Investigations Won't Defeat Trumpism. Strengthening Democracy Will.

[DonViejo]

House Democrats should focus on defending voting rights and majority rule, not issuing subpoenas to the White House.

By ROB GOODMAN December 04, 2018

In June 1973, as the nationally televised Watergate hearings entered their second month, and as even members of Richard Nixon’s own party conceded that the investigation posed a mortal danger to his presidency, one Republican stood out for his insistence that Watergate was nothing more than a distraction. As he put it, “I think it’s too bad that it is taking people’s attention from what I think is the most brilliant accomplishment of any president of this century.” He called the investigation a “lynching” and a “witch hunt.” That Republican was Gov. Ronald Reagan, and he was the future.

Today, as newly empowered Democrats prepare to investigate President Donald Trump on allegations ranging from money laundering to the manipulation of the Census, they ought to bear in mind that Watergate stands as the outer limit of potential success, the improbable “best-case scenario” of a lawless president driven from office in disgrace. As Watergate unspooled, “a consensus formed, even among the president’s defenders, that the scandal was the most serious happening in American politics in a long time,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in The Baffler. “This consensus encompassed just about everyone in public life other than Ronald Reagan.” And yet it was Reagan who was right. The most serious happening in American politics, the one with much more profound consequences than Watergate, was the consolidation of the conservative movement’s dominance of the Republican Party. That movement reshaped American politics for a generation, and Reagan’s consistent Watergate denialism—today we’d call him a Watergate Truther—helped him secure his party’s leadership.

Of course Watergate mattered. But in the long view, it did not matter enough to stop a political realignment led by the most extreme members of President Nixon’s coalition. Its example suggests that investigations, even the most consequential ones, have a limited power to shape the political future. If Democrats want to win that future—if they believe, as I do, that our democracy depends on it—then they need to think bigger. They need to investigate presidential corruption not as an end in itself, but as part of a broad, ambitious movement for American democracy.

Oversight of the executive branch is a central responsibility of Congress. It’s shameful that Republicans have abdicated that responsibility for the past two years, and Democrats are right to take it up. But they must do so with a realistically limited sense of what that oversight can accomplish. It’s hard to imagine the next two years producing more damning disclosures about Trump than the fact that he committed systematic tax fraud, the fact that his image as a self-made billionaire is built on a lie, or the fact that he confessed on tape to committing sexual assault. All of those facts, and many more like them, have been widely reported, and yet they have not shaken the president’s base of support, or the complicity of Republican members of Congress. I don’t doubt that the Democratic House will dig up more damning facts and exhibit them to the public with high drama. But the very drama of congressional hearings is a double-edged sword. It frames the central antagonism of the Trump years as one between a watchdog Congress and a corrupt administration—not between a majority of the American people and the institutions that disempower them.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/04/investigations-trump-democracy-house-democratic-agenda-2019-222607

[Nitram]

1. Investigations reveal the truth amidst a din of competing theories and ideologically based

opinions. Democracy thrives on truth. In a system where the Rule of Law is supreme, investigations are essential to reveal crime, and remove miscreants from office.