Robert Garcia, the Long Beach congressman, issued a two-word statement Election Day after his Democrats’ wild victory nationwide became clear: “Lawyer up,” he said.
God, don’t you just love a good impeachment?
Kidding. While it is true that the three massively televised presidential impeachments in our time, of Bill Clinton and twice of Donald Trump, provided the best political entertainment value this side of a marathon binge-watch of “Veep,” the last thing we need over Trump’s two lame-duck years is another impeachment trial.
There’s so much real stuff to spend our energy on. Plus, Trump’s self-inflicted final political death could not be more profound if he were to commit seppuku on the Kennedy Center stage. His impeachment is simply unnecessary.
But Garcia is gonna do what he’s gonna do. In January he becomes chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and has already vowed to take on what he calls “the Trump Crime Family,” corporate corruption, DHS and ICE abuses and the cover-up of the Epstein files. It looks like he’s going to do a lot.
Maybe we’ll have to start watching C-SPAN again after all.
But the smartest thing the understandably jubilant Dems could do right now, after they come down from the dizzy high that comes with the biggest voter swing in their favor since Watergate over half a century ago, would be to put a governor on each and every bold act of retribution.
Not a governor like Xavier Becerra. A governor like the device that limits the RPMs of an engine to keep it from over-revving and blowing up.
Choose your battles, Democrats. Play the long game, or at least the “Is this going to make them sour on us in ’28?” game, with every decision you make. Because this brave new world in which a Latina gets elected governor of Texas and a Democratic pastor from Kansas gets elected senator, which hasn’t happened since the ’30s — well, it’s not going to get any better than this for America’s traditionally liberal party. Just because the whole nation has soured on the ego, kleptomania, economic outrages and foreign disasters of Trump doesn’t mean the electorate couldn’t rapidly sour on untoward Democratic antics as well.
For instance, yes, we are outraged at the blatant, unprecedented corruption that has allowed a president and his family to enrich themselves by billions of dollars over the last two years.
But the best response to that is not your first impulse to take the guy to court to squeeze some of that money back. Americans are up in arms about the much broader graft practiced by much of the political class, not just by its evil faux-king.
The Stop Insider Trading Act passed by the current House over the summer, for instance, doesn’t go nearly far enough. It only bars members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children from purchasing new individual publicly traded stocks. The bill explicitly exempts the president and vice president from the trading ban. It also was awkwardly attached to a federal voter ID requirement, which went over like a lead balloon on the California ballot Tuesday.
The Democratic House and Senate should quickly pass legislation banning all active stock trading by all federal politicians in all three branches of government. Investment portfolios of all electeds should be placed in actually blind trusts that it would be a federal crime for pols to know the disposition of.
Along with being all upright citizen-like, can’t we have any fun? To the victors go the spoils and all that?
Of course, kids. Knock yourself out! Impeach that buffoon Pete Hegseth and let him go on vitaminT-fueled iron-pumping binges on his own dime. Rehire all the Black and women generals and admirals the secretary of war, who turned out to be bad at war, viciously axed. He can lawyer up, but he can’t hide.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.