York

with Lewis but were not entirely clear on the question of Trump’s legitimacy. In an extensive statement Saturday, Lieu said Trump has insulted too many people, is too close to Vladimir Putin, and has unconstitutional business conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, Lieu said, “I do not dispute that Trump won the Electoral College.”

So does that make Trump illegitimate, or not? Lieu did not say.

Judging by the Democrats’ reaction, it’s one thing to denounce Trump’s statements, to link him to Russia, and to suggest he will be a disastrous leader. It’s another to claim that Trump is not a legitimate president. For some Democrats, the illegitimacy charge would move them a bit too close to a kind of birtherism that they spent years denouncing. (Remember that Republican leaders stayed away from birtherism, although some GOP members of Congress embraced, or at least flirted, with it.)

So it’s possible, perhaps likely, that the Trump illegitimacy charge will remain confined to the leftmost reaches of the Democratic party, just as birtherism was confined to the rightmost reaches of the GOP.

If anyone other than John Lewis were leading the legitimacy fight, even more Democrats might distance themselves from it. But Lewis is so widely revered for his actions 50 years ago -even those denouncing him have to pay tribute to his past -- that he has given a sort of moral cover to a small number of Democrats who want to suggest that the 2016 election results are not legitimate. Right now, though, in the absence of some explosive new revelation or wholesale change in the political atmosphere, it appears that small number won’t get much bigger.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.