Six weeks before an election, House and Senate Democrats have told The Independent what the first order of business will be if they take either chamber. Not a bill. Not a budget. Investigations of the president’s family businesses, opening as early as February, with expanded oversight staff and the expectation of documents fast. Hakeem Jeffries, a.k.a. ‘Dollar Store Obama,’ put it in one line on September 17: they intend to hold the crooks accountable starting on day one.
Day one. Not day one of a legislative agenda — day one of the subpoenas.
Ask what’s missing from that preview. Nothing on housing costs. Nothing on energy prices. Nothing on the fraud metastasizing through state welfare programs their own governors administer. The entire case for handing them a majority is the promise of what they’ll do to one family once they have one.
The most revealing part isn’t aimed at the Trumps at all. Adam Schiff has instructed corporations that did business with the president or his administration to preserve their records, and warned that Democrats can make life very difficult for companies that resist what he deems legitimate oversight. Read that as any general counsel would. It’s a message to private firms — donors to the ballroom project, vendors, partners — that transacting with the wrong administration carries a future cost, payable in legal fees, document productions, and a day in front of a committee with a camera.
That is the mechanism conservatives have spent a decade identifying and it has a familiar shape. Not prosecution, which requires a crime and a jury. Pressure, which requires only a letterhead. Businesses aren’t built to absorb that, so they do the rational thing: they stop taking the meeting, stop writing the check, stop being associated. The investigation never has to conclude anything. The chilling effect is the product.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) has already named Jared Kushner as someone the Judiciary Committee would need to talk to about Affinity Partners and Gulf sovereign funds. Note the pattern from this same crowd: Raskin voted this month to make the federal fraud enforcement division permanent while sneering at the bill on his way past, and ‘GOP’ Sens. John Curtis of Utah and John Cornyn of Texas spent last week asking that same committee to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. over who picked up the tab at a wedding reception. The instrument is bipartisan now. Which is exactly why the precedent matters.
Americans have seen this film. Three years of ‘Russia Russia Russia!’ hoax hearings. Two impeachments. A special counsel. Civil suits, state prosecutions, federal prosecutions, a business fraud case. At the end of all of it, voters made him president again — the clearest possible statement that they had weighed the lawfare and found it uninteresting.
The response, apparently, is to run it again, and to say so out loud before anyone has voted.
Democrats have decided the way to win a midterm on affordability and crime is to promise document requests and more prosecutions. Republicans should thank them, quote them accurately, and put it in every ad between now and November 3.
