America needs a true opposition party. Instead, it has a crazed resistance movement stuck in 2016. Consider the evidence.
Democrats in Congress are acting like teenagers auditioning for a school play. Rep. Jerry Nadler, finally in a starring role after decades in the shadows, is trying to gin up outrage at President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr but his amateur theatrics bear no relation to reality.
Nadler’s insurmountable problem is that he wants to make the report of special counsel Robert Mueller something it’s not. If there were anything resembling a smoking gun showing collusion or obstruction, Mueller and his team of biased prosecutors would shout it from the rooftops. But the smoking gun doesn’t exist, and Nadler is on a fool’s errand to pretend otherwise.
Then there’s Nancy Pelosi, the speaker who increasingly speaks incoherently. Pelosi claims in one sentence she opposes impeachment while in the next says the party’s mad dogs should continue to hunt for something impeachable.
Critics accuse her of wanting it both ways, but that’s too kind. Pelosi simply doesn’t have the courage to rein in the radicals, allowing the loudest, angriest voices to seize her bully pulpit.
The result is that instead of searching for solutions to the border crisis or other problems, House Dems paper the White House with subpoenas and threats. What happened to governing, Madam Speaker?
Meanwhile, out on the 2020 campaign trail, Joe Biden surprisingly sits atop the party’s presidential heap. National polls show the former vice president scoring from 38 to 46 percent, with runner-up Bernie Sanders 20 to 30 points behind.
Others thought to have a chance at the nomination — Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke — are stuck in single digits, according to the Real Clear Politics average.
Color me skeptical. Not of the polls, but of the prospect that Biden will finish on top.
Although he is popular in some quarters, I believe his catapult to frontrunner status reveals that many Dems still suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Consumed with rage and determined to drive Trump from office one way or another, they are betting on Biden only because they accept the claim he can beat Trump in a head-to-head match-up.
In theory, anything is possible. In reality, Biden was a disaster in his previous two bids for president and at 76 years old he’s not going to get better. Already he’s slurring words and 18 grueling months will kick the human gaffe machine into high gear.
More critically, the idea that he can appeal to working-class voters who put Trump in the Oval Office is a media and consultants’ fantasy. Biden is a career Washington windbag and the Obama-Biden administration presided over high regulation, low growth and the loss of more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs. Obama insisted those jobs were gone forever.
Under Trump, unemployment is at historic lows, wages are rising, regulations are being shredded and nearly 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been added.
What does Biden say to all that? More important, what do those workers say?
While Dem decisions are bad for them and good for Republicans, none of this is good for America. Just as competition improves performance in sports and business, the nation needs two parties fighting for the same voters.
Traditionally, that competition has forged compromise and progress. Even Trump is a more disciplined president when convinced his freewheeling style is hurting him.
But rather than try to convert the president’s supporters with better ideas, Dems are collapsing into a heap of nonsense-babbling Trump-haters. Their agenda ranges from idiotic — Green New Deal, Medicare For All — to the insane idea of removing him before the end of his term.
None of this is rational — yet they offer nothing else.
Oh, and things are almost certain to get worse for Dems. As Barr’s investigation of the investigators heats up, it will bolster Trump’s claim that the FBI’s 2016 investigation was at best improper and at worst a partisan bid to sway the election and then, when that failed, depose him.
New bits and pieces are emerging daily as insiders rush to justify their conduct through leaks and interviews before Barr gets to them. It was in this context that the dirtiest cop of all, Jim Comey, admitted that the anti-Trump texts of former agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page “made us all look bad.”
How touching. It’s a little late for confession, and worth noting that it was Comey who assigned Strzok and Page to both the Hillary Clinton e-mail probe and the Trump-Russia investigation. He never had a problem with their misconduct until now.
There are reports that Barr plans to use a grand jury to see if the spying, as he rightly calls it, on the Trump campaign was justified. That would probably delay the release of findings, but also sets up the potential for indictments of former officials in the Obama administration.
That would make quite a 2020 surprise and complete the reversal of the Russia, Russia, Russia hysteria. Instead of Trump in the dock, it would be his tormentors.
All the more reason why Dems ought to quit the resistance nonsense and turn their energies into becoming a genuine opposition party. They can start by quietly accepting that Trump was fairly elected in 2016, then make news with constructive criticisms of his policies and credible alternatives. That would give voters a substantive contrast.
And Dems would be practicing what they preach. They demand respect for presidential norms and the separation of powers, yet refuse to accept Trump’s legitimacy.
If they can’t do even that, they deserve a long exile in the political wilderness.
Spare us the shock
Of all the government scams New Yorkers face, the outrageous sky-high overtime costs at the MTA are especially galling. Even more so now that Gov. Cuomo and board members insist they are shocked, shocked that the total overtime tab soared to $1.3 billion in 2018.
Here’s the rub: It was $1.2 billion in 2017. Sure, $100 million more is real money, but where did the first $1.2 billion go?
Where was the outrage last year?
There was none until the Empire Center and The Post started spotlighting individual workers who got OT payouts of more than $200,000 each.
Suddenly, officials’ outrage flows like water and reforms are promised. Right, as soon as they round up the usual suspects.
City schools’ racial politics
Reader Michael Quane scoffs at the plan by Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to impose racial quotas on top schools. He writes:
“The irony is that most of these students come from families below the poverty line, so there is no altruistic reason to do this. It’s racial politics pure and simple, aimed at a group they think won’t fight back. This is what colleges did to Jewish students in the 1930s. It was racist then and it’s racist now.”