The intensity of the controversy between President-elect Donald Trump and Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) – it threatened for a while to escalate into a serious race issue – should not allow us to be distracted from the bigger picture.
The congressman’s broadside that Mr. Trump’s presidency will have no legitimacy and his declaration that he would boycott the Trump inauguration were just part of an overall effort by liberals to rally public opinion for their coming challenge to all attempts by President Trump, whom they depict as being outside the political mainstream, to roll back a number of the so-called progressive policies introduced by President Obama.
Many of those changes will have to be ratified by Congress, so Mr. Trump’s opponents know the importance of rallying public opinion to their side, particularly in light of the Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House. In a sense they are opting for a form of rule by the street.
This would explain why the president-elect’s response to Mr. Lewis’s comments was decried by many on the left in such exercised tones that one would think Mr. Trump had insulted the entire African-American community. All the president-elect said was that Congressman Lewis and by inference his longtime colleagues as well were responsible for the decline in their districts. But anger in the black community was doubtless seen as low-hanging fruit that could assist Mr. Trump’s opponents in their efforts to thwart him at every turn.
It is also worthy of note that Congressman Lewis’s boycott seems more a matter of simple partisan politics than his supporters would have everyone believe. It turns out, as the Washington Post and other media outlets reported on Tuesday, that Mr. Lewis and some other members of the Congressional Black Caucus boycotted George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, with Mr. Lewis saying at the time that he thought it would be hypocritical to attend Mr. Bush’s swearing-in because he did not believe “Bush is the true elected president.”
So as Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza put it, “John Lewis has said the last two Republican president were illegitimate” and “has attended just one inauguration of a Republican president since he was first elected to Congress in 1986; that of George H.W. Bush in 1988.”
Significantly, according to The New York Times, many of the members of Congress who will not attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration “said they planned instead to meet with activists and focus on how to push back against Mr. Trump’s administration.”
It is disappointing that those members of Congress who have declared they will not attend the inauguration are unprepared to give the new president the chance to prove himself and instead are girding for political battle. We are particularly bothered that New York Representatives Jerrold Nadler, Yvette Clarke, and Nydia Velazquez have said they will not attend – this despite the fact that their districts include a significant number of Orthodox Jewish voters who cast their ballots for Mr. Trump.
