Warren’s point that “there is no political inconvenience exception to the United States Constitution” seems more compelling than ever. Instead of sticking their fingers in the wind, Democrats in Congress, and on the campaign trail, need to do their jobs and provide a check on the executive branch as a matter of principle.
As Biden has surged ahead of the rest of the field, his back-to-the-future, Trump-is-an-“aberration” campaign has attracted a lot of supporters who would prefer a more establishment-friendly, don’t-rock-the boat candidate. An analysis of Biden’s strengths byRealClearPolitics asserts: “Winning in November depends on retaking the industrial Midwest, and only centrist Democrats can do it.”
But I have met enough Midwesterners who voted for Sanders in the primary and Trump in the general election to believe that Biden’s centrism is not necessarily the winning formula Democratic strategists think it is. And there is a real risk that Biden’s “do-over” message is a major miss with voters who have helped push the Democrats to the left since the Obama Administration ended.
“Democrats want to hold constant their support from women and minorities even as they chase the votes of people hostile to the interests of women and minorities.”
As for getting out the base, not everyone is happy about Democratic candidates’ focus on white, working-class voters. New York Times columnist Charles Blow laments that “there is part of the Biden enthusiasm, and to a lesser extent the energy around candidates like Bernie Sanders, that focuses too heavily on the fickle white, working-class swing voters and is not enough focused on the party’s faithful.”
Blow is annoyed that so many Democrats are obsessed with pleasing old white people, cramming candidates who don’t represent the base down their loyal voters’ throats.
“Democrats want to hold constant their support from women and minorities even as they chase the votes of people hostile to the interests of women and minorities,” he writes. Instead, the party should focus on firing up black and Hispanic voters, women, and young people, and stop courting white people, who never vote as a majority for Democratic presidential candidates anyway.
Of course, there are moral as well as political reasons for progressives to appeal to working-class Americans who feel abandoned by mainstream politicians of both parties after decades of job-killing trade deals, tax cuts, and deregulation that helped hollow out the middle class.
Representing the interests of those voters as well as women and people of color, who are the backbone of the progressive movement, is the best chance the Democrats have to win—and, frankly, the only reason to vote for them.
None of this means that Congressional Democrats shouldn’t pursue impeachment.
Even if it isn’t politically expedient, Congress needs to do its job. And there is evidence that doing what’s right for the country might even turn out to be good politics. Elizabeth Warren got a bump in the polls shortly after she came out strongly for impeachment. Voters could still be open to a clear Constitutional argument for impeachment from their political leaders.
Whatever happens in the 2020 presidential race, both politically and morally, what our country needs is bold, progressive leadership.