In retrospect, it is not clear if Michael Cohen's televised testimony in front of the House Oversight Committee served any purpose. Donald Trump's fixer-turned-rat provided some good theatre, but he really didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Is Donald Trump a conman? Sure, Marco Rubio told us that early on. Is he a narcissistic liar? Nothing new in that, Ted Cruz offered the most succinct diagnosis of Trump's pathology three years ago. Is he a terrible human being? That was how South Carolina Congressman Mick Mulvaney – now Trump's Chief of Staff – summed it up the day he endorsed Trump for President in 2016. Most notably, as each of these charges were raised anew during the hearing, none of the Republicans in the hearing room actually bothered to dispute them.
As has become the norm in the current political era, before Committee Chair Elijah Cummings gaveled the hearing to order, we knew how public opinion would shake out on whatever Michael Cohen might have to say: A bit over one-third of Americans would rally to the President, telling pollsters that Cohen is a self-serving liar, while somewhere around 60% of the public would confirm that Cohen made a compelling case that Donald Trump is everything we already know him to be. During the day-long hearing, there was no discourse across the aisle. No one actually came to the hearing seeking to learn something new about Cohen, the Trump Organization or the President himself; those views have long since been settled, even if the actual facts are not yet clear.
Beyond Cohen's testimony, however, the hearing provided a valuable window into the shifting political landscape within Congress, and the ebb and flow of power in each party caucus. With Democrats in charge, Republican members are visibly chafing at being in the minority, something that many of them have never experienced. At the same time, newly elected Democrats on the left were unabashed in their embrace of the firebrand mantle previously held by members of the Freedom Caucus on the right. When Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib lashed out at Republican Mark Meadows, it was a reminder of the caustic rhetoric one became accustomed to hearing hurled from the right by Steve King, Louie Gohmert or others. Just as fellow Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan was stunned at having to follow the dictates of the committee chair, Meadows was shaken at being called out by Tlaib as he sought to defend Trump against Michael Cohen's assertion that Donald Trump is a racist.
It was an odd place for Meadows to stand his ground in defense of the President. After all, Trump's long history of racially motivated conduct is well documented, from his real estate company's policy of housing discrimination, to his taunting of the Central Park Five, to his championing of Birtherism, to his anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim rhetoric, to building his political movement based in part on the racial animus and pandering to White Nationalists that found its full voice in Charlottesville, to his embrace of policies that have tormented, and in many cases destroyed, immigrant families. Meadows, who has been fulsome in his embrace of Trumpism, failed to see in Tlaib a mirror of himself a decade ago: a newly elected member of Congress who declined to play by the old rules and was prepared to aggressively challenge conduct and attitudes that violated their own principled view of the world. Flailing and visibly upset at the confrontation, the one-time conservative bomb thrower appealed in desperation to Committee Chair Elijah Cummings to defend him against Tlaib's words: You are my friend, Meadows begged, I can't be racist if one of my best friends is Black.
If politics is a pendulum, we are watching it swing in real time. Just as Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are struggling with the new reality of living in the minority – something Meadows has never experienced – Democrats are facing the challenge of living in the majority. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her acolytes have brought a new, aggressive energy to the Democratic caucus. Like the Tea Party Republicans elected in 2010 whose Freedom Caucus quickly took aim at Speaker John Boehner and others in the GOP whom they viewed as moderates, this week AOC threatened to keep a list of moderate Democrats who might vote with Republicans from time to time, for the explicit purpose of primarying them from the left. Just as the 2010 election led to the establishment of a strident code of political correctness within the GOP, and ultimately a purging of moderates through primary challenges and resignations, activists within the Democratic Party have become emboldened to engineer a similar purge of wrong-thinking members within their own party.
