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Bill Mahrer recently had a great rejoinder regarding the handwringing of some insider Democrats about talking about Russia too much: If you can’t run against treason, maybe you should hang it up as a party.

Exactly. But as a newbie candidate to politics-I had run in the NY2 Democratic primary earlier^[1] and while I conceded the race I am now running for State Senate in District 4-I can attest that much of elected Dems, party chairs, and consultants are under this conception that running against treason is going out on too much of a limb.

Tom Perez and the DNC have gotten some pushback against their civil lawsuit which is completely wrongheaded. That Trump and the GOP are hand waving it away is no surprise and their criticism of the lawsuit is very similar to what Nixon and his loyalists said in 1972 when Larry O’Brien and the DNC put in a lawsuit against Watergate in 1972. It was dismissed by not just Republicans but much of the media as a political stunt.

Indeed, as Rachel Maddow observed the other night, history is not just repeating itself, it’s plagiarizing itself.

The Democratic National Committee is suing, alleging that Russia, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks conspired to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign https://t.co/PnxTjT8xOO pic.twitter.com/mTvRSMhRJv

— CNN (@CNN) April 20, 2018

But what is particularly disappointing is that you even have Democrats criticizing the DNC’s lawsuit. 

“The chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Sunday defended a new multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, with talk show hosts asking whether it was distracting from efforts to rebuild the Democratic Party.”

“They still haven’t done a postmortem of why they lost the election, because the explanation for everything is Russia,” said Tim Canova, a Sanders supporter who challenged Wasserman Schultz in her 2016 congressional primary and is now challenging her as an independent. “They were losing midterm elections before anything got hacked.”

A distraction. Sure, there was Russian interference in an American election and the Trump campaign may have colluded with this interference but talking about it or demanding answers and accountability is distracting. Just forget about it. It’s not as if the legitimacy of the democratic process is something precious that is now open to doubt for many Americans. Oh wait.

Is Canova denying the Russian interference? If he’s not that how can he argue we should just forget about it?

The idea that you can either ‘rebuild the Democratic party’ or you can file a lawsuit against the attacks on the DNC is a rather tortured idea.

“In a Friday tweet, President Trump wrote that Democrats had “sued the Republicans for Winning” and encouraged his party to “counter and force them to turn over a treasure trove of material, including servers and emails.” On its own Twitter account, WikiLeaks argued that the DNC was distracting from a previous “moribund publicity lawsuit” and that the anti-secrecy organization was “constitutionally protected from such suits.”

“But Perez, who had no role at the DNC during the 2016 campaign, told NBC News’s Chuck Todd that the lawsuit was necessary to protect both the committee and U.S. elections. He said he was “confident that we will get a jury trial” and added that he had “not consulted Hillary Clinton to ask her permission” before filing the complaint.”

“We had people on our team who got death threats,” Perez said. “When you do that to people on my team — yeah, I’m gonna punch back.”

A Democrat who actually wants to punch back-there’s been far too little of this and I commend Perez for taking a stand. The notion that the Democrats shouldn’t punch back against a Russian interference campaign that directly targeted the Democratic party because otherwise they can’t rebuild is one zombie idea that never dies.

FN: After the record setting landslide of November 2018 the new zombie idea was that impeachment or even ‘over investigating’-as if with all Trump is guilty of it’s even physically possible to over investigate him-somehow helps him indeed plays right into his hands. 

End FN.

What we’ve seen in the all the special elections over the last 15 months is that the Democrats are well on their way to being rebuilt-though the DNC itself continues to struggle to raise money; the DCCC is doing very well.

At the end of the day how do you put a price tag on democracy?

Pressed on how much the lawsuit might cost — a worry for Democrats in cash-starved red states — Perez said it was “hard to put a price tag on preserving democracy.” After Todd played back criticism of the lawsuit from Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Perez said the fight would be worth it.

“I disagree with them for the simple reason that our democracy is priceless,” Perez said. “We can’t afford not to do this. It’s hard to win elections when you have interference in elections. And we’ve been winning elections.”

Another canard is that the Democrats should not bring a lawsuit because Mueller. The idea seems to be that somehow for the DNC to bring a civil lawsuit against the interference at the same time as the Mueller probe somehow risks undermining the Mueller probe. Here they are playing right into the GOP’s hands. The moment Mueller was appointed, the GOPers in Congress and the Senate started arguing the canard that now Mueller was doing his investigation Congress had to pull back on its probe and limit its scope or otherwise in some way it could undermine what Mueller is doing.

