2019 is going to be great. 2020 even better. Yeah, the shutdown sucks, but I imagine it can only last so long—Trump’s 54,000 border patrol agents are currently not getting paid, nor are the farmers who can’t get their bailout payments until the furlough ends. Trump will cave, and it's not going to get any better for him.
Several months ago, House leaders impressed upon the Donald the need to fix the damage done by Newt Gingrich. Back in the day, he took away staff from committee chairs to consolidate his own power. He figured he could outsource policy-making to lobbyists and right-wing think tanks—which is exactly how the GOP runs Congress. The big problem here is that oversight and investigations are hard to run with limited staff, and Hillary Clinton is not going to investigate herself.
Back in late August, Donald—living in his ego-inflated bubble--kept insisting that there would be a “red wave” and listened to pundits who told him that not only would the Democrats not take the House, but the GOP was likely to gain seats. That was the selling point for Congress to get their staff funding. The extra staff would be critical for conducting hearings and investigations, which would be “handy for investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails.”
Trump approved the extra $129 million for staff.
DOH!
Donald Trump Is Handing House Democrats a Loaded Gun
When Democrats assume control of the House on January 3rd, they will have $129 million more to spend on staff than their predecessors in the 115th Congress did—money they can use to hire more personnel to, among other things, investigate the Trump administration.
And that, by the way, is exactly what she is doing:
As the clip states, the House Judiciary Committee is running multiple ads for lawyers with expertise in criminal law, immigration law, constitutional law, antitrust law, and bankruptcy law, just to name a few. Legislators are saying that applications are pouring in. (As a commenter noted, people actually want to work for Democrats.)
Given that every week there’s a new Trump scandal, they are going to be busy:
On the flip side, the GOP just closed their investigation into Hillary’s emails and had to admit they had absolutely nothing. However, during this same time period, with the GOP and Trump obstructing in every way, Mueller’s team has managed to get either indictments or guilty pleas from 35 people and three companies. Just imagine what the Democratic House is going to find, now that they have subpoena power, staff, funding, and a toothless GOP that can no longer obstruct.
It has also been pointed out that Nancy could even put some funding aside in reserve, just in case Trump tries to fire Mueller and his team.
It’s almost sad that Trumpy really did think that the shutdown would “distract” Nancy from focusing on his Russian collusion and multiple crimes. Wrong again. Nancy knows a thing or two about multi-tasking. Trump is a toddler who can’t concentrate on a single thing--he can’t even drink out of a cup with one hand. It’s really not fair to pit these two against each other.
But I’m already having so much fun watching.
