Hopeless gestures

I see that Democrats are still having trouble letting go of their “Russian collusion” delusions about Trump, despite the special prosecutor declining to indict Trump or any of his associates on those charges, though he did snare a number of associates on other unrelated charges. Democrats in the House have embarked on two other hopeless efforts to prolong the agony though.

1.  House Democrats have demanded that the IRS supply them with copies of President Trump’s taxes for the past six years. This will of course fail, if for no other reason than that Trump can refuse and all Congress can do is hold him in contempt of Congress and ask the Department of Justice to prosecute him, which a Republican DOJ can simply choose not to do. And if they take him to court the legal process, including appeals, will stretch well beyond even a second term, and therefore be moot even if they won (which they might not). Democrats surely know this, so clearly this is just a base-pleasing media maneuver, not a serious attempt.

In any case, even if he provided them with copies of his tax returns, it would be illegal for the House to make any of the contents public, which of course would be the whole point of trying to get them in the first place.  Tax returns are by law confidential, and revealing any of the contents would subject the person who revealed them to prosecution. So this whole effort is just political theater.

2. House Democrats are demanding to see Muller’s entire un-redacted report.  They will fail, for a perfectly good reason.  By law grand jury testimony and materials are secret. Nothing a grand jury sees or hears can be made public unless it is embedded in an indictment. There is a perfectly good reason for this – if a prosecutor doesn’t think there is a crime, or at least a winnable case and chooses not to file an indictment, that prosecutor is not allowed to try to “get” the  person under investigation anyway by leaking dirty laundry from the grand jury hearings. By all accounts almost every page of Muller’s report contains information from the grand jury, so the House Democrats not going to get to see it, not least because everyone knows perfectly well that the Democrats will leak to the press, probably out of context, anything they think might hurt Trump.

Once again, Democrats understand this, so the attempt is nothing more than another piece of political theater.

I would like to see a resurgent Democratic party emerge to balance Trump’s excesses, but all I see from Democrats thus far is short-sighted, mean-spirited trench warfare and a lot of incompetence. Given that, I would give Trump better than even odds of being re-elected to a second term, not based on any brilliance on his part, but rather on the continuing incompetence and short-sightedness of the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, I think, understands this, which is why she is trying – with only moderate success – to damp down the unrealistic proposals of her House members. But some of her fellow Democrats in the House are apparently so lost in their anti-Trump rage that they can’t think strategically about what is needed to win upcoming elections.

As near as I can tell, our political systems is just as dysfunctional as the British one right now.