Donald Trump’s call for a new era of bipartisanship lasted for less than 24 hours, but it wasn’t the President who broke ranks — it was the Democrats.
America had barely awoken after Trump’s State of the Union speech the night before when house Democrats, led by their softly spoken assassin Speaker Nancy Pelosi, struck hard.
Pelosi accused Trump of making “an all-out threat” against the Democrats after he said that “ridiculous partisan investigations” into him would get in the way of bipartisan co-operation in congress.
It was almost a throwaway comment in an 82-minute speech but Trump was goading the Democrats who command a majority in the house. He was warning them that what goes around comes around in politics and that if they were going to target him, then they can’t expect him to grant them favours over the next two years.
Yet Pelosi’s response was over the top and betrayed the mindset of the Democrats that is do not deal and negotiate with the President, but rather obstruct and attack. Pelosi said of Trump’s “threat” that Democrats had a “congressional responsibility” to conduct probe oversight of the President’s affairs, and Democrats would be “delinquent in our duties” not to pursue the President through a raft of inquiries.
With the ink from Trump’s relatively conciliatory State of the Union barely dry, Democrats heeded Pelosi’s call by initiating and pushing forward with a raft on sensitive inquiries into Trump. These range from his taxes to links between his decisions and his business interests to aspects of the Russia investigation.
Democrats are perfectly entitled to investigate Trump on these issues and Republicans would be wise to remember the extent to which they sought to investigate Democrat presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton when Republicans held congressional majorities. That is why Trump was wrong to claim yesterday the raft of Democrat-led inquiries amounted to “presidential harassment”. But what is disappointing about the Democrats is the timing of this and the message it sends.
Although Trump has a poor record on bipartisanship, he at least talked the talk in his speech about the need for both sides of politics to work harder to bridge the divides which have paralysed politics in Washington. Both Democrats and Republicans are engaged in crucial negotiations to try to find a negotiated solution to the impasse over Trump’s border wall, which triggered a record 35-day partial government shutdown.
The cost of failure in these negotiations is high. It will lead to either another shutdown or it may prompt Trump to declare a national emergency on border security, triggering a prolonged court battle over the issue.
None of these outcomes is good for Americans, so what is surely needed now is cool heads on both sides of politics to strike a workable compromise deal. It’s not rocket science to understand the way to maximise the chances of a deal is not to antagonise one party and a president unnecessarily.
Yet that is what the Democrats did yesterday. They could have taken the high road and maintained a dignified silence on Trump and on the investigations for the next two weeks to maximise the chances of a resolution on February 15. But they didn’t. The Democrats increasingly seem willing to hijack the interests of ordinary Americans in their quest to bring down Trump. That may or may not be smart politics, but it doesn’t help the country.
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