Yesterday’s President Defeats Yesterday’s Opposition on Sessions Vote

America has a president who wallows in the past. We’ve known that about the president since before he won a single primary vote. As he tightens his grip on the Republican Party, it also is being dragged back into yesterday’s battles.

What we did not know until this week was that the opposition is just as eager to relitigate the past instead of addressing the future.

The first whiffs of the problem came during the ongoing debate over the president’s executive order on refugees. That Trump would harken back to 1970s Nixonian language was no surprise to anyone. More troubling was the Democrats’ bizarre decision to shift from arguing the policy to arguing about its legality as soon as a federal judge ruled the order invalid. Democrats promptly fell back on the if-it’s-unconstitutional-it-must-be-wrong defense, leaving the policy issue almost entirely to Trump himself. It took a Bush-the-Younger-appointed CIA Director (Michael Hayden, in the WaPo) to finally challenge Trump’s ridiculous assertion that the policy itself would be effective. It’s as if twenty years of getting beaten on gun control via the same argument (challenging the effectiveness of insert-gun-regulation-here) vanished from the opposition’s memories.

However, as bad as that excursion into past Pollyanism was, the Jeff Sessions confirmation battle proved beyond any doubt that the Democrats can’t – or won’t – come out of the 20th Century.

Contrary to what you may have heard or seen, dear reader, Session had vulnerabilities to his right – especially on the libertarian side. His utter refusal to do anything about civil asset forfeiture (something he shares with his maniacal boss – Politico) and his amber-encased views on recreational drug law were opening to slice decent-sized pieces off the Trump-led Republican coalition. Pressure could have been brought especially to bear on Senator Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and perhaps even Ted Cruz. Sessions’ confirmation was probably difficult to prevent in any case, but divisions within the governing coalition would have given Democrats a beginning to winning over new converts for 2018 and 2020.

Instead, Democrats in the Senate decided the best thing to do was to rerun Sessions’ 1980s federal judiciary confirmation battle. Never mind that thirty years had passed since then. Never mind that Session himself had recovered from those 1980s wound to win election to the Senate itself four times (the last time without opposition). Issues that could have divided conservatives from each other (Twitchy) were left on the table while Democrats tried desperately to relive the 1960s…perhaps forgetting that it was in the 60s that their New Deal coalition fractured so badly that the GOP won five out of six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988.

Having the governing party living in the past is bad enough. When both major parties are stuck in the wrong century, it can be catastrophic.