This argument is simply wrong but it gave them a political excuse nevertheless to pullback-‘Mueller’s handling it and we don’t want to get in his way.’

This is major misconception: Watergate had a Select Committee along with Leon Jaworski’s Independent Counsel. The former in no way sabotaged the latter but rather was complimentary to it. Indeed, regarding Trump-Russia, we can’t simply sit back and wait for Mueller to take care of this awesome political scandal. At the end of the day impeachment is the optimal way to resolve this crisis; for our country to have closure on what happened in 2016 will require ultimately not a legal decision but a political one that only Congress can make.

FN: Note that I first wrote this on April 23, 2018 so you can see I was always talking about impeachment-rather than many in the #Resistance who were alas talking about the Mueller Report being released and Trump being taken out in handcuffs-not that this is an outrageous idea legally and in light of his Lock Her UP chants he continued the same night Clinton received a pipe bomb from Trump’s #MagaBomber-it would be Poetic Justice but it was also pretty clear that Mueller would bow to DOJ precedent and set many up for disappointment as the mere fact he wasn’t indicted was taken as vindication by Barr and the Ken Dilanian MSM.

But then I ran as the #ImpeachmentTrain guy back in the 2018 primary,

Regarding the issue of using Mueller as an excuse as we see in Chapter A unfortunately the Dem leaders largely seemed to have bought the GOP’s false narrative that because of Mueller’s investigation Congress’ role was less important. At least before Mueller finished-including the first three months of Dem leadership in early 2019-the stock answer was ‘First we have to see the Mueller Report.’

As for the late John McCain’s excellent idea of a Select Committee this idea interested  Nancy Pelosi no more than Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell-she offered up yet another zombie argument-that a full SC somehow impedes the efforts of the various Committee Chairmen. This is false and it’s sort of hard to believe the Speaker doesn’t know better.

End of FN

So ideally, there ought to be multiple tracks or prongs for Trump-Russia; Mueller’s investigation is one; another should be Congress that has abdicated its role-especially in the House. As for the DNC civil lawsuit this is yet another track altogether.

FN: All true, and again, you wish the Dems hadn’t taken the bait that Mueller would do the heavy lifting for them even though the DNC lawsuit itself didn’t succeed. Even though it failed it in on way hampered Mueller that’s for sure.

In no way does it somehow get in the way of Mueller. If there were certain issues of witnesses, etc, Mueller could always give them the heads up. The OJ trial had the criminal case-that OJ beat-but then the Brown and Goldman families got him in a civil trial.

With Whitewater you had the Ken Starr investigation but you also had civil lawsuits against Clinton that ultimately Starr got involved in and his recommendations about that was the legal basis for the GOP’s impeachment of Clinton.

In legal cases you can always have both criminal and civil cases going on side by side-one doesn’t obviate or sabotage the other. All you need in a civil lawsuit is standing to sue which the Democrats clearly have as the Russian attack was not only an attack on American democracy but an attack on the Democratic party.

In general, “The Constitution does not ordinarily require a stay of civil proceedings pending the outcome of criminal proceedings.” Keating v. Office of Thrift Supervision, 45 F.3d 322, 324 (9th Cir. 1995). Yet, as Keating continued, “Nevertheless, a court may decide in its discretion to stay civil proceedings when the interests of justice seem to require such action.” Id. (citations omitted). The Second Circuit Court of Appeals would hear any appeal from the DNC lawsuit, and it has similarly ruled:

The power to stay proceedings is incidental to the power inherent in every court to control the disposition of the causes on its docket with economy of time and effort for itself, for counsel, and for litigants. Courts may defer civil proceedings pending the completion of parallel criminal prosecutions when the interests of justice seem to require such action. Although civil and criminal proceedings covering the same ground may sometimes justify deferring civil proceedings until the criminal proceedings are completed, a court may instead enter an appropriate protective order. How this can best be done calls for the exercise of judgment, which must weigh competing interests and maintain an even balance.

So the Trump associates sued by the DNC can  hope to get a stay. But while in theory a stay is a possibility in practice it doesn’t happen too often.

Louis Vuitton Malletier SA v. Ly USA, Inc., 676 F. 3d 83, 97 (2d Cir., 2012). The Second Circuit noted, “so heavy is the defendant’s burden in overcoming a district court’s decision to refrain from entering a stay that the defendants have pointed to only one case in which a district court’s decision to deny a stay was reversed on appeal, and that case was decided more than thirty years ago.” Id. at 100.

Please Democrats: if you can’t run against treason what can you run against?

UPDATE: Maybe move some of the footnotes to the bottom?