Democrats seize on corruption as a midterm election issue
WASHINGTON – Leading Democrats in Congress are seizing on the tidal wave of legal troubles hitting President Donald Trump’s allies to cast the Republican Party as deeply corrupt ahead of the fast-approaching midterm elections.
Democratic leaders say they plan to make ethics a key pillar of their push to take the House majority this fall, arguing their party will serve as a check on what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., calls the Trump administration’s “brazen corruption, cronyism and incompetence.”
Trump and his allies suffered a triple hit Tuesday: the conviction of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, on bank and tax fraud charges; a guilty plea by his former attorney, Michael Cohen, that implicated the president in violating campaign finance laws; and the federal indictment of one of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters, Rep. Duncan Hunter of California. Prosecutors say Hunter and his wife used $250,000 in campaign money for family vacations, private-school tuition and other personal expenses.
Earlier this month, authorities arrested another early Trump backer, Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., on insider trading charges.
“This is a president who promised people that he was going to be their voice, that he was going to return power to the people. But he’s gone in the opposite direction,” said Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes, who was tapped by Pelosi to lead a “democracy reform” task force for House Democrats.
Voters “understand that the way this president and his allies in Congress and his buddies like Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins are behaving is disrespecting the average person out there,” Sarbanes added.
Democrats need to flip just 23 seats to retake control of the House. But they are competing in dozens of swing districts and some that solidly backed Trump in 2016. And many Democratic candidates have steered clear of attacking the president or those in his orbit in favor of pushing pocketbook issues, such as rising health care costs.
Strategists in both parties, however, say red-state Democrats risk energizing GOP voters if they focus too narrowly on ethics and raise the specter of impeaching a president who has still has high approval ratings in his party.
“For a lot of Republicans, particularly base Republicans, (impeachment) is a really powerful motivator,” said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the grass-roots group Tea Party Patriots that helped sweep Republicans into Congress in 2010, said the GOP should use Democrats’ arguments to rally the base about an impeachment threat.
Democrats acknowledge the tightrope. The party’s candidates must “avoid blind hatred of Trump,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist who worked for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., when Democrats swept to power in 2006 amid Republican ethics scandals.
“It’s not enough to rail against Trump and the unprecedented level of corruption,” he said. “Democrats have to tie it back to the impact it’s having on things such as clean air, clean water and the massive tax benefits for wealthy corporations.”
The fight already has begun. Hours after the Hunter indictment, the Cohen plea agreement and Manafort guilty verdict came down, the national Democratic Party sent a fundraising email lambasting the “culture of corruption that Donald Trump brings with him everywhere.”
“If we don’t do everything we can to fight back, the consequences could be catastrophic,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez wrote. “This November’s elections are an opportunity to fight back and reclaim our democracy.”
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a potential 2020 Democratic contender, called for new anti-corruption measures, including a lifetime ban on former presidents and members of Congress working as lobbyists.
And Ammar Campa-Najjar, the Democrat running against Hunter, seized on the indictment as he seeks to gain an advantage in a San Diego-area district Hunter captured by 27 percentage points in 2016. Voters “see Hunter now as a poster child for all of the division and the chaos and corruption that has plagued Washington for so long,” Campa-Najjar told USA TODAY.
On Wednesday, a defiant Hunter cast the Justice Department as the “Democrats’ arm of law enforcement.”
David Wasserman, who tracks House races at the nonpartisan “Cook Political Report,” said many Democrats learned in the 2016 election that focusing exclusively on Trump and “his outrageous statements” did not persuade red-state voters to reject him.
“Democrats running in swing and red districts are likely to let the convictions speak for themselves and focus on health care and the Republican tax bill,” Wasserman said.