View / Democrats weigh ‘lawfare’ against Trump - Semafor

Before there was the other Dan Sullivan, there was the other Mike Doyle.

Four years ago, when longtime Pittsburgh Democrat Mike Doyle retired from Congress, a left-wing legislator named Summer Lee won the primary to replace him. Republicans nominated a local politician from the suburbs to face her who had a fortuitous name: Mike Doyle.

Some voters were perplexed. The new Doyle’s lawn signs called him “the right Mike” without explicitly identifying him as a Republican — a moniker that would be a non-starter in the safely Democratic seat. Local Democrats got worried calls, asking why Lee was running against their beloved liberal congressman. The Democrat Doyle called an emergency press conference to clarify that he was not the Republican Doyle: “My name is on the ballot, but it’s not me.”

Lee won, albeit by a smaller margin than other Democrats in her district had in the past. Nothing else came of the story. There was no federal investigation of the Doyle scheme; no demands not to seat Doyle if he won; no statement from the governor saying that he might not certify the election.

All of that has unfolded in Alaska this cycle. The clandestine Democratic effort to recruit a candidate who shares the name of the state’s incumbent Republican senator could have major implications for what happens after Tuesday.

The plot’s exposure damaged Democrat Mary Peltola, knocking her off-message, and now threatens her party’s chances of winning control of the Senate. President Donald Trump’s administration is investigating, and also sued to block the certification of the results should Sullivan lose — though a federal judge tossed out the suit over the weekend. Those efforts, along with the announcement of investigations into candidates within 60 days of the vote, show how the Trump administration is jettisoning unwritten norms at the Justice Department.

The Alaska mess is weighing heavily on Democrats who hope to win control of Congress tomorrow. Victory in either chamber would mean a two-year license on oversight powers, empowering Democrats to subpoena the Trump administration and its allies in the private sector. There is a thirst for vengeance among some Democrats that is testing their public stance that they must restore standards blown up by Trump.

There’s also a shared sense, among most Democrats, that following those standards has gotten them nothing, while Republicans have benefitted from bending the rules. 

“Donald Trump and [House Oversight Committee Chairman] James Comer have basically written a playbook on how to politicize investigations and attack political enemies and weaponize government,” said Robert Garcia, the California Democrat who is in line to lead the House Oversight Committee in a Democratic majority. “[Attorney General] Todd Blanche? His whole job is just to grift for the president.”

The argument over which party first used “lawfare” to get what it wanted is an old one. Democrats have long celebrated the Watergate investigation as an example of the Constitution and US legal system working as designed. Republicans are more likely to call the episode a coup against a president who’d just won a landslide.

But the current debate begins, like so many irritating conversations, with the 2016 election. For all of Hillary Clinton’s errors, like telling coal miners that their jobs would vanish if she won, Democrats largely believe that she would have won the election against Trump had the FBI not abandoned its “60 day rule” and announced an 11th hour investigation into emails found on Huma Abedin’s laptop. Some believe that Barack Obama acted too timidly when Republicans refused to co-sign a letter warning of Russian interference in that campaign.

Nobody has ever accused Trump of acting timidly. Ten years on, his Justice Department is still probing the origins of the Russia investigation into his first campaign. When Joe Biden replaced Trump, he kept on the US attorney who was investigating his son. When Trump replaced Biden, he sacked the prosecutors who’d worked on post-Jan. 6 investigations.

Democrats felt like suckers. Biden publicly promised that his Justice Department would act independently. Privately, he was resentful of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s choices to hold off on investigating Trump until November 2022, after Republicans were more or less united in denouncing any Trump probe as “lawfare.”

This is on many Democratic minds as they watch the Justice Department in Alaska — even though it’s not the only race where one party meddled in a way that might confuse voters. In Maine, a conservative PAC is sending out mail for a left-wing spoiler candidate for governor. In Ohio, a conservative PAC is doing the same for a socialist Senate candidate who could threaten Democrat Sherrod Brown’s chances. In Nevada, a conservative PAC… okay, you get the point.

“They’re obsessed with meddling in elections,” Garcia said. “We have to put in place new rules and a new standard to get things back to a place where we don’t have the president trying to rig elections constantly.” In Pennsylvania, when I asked Gov. Josh Shapiro how Democrats should respond to Trump’s Justice Department, he was hopeful they would be the “party of law and order” — by showing that this was not the way to use the government’s bottomless resources.

“I said every single day to our team and to the public that I enforce the law without fear or favor,” said Shapiro, referring to his six years as state attorney general. “That is not the case in the Trump administration.”

Despite the ongoing debate of how far to go, Republicans are portraying a party intent on going after the president in order to rev up their base. “They’ve already filed articles of impeachment in this Congress,” House Speaker Mike Johnson alleged. In reality, the impeachment articles filed by Democratic Reps. Al Green and Shri Thanedar failed to accumulate broad Democratic support, and neither man will be in Congress next year.

I’d expect Democrats’ thinking to reflect what happens on Tuesday. To be sure, there will be investigations of the Trump administration and its allies. But the risk assessment of any new probe will depend on voters’ appetite for it. Voters haven’t really punished a party for launching an investigation that doesn’t go anywhere. At the same time, Trump hasn’t lost much support for pardoning corrupt politicians like Rod Blagojevich, Kwame Kilpatrick, or Chris Collins.

I’m confident about one thing: No Democrat with a gavel is going to want to move on from Trump oversight.