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Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) rightly called popular vote loser Donald Trump "dangerous" in an interview on Morning Joe Friday. He followed up with a statement adding that Trump's admission in the NCB interview with Lester Hold that he had fired Comey because his Russia investigation "is dangerously close to obstruction of justice," and that Trump's tweeted threat to Comey Friday morning "could be construed as threatening a witness in this investigation, which is another violation of federal law." Because of this, Durbin continued, "Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein must appoint an independent special prosecutor to pursue possible criminal charges, or he must resign."
Right. So. What are Senate Democrats going to do, besides send statements, to make that happen? Durbin is ready to fight, he shut down Senate committee hearings using one of the procedural tools the minority has. That's an excellent start, but as Adam Jentleson, formerly deputy chief of staff to Sen. Harry Reid, writes, Democrats have to keep it up because "through a steady slog of unrelenting business as usual, [Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and his army of obedient congressional Republicans will turn Trump’s lurch toward authoritarianism into the new normal—unless Democrats stop them."
McConnell’s key insight is that the simple passage of time and the conduct of business as usual combine to stretch a cloak of normalcy over even the most extreme event. It’s a smart strategy that plays to the natural human desire to seek normalcy in the face of uncertainty, an impulse the psychologist Arie Kruglanski described as seeking “cognitive closure.”
Democrats need to resist that impulse. The first thing they should do is refuse to conduct business as usual in the Senate. Senate rules make it easy for individual senators to slow things down, and Democrats have already begun to use them. On Wednesday, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) withheld consent from a motion to set up committee hearings, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) forced a delay in a committee hearing. Even in the minority, Democrats are able to do this because everything the Senate does happens by unanimous consent. By withholding consent, any individual senator can force the Senate to grind its gears running through time-consuming procedural hurdles. The challenge will be to repeat these acts again and again over a sustained period of time, because repeated enough, the act of withholding consent can make even the Senate far more unmanageable than it already is.
Democrats should also use the Senate’s rules encouraging free and open debate to take advantage of every opportunity to press Republicans directly and publicly on why they continue to cover for President Trump instead of holding him accountable. Senators can and should flood the floor with speeches and hold frequent news conferences on Trump’s ties to Russia. But they can also engage Republicans directly on the Senate floor and force them to publicly defend their blind obedience to the most conflicted and compromised president in recent history.
Every time a Republican senator is speaking, Jentleson advises, a Democrat should ask them to yield for a question and make them defend themselves—and Trump. That includes McConnell, who speaks at the beginning of every session in "leader time." Democrats should "make a point of asking McConnell to yield for a question about why, for instance, he is still trying to cast doubt on the intelligence community by stating that Russia 'may have' hacked our election in his speech Wednesday—when the entire U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russia was the perpetrator." That's a good question for a hypothetical Democrat to ask, isn't it.
McConnell continues doing his damnedest to make the outrageous normal, and he has a great track record of success at this—witness Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat McConnell stole from Merrick Garland. A stolen Supreme Court seat is absolutely not normal, but McConnell stuck to his guns and here we are. But that stolen seat is just the beginning of what Trump and McConnell can and will do to undermine our democracy. Democrats can't let that happen without the maximum resistance.