That brings us to the other commodity with which Democrats need to fill the space left by the absent primary: derogatory information about Republicans. This is one area where Democrats simply don’t seem to be on the same page. As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reported this week, Representative Jamie Raskin and his colleagues on the House Oversight Committee have done yeoman’s work, surfacing a tremendous amount of documentation proving that President Trump “pocketed at least $7.8 million in payments from foreign governments during his presidency” and that the cataloging of “far more such foreign booty” was “thwarted when GOP capture of the House deprived them of subpoena power.” The path to furthering this investigation is blocked in the House, but Raskin has, in recent days, “approached Senate Democrats and made the case that they might consider using their subpoena power to continue the investigation into the unconstitutional payments.”
The problem, Sargent says, is that Raskin is hitting a roadblock in the Senate, which is divided on whether to take the next step and jump into the fray—especially given that “to refer any ignored subpoenas for prosecution, the Senate must marshal 60 floor votes to overcome the inevitable GOP filibuster.” But the point of this exercise shouldn’t be to levy a bunch of criminal convictions—it’s to surface newsworthy information that the media might mill into content. The Senate may prefer to be the “cooling saucer” of democracy, but to provide for democracy’s future, it’s going to have to spill some tea.
The fact that the Democrats are of two minds on the matter is emblematic of the asymmetry of America’s political warfare. Republicans can be counted on to speak with one voice, picking topics on a daily basis on which to do a Two Minutes Hate, keeping the right-wing media Wurlitzer filled with fresh sheet music to call the next dance. Democrats can’t match the GOP in terms of propaganda infrastructure, but they can marshal far more relevant and substantive topics of conflict than the Republican Party’s typical culture-war fare. As Brian Beutler noted in his Off Message newsletter, Raskin did successfully break into the media transom—and if Democrats could learn to parcel such damning information in small portions, that slow drip could keep the media fed for days on end.