Sohn: There is no getting over it

Protesters unfurl a banner that reads "Resist" at the construction site of the former Washington Post building in Washington on Wednesday after police say protesters climbed a crane at the site refusing to allow workers to work in the area. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Protesters unfurl a banner that reads "Resist" at the construction site of the former Washington Post building in Washington on Wednesday after police say protesters climbed a crane at the site refusing to allow workers to work in the area. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

How many times have Democrats heard since November: "You lost. Trump won. Get over it."

Here's an answer to that indelicate taunt.

Too many times, and no, we won't get over it. Unless by "get over it" you mean follow the Republicans' eight-year example of obstructionism when they "got over it" after Barack Obama won. Twice.

The GOP got over it on the night of Obama's first inauguration when top Republican lawmakers and strategists met at a posh D.C. restaurant to conjure up ways to deep-six his presidency.

Journalist and author Robert Draper wrote about the meeting in the prologue of his book, "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives." According to Draper, about 15 Republicans - including our own Sen. Bob Corker, along with former lawmaker Newt Gingrich and Reps. Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, and Pete Sessions - plotted ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama's legislative platform.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," Draper quoted McCarthy as saying. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The GOP got over it in October 2010 when Mitch McConnell said that his party's primary goal in the next Congress was to make Obama a one-term president.

The GOP got over it when they shut down the government in 2013, and when they refused for more than 300 days to even convene a hearing for Obama's Supreme Court Justice nominee Merrick Garland. McConnell sat on the Garland nomination, saying Congress would let the people decide in the upcoming 2016 election - never mind that the people had decided twice already when they elected Obama. And, by the way, the people decided again in 2016 by giving Hillary Clinton nearly 3 million more votes than they gave Donald Trump, who claimed the presidency with one of the smallest electoral vote margins in American history (Trump has an alternative fact for the electoral victory. He spins it as "a landslide" electoral win).

Thus, in these early days of Kingdom Trump, Democrats are asking themselves a seemingly simple question: Should we follow the example set by the Obamas and "go high," or should we follow the obstructionist example of the GOP and just say no? After all, the party of no just sat down in the White House and the Capitol.

There's been plenty of Democratic naval gazing, and plenty of folks saying the party did it wrong and Clinton campaigned wrong and so on. But this was also the year of Russian election meddling, FBI election tricks, an Electoral College that ignored how the people voted and a GOP-weighted gerrymandering that strategically disenfranchises black votes all across the country.

We have many places to put our anger. It is choosing where and how to manage it that is the tough call.

Should we stow it on a top shelf while we fluff up our moral high ground? Or should we further undermine American democracy by acting like the Republicans - seeking ways to sink Trump's ship faster than he can do it himself?

Perhaps if Trump had acted a bit more presidential during his first two weeks in office, that first option - the top shelf - might have been more likely.

Instead, Trump's every antagonistic tweet - not to mention his administration's painful rollout of knee-jerk and ill-prepared freedom-stealing executive orders aimed at erasing eight years of progress - makes that choice improbable and perhaps impossible.

Truth be told, the options may really be one and the same.

In this Trumpian era of alternative facts, sticking to the high moral ground may well be opposing anything proposed by this president and his mini-me, Steve Bannon. Bannon is Trump's chief strategist and political adviser whose primary experience is Breitbart News, which he himself acknowledged is a platform for the alt-right.

In short, there is no getting over it. We saw some of that the day Democrats boycotted the inauguration. We saw it again when protesters took to the streets for two weekends straight, first to protest Trump himself and later to decry his travel and immigration ban.

We saw angry Democrats getting over it by borrowing from the tea party handbook: They showed up at minority leader Chuck Schumer's office to demand that he and other "Wall Street Democrats" do more "to filibuster Trump's legislation that promotes his hatred or his greed." And we saw the results of that last week when Democrats used boycotts to delay some Senate confirmation hearings for cabinet members.

Democrats will be moving on, all right, and we will hold to the high ground when and where we can - what's left of it in the wake of Trump's wrecking ball.

But the GOP had best buckle its seat belt.

Resist is the mood of the day.

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