As a strategy, the liberal Democratic approach to the Trump victory since November 8 has been to go nuts about anything and everything, and you have to live in a conservative bubble not to see some value in this for them. Trump’s enemies aren’t depressed; they’re in a condition of high alert, they’re mobilized, and they believe they are righteous. These pose real dangers to Trump and the political coalition he now leads. But. Just as Trump signaled this week he does not intend to continue running his presidency as he ran his candidacy, Democrats ought to take a cold, hard look at the case of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and be reminded of the value of keeping your powder dry so that you can pounce more effectively when your opponent makes big mistakes.
I’m not going to beat around the bush here: What Sessions did in his confirmation hearing was bad, and it just won’t do for people to defend him. You can say, as many are, that the lie didn’t rise to the level of perjury, and you can say he didn’t really lie since he wasn’t asked the question to which he gave a false answer—but he said flatly he hadn’t met with Russians and he had. He said it once aloud and once in a written answer to a question. You can examine the questions and his words with Talmudic pilpul to render your judgment if you choose, but that’s just the fact of it. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial today suggests this was a move Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber might have made, and that’s a great line. But just as you don’t want someone speaking untruths under oath, you also don’t want a moron as your nation’s attorney general—and you don’t want someone whose only defense against the charge that he was deliberately untruthful is that he was a moron.
The problem is this: When Democrats then come out and say he should resign, it’s hard to take their outrage seriously because they spent three months being outraged by the very idea of Sessions’ appointment on grounds having absolutely nothing to do with the Russian “role” in the 2016 election. They acted from the get-go as though his nomination itself was such an outrage he shouldn’t be confirmed… in part due to a 30-year-old letter against his failed judicial nomination written by Coretta Scott King. Sessions was disliked for his conservatism, for his views on immigration, for his early support for Trump. All but one Democratic senator voted against his confirmation.
Just as a political matter, imagine a different recent history. Sessions would have been grilled, as he was, during his confirmation hearing. Democrats would have said they would have preferred someone else. But with a heavy heart and disappointment at the election’s outcome, they join, for the most part, in his confirmation.
In this case, voting for Sessions would have given Democrats in the Senate almost unimpeachable standing to use his prevarication as a political weapon against him. They could have said that had they known he had been lying they would have voted differently. And they could, from that vantage, have pressured their fellow Republican senators far more effectively—and made a stronger case that their outrage over Sessions’ testimony isn’t strictly situational and convenient. They have made it harder, not easier, for Republicans who might have real misgivings about Sessions to come out against him—because those Republicans will look not like they are disappointed with their former colleague but more like they are surrendering to the totalistic anti-Trump Democrats.
Because Democrats and liberals have opposed every appointment and every policy and every word emanating from the Trump administration, they have damaged their effectiveness as a political force against it. They may have strengthened the anti-Trump movement among those who didn’t vote for him, but they are in danger of limiting their ability to bring the soft Trump voters they need to grow disillusioned with him to their side.
