Impatient with Nancy Pelosi’s temporizing, her unwillingness to drop the impeachment bomb on the now aggressively obstructive Trump?
Whatever your answer, she and the Democrats have a messaging problem: how to sell such a move to the public. They haven’t yet found a way to make accountability and preservation of Congress’ investigative powers seem relevant, much less essential to voters burdened with pocketbook issues and befuddled by Robert Mueller’s exquisitely hedged report on collusion/obstruction.
I’m befuddled too. Mueller pulled too many punches. Still, I would argue that Trump himself has given Pelosi & Company the perfect set-up for a take-down by stonewalling too much, bringing Congress to a near standstill by refusing to honor virtually any subpoena or request for testimony on just about anything.
Trump didn’t even need a threatened court order to be provoked into going hardnosed in his latest public snit. He just said flat out he wouldn’t do business with the Democrats – the specific issue was infrastructure – as long as they dared to inconvenience him with fair but pointed questions.
“I want to do infrastructure,” he snapped. “But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances. So, get these phony investigations over with!”
What we’ve got here is something that has the feel of that old bogey: a government shutdown.
Shutdowns are never good for the economy or anybody’s bottom line. And everybody gets what a shutdown means because it’s a short word with the abruptness of a pistol shot and a whiff of the funereal.
Yes, I know the current situation is different. Congressional paralysis isn’t a formal shutdown. But believe me, the Republicans could find a way to frame the existing impasse in just that way if it served their purposes.
So, what’s wrong with the Democrats giving it a try? Why not send Pelosi and Hoyer, and yes, AOC out to the microphones to remind voters a crippled Congress can’t keep their pocketbooks safe?
Draw a straight line between Trump’s obstructionism and the legion of potential terribles — price hikes at the pump, mortgage rate upticks and ballooning grocery bills.
If there’s no oversight, there’s no keeping the profiteers in check, no staving off Flint-style crises right in your own neighborhood, no propping up bridges down to their last rusting rivet and just a tremor away from collapsing onto crumbling freeways below.
A Republican strategist, faced with Pelosi’s challenge, might urge slow-walking certain voter-friendly bills through committee simply to make the point that a stymied Congress is no good for the public good. I wouldn’t urge such cynicism on a Democratic lawmaker, but you get my point.
This is the time for some imaginative message-making. Trump, the Maleficent, has provided Democrats the grist.
Think government shutdown, gridlocked cities, stifled innovation. It’s enough to make this generation’s Howard Beal fling open the window and howl, Impeachment!