Among those who spoke out against AOC's threats was New Mexico Congresswoman Xochitl Torres Small. Like AOC, Torres Small is a freshman member, but unlike AOC, she is among the large cohort of new members who flipped formerly Republican seats to the Democrat side, and represent districts that are neither as safe nor as left-leaning as the one that AOC represents. Torres Small's district in southern New Mexico is a long way from the neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that sent AOC to Congress. While New Mexico is a consistently blue state, on a number of issues – notably guns and abortion – it is far more conservative than the norm. In that respect, with its wide expanses of insular communities, Torres Small's district is similar to those areas of America that Democrat candidates struggle to win. As such, when she admonished Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues on the left to respect the views and political realities of those from different areas of the country, activists across the party would be well-served to listen to what she was saying. For a Democratic Party consumed with identity politics, it was notable to see AOC being schooled by the Native American Torres Smalls about the realities of American politics in the flyover states. Diversity cuts many ways.
That AOC might be a gift to the GOP is something that would not seem to occur to her. Her certitude of the rightness of her cause, and her preparedness to impose her views on the rest of the Democratic Party – characteristics that she shares with her political opposites in the Freedom Caucus – stand in contrast to the electoral mandate that she actually can claim. In her primary election victory over long-time incumbent Joe Crowley – the only race in which her leftist views were put to the test – she won 16,898 votes. That vote total represented 7.9% of the registered Democrats in her district, and 5.2% of voters overall. While one cannot question the validity of her election, one can easily question whether the mandate that she received from the voters – as opposed to the attention she attracts from friends and foes alike – warrants the power she seems prepared to wield.
If there was a winner in the room, as Michael Cohen's testimony wound down, it was Elijah Cummings himself. We are better than this, he insisted as members bickered and occasionally lashed out. We have got to get back to normal. These were sentiments that surely resonated to many watching across the country. The question is whether members of Congress themselves were listening. For Republicans, the end of one-party rule should serve as a warning that the Trump era may be running its course, and that the future of the GOP depends on whether it can turn back the clock to before the Freedom Caucus wrecked its havoc on the party. For Democrats, the emergence of the left wing of the party and the very real parallels with the Freedom Caucus should serve as a shot across the bow.
No doubt, activists on the left will continue to argue that theirs is the only path to victory – as well as to resolving the inequities that plague the nation – yet the evidence to support their conclusions is thin. The greater risk facing Democrats is that if leftist activists insist on imposing their will on the party, they may not only stall the very real momentum that the party gained in the 2018, but – as Republicans fervently hope – they may alienate independents and moderates who flocked to support Democrats last November, and leave the country saddled not just with four more years of a Trump presidency, but with a further rightward tilt in the Supreme Court and judiciary that will stay with us for a generation.
Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."
Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.
Beyond Cohen's testimony, however, the hearing provided a valuable window into the shifting political landscape within Congress, and the ebb and flow of power in each party caucus. With Democrats in charge, Republican members are visibly chafing at being in the minority, something that many of them have never experienced. At the same time, newly elected Democrats on the left were unabashed in their embrace of the firebrand mantle previously held by members of the Freedom Caucus on the right. When Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib lashed out at Republican Mark Meadows, it was a reminder of the caustic rhetoric one became accustomed to hearing hurled from the right by Steve King, Louie Gohmert or others. Just as fellow Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan was stunned at having to follow the dictates of the committee chair, Meadows was shaken at being called out by Tlaib as he sought to defend Trump against Michael Cohen's assertion that Donald Trump is a racist.
It was an odd place for Meadows to stand his ground in defense of the President. After all, Trump's long history of racially motivated conduct is well documented, from his real estate company's policy of housing discrimination, to his taunting of the Central Park Five, to his championing of Birtherism, to his anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim rhetoric, to building his political movement based in part on the racial animus and pandering to White Nationalists that found its full voice in Charlottesville, to his embrace of policies that have tormented, and in many cases destroyed, immigrant families. Meadows, who has been fulsome in his embrace of Trumpism, failed to see in Tlaib a mirror of himself a decade ago: a newly elected member of Congress who declined to play by the old rules and was prepared to aggressively challenge conduct and attitudes that violated their own principled view of the world. Flailing and visibly upset at the confrontation, the one-time conservative bomb thrower appealed in desperation to Committee Chair Elijah Cummings to defend him against Tlaib's words: You are my friend, Meadows begged, I can't be racist if one of my best friends is Black.
