House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't have time to worry about the fact that Donald Trump snubbed her on the dais at the State of the Union address. Customarily, the speaker gavels the chamber to order and introduces a president before she or he begins orating. But as Pelosi stood with gavel in hand, Trump simply dove right into his torturously long harangue.
“Who really cares,” Pelosi reportedly told her colleagues Wednesday morning when asked about the slight. She was more concerned about the conduct of her own charges. “I do want to applaud our entire caucus for the decorum. I thought you were very, very respectful of the office that he holds, respectful of the position that we have.” Pelosi is clearly devoted to ceremony and tradition, but she's applying what might be called some basic sandbox wisdom to her interactions with Trump. Chief among them is, "You do you, because you can't control what the other kids do." Another sandbox axiom to live by: Pick your battles.
And returning fire on Trump’s petty antics isn’t among them. But Trump trying to bully Democrats out of performing their constitutional duties? Yeah, that counts.
"It was an all-out threat,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointedly told reporters Wednesday morning of Trump’s warning against investigating him. “The president should not bring threats to the floor of the House. He said he wasn’t going to cooperate unless we didn’t exercise our constitutional responsibility to oversight.”
Later that day, Democrats would launch what promises to be a gusher of vigorous investigations into Trump and the corruption that's coursing through his administration. The House Intelligence Committee, in particular, announced a renewed probe that will be less focused on the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia than on the many financial entanglements that make Trump and his inner circle vulnerable to Russian influence and potentially guilty of wrongdoing. The Judiciary panel also proceeded to hold a contentious hearing in which acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker proved to be less cooperative than some terrorists typically are, according to one former FBI official.
But as House Democrats delve into their massive electoral mandate to provide a check on Trump, they also face the daunting task of restoring to the public some semblance of faith in our federal government. After Republicans traded in their oaths of office for blind allegiance to Trump, Democrats will be laboring under the watchful eye of an understandably jaded citizenry. In recognition of that reality, they also held hearings on key policy initiatives related to infrastructure, voting rights, gun background checks, and protecting health coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
Certainly, the caucus as a whole appears to be acutely aware of the glare of history gazing down on them. From freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenging the nation to meet the moment on climate change to Oversight chair Elijah's Cummings’ powerful call to arms on voting rights, Democrats are swinging for the fences. In some ways, they have little choice at this perilous moment in history.
"Two hundred years from now, our people will look back on this time and ask the question, when you saw what this president was doing, what did you do? Did you just stand by and do nothing?" Cummings told NPR, adding that it's a question he's asked every Democratic member of his committee.
But Cummings knows that his ability to have lasting impact will also partially rest on the extent to which he can restore the integrity of the committee he now chairs after the GOP chairs who came before him abused it to no end for partisan hackery. Republican California Rep. Darrell Issa, an influential Obama-era chair, issued more than 100 subpoenas during his four-year stewardship of the panel. And in a stunning turn, once Trump was elected, no Republican even wanted the gavel or the investigative responsibilities associated with it.
That’s the fraught tenor under which Cummings and other Democrats will now labor. "I want to take us not to common ground—that's not good enough,” Cummings said this week. “I'm trying to take us to higher ground."
And so it goes: a woman is left to clean up the mess of the man who came before her, a black man is left to clean up the mess of the white men who came before him, and Democrats are once again cleaning up the mess of the Republicans who came before them. For the sake of our republic, Godspeed to them.