Have at it, Sen. Warren

Elizabeth Warren, the senator from the People's Republic of Massachusetts (where I spent eight years of my life, including college), is certainly trying to make a name for herself, eh?

This week, she had to be sent into the dunce corner of the Senate for having violated Senate rules.  In this case, she tried to read into the record the content of a letter of some thirty years ago, from the late Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr..  The letter purported to have called the now Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, a bunch of things, but mainly tried to portray him as a racist, the "go-to argument" for Democrats who can't argue on merit.

Let us point out something.  First, the letter came from Coretta Scott King, not Martin.  Last I looked, her celebrity was based on whom she married, which makes her 30-year-old letter worth as much as my 30-year-old letters.  And truth to tell, Alveda King, Martin's niece, condemned Sen. Warren for "playing the race card."  So we're pretty much even, at least on what people named "King" think.

Jeff Sessions, as you know, was until yesterday the senator from Alabama, where he served some time back as its Attorney General before being elected to the Senate, where he served his state for several few terms.

To the extent that we saw at Sessions' hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the charge of racism rang pretty hollow.  The testimony before the committee, the words of black attorneys and clerks who worked with Sessions as Alabama attorney general were pretty compelling, as each one described him in glowing terms.  In every case, the depositions of people who had actually worked with him on a daily basis described a man who painstakingly sought to develop the careers of those who worked with him.

Considering that these people actually worked with him, and had been helped by him, and of course the fact that they were indeed black, not only black but happy to testify for Sessions, well, the Democrats had a pretty weak argument.  In fact, if you watched the committee hearings, the testimony alternated between Republican senators yielding their time to guests who had worked with Sessions in Alabama and spoke glowingly about him, and Democrats calling him a racist.  Given that all the guests were black, those accusations of racism looked beyond petty.

But even after that, old Elizabeth Warren wouldn't stop calling Sessions a racist.  Truth to tell, she looked pretty pathetic doing it.  The same Democrats who defended their pet Klansman, Robert Byrd (D-WV) as being "able to change", well, even with plenty of evidence, they were unwilling to afford the same consideration to a man they had been working with in the Senate for years.

It is that kind of thing that makes me happy that Elizabeth Warren is so prominently touted as a candidate for president in 2020, here while Donald Trump has served about 0.00001% of his (first) term.  As I write this, she is on the news again, with her whatever it is that gets into a high dudgeon, in a high dudgeon.

I tend to think of Elizabeth Warren as representing the kind of politics and policies that are why Donald Trump was elected in the first place.  Rather than trying to work with the new administration to get things done in a collaborative, collegial way, she is among those forcing the confirmation debates of every Cabinet appointee to go the whole allowed 30 hours, as if by putting off the inevitable, she is somehow doing something good.

Rather, she and her cohorts and assorted Schumers are simply spitting in the wind.  More than that, they are blowing a phenomenal opportunity.  The one time that the Republicans have the White House and both houses of Congress, the president happens to be not an ideologue, but rather someone with whom Democrats could actually work -- if they chose to.

Three and a half years hence, if she is actually the candidate to oppose President Trump's reelection, he will be able to state, in his own truly inimitable way, that she blew an opportunity to be part of the change that the nation asked for in the 2016 election.  By helping make them the Party of No, she led the Democrats into irrelevance.

And by the way, she will be 71 then.  It needs to be said; not so much because she'd be "too old" although she'd be the oldest person ever elected (President Trump was 70), but because she would have at least 40 years removal from the heartbeat of the left.

You may recall that in 2009, the Republicans declared themselves opposed to Barack Obama's platform.  But they at least voted-in his Cabinet, and the fact was that their efforts to be a collegial part of the legislative process were blocked, by Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy "You'll have to pass it to see what's in it" Pelosi.

What this is all doing now is portraying the Democrats as absent of ideas, and only able to be political beings -- precisely the "swamp" that the nation voted in Donald Trump to drain.  So as unlikable and personally annoying as Elizabeth Warren appears to be, well, bring her on.

At this moment, I can't imagine anyone I'd rather see running against Trump 2020.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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