If politics is a pendulum, we are watching it swing in real time. Just as Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are struggling with the new reality of living in the minority – something Meadows has never experienced – Democrats are facing the challenge of living in the majority. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her acolytes have brought a new, aggressive energy to the Democratic caucus. Like the Tea Party Republicans elected in 2010 whose Freedom Caucus quickly took aim at Speaker John Boehner and others in the GOP whom they viewed as moderates, this week AOC threatened to keep a list of moderate Democrats who might vote with Republicans from time to time, for the explicit purpose of primarying them from the left. Just as the 2010 election led to the establishment of a strident code of political correctness within the GOP, and ultimately a purging of moderates through primary challenges and resignations, activists within the Democratic Party have become emboldened to engineer a similar purge of wrong-thinking members within their own party.
Among those who spoke out against AOC's threats was New Mexico Congresswoman Xochitl Torres Small. Like AOC, Torres Small is a freshman member, but unlike AOC, she is among the large cohort of new members who flipped formerly Republican seats to the Democrat side, and represent districts that are neither as safe nor as left-leaning as the one that AOC represents. Torres Small's district in southern New Mexico is a long way from the neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that sent AOC to Congress. While New Mexico is a consistently blue state, on a number of issues – notably guns and abortion – it is far more conservative than the norm. In that respect, with its wide expanses of insular communities, Torres Small's district is similar to those areas of America that Democrat candidates struggle to win. As such, when she admonished Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues on the left to respect the views and political realities of those from different areas of the country, activists across the party would be well-served to listen to what she was saying. For a Democratic Party consumed with identity politics, it was notable to see AOC being schooled by the Native American Torres Smalls about the realities of American politics in the flyover states. Diversity cuts many ways.
That AOC might be a gift to the GOP is something that would not seem to occur to her. Her certitude of the rightness of her cause, and her preparedness to impose her views on the rest of the Democratic Party – characteristics that she shares with her political opposites in the Freedom Caucus – stand in contrast to the electoral mandate that she actually can claim. In her primary election victory over long-time incumbent Joe Crowley – the only race in which her leftist views were put to the test – she won 16,898 votes. That vote total represented 7.9% of the registered Democrats in her district, and 5.2% of voters overall. While one cannot question the validity of her election, one can easily question whether the mandate that she received from the voters – as opposed to the attention she attracts from friends and foes alike – warrants the power she seems prepared to wield.
If there was a winner in the room, as Michael Cohen's testimony wound down, it was Elijah Cummings himself. We are better than this, he insisted as members bickered and occasionally lashed out. We have got to get back to normal. These were sentiments that surely resonated to many watching across the country. The question is whether members of Congress themselves were listening. For Republicans, the end of one-party rule should serve as a warning that the Trump era may be running its course, and that the future of the GOP depends on whether it can turn back the clock to before the Freedom Caucus wrecked its havoc on the party. For Democrats, the emergence of the left wing of the party and the very real parallels with the Freedom Caucus should serve as a shot across the bow.
No doubt, activists on the left will continue to argue that theirs is the only path to victory – as well as to resolving the inequities that plague the nation – yet the evidence to support their conclusions is thin. The greater risk facing Democrats is that if leftist activists insist on imposing their will on the party, they may not only stall the very real momentum that the party gained in the 2018, but – as Republicans fervently hope – they may alienate independents and moderates who flocked to support Democrats last November, and leave the country saddled not just with four more years of a Trump presidency, but with a further rightward tilt in the Supreme Court and judiciary that will stay with us for a generation.
Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."
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