we have a water issue going on in our state, so we have that s a place i think we have real bipartisan opportunity. people have talked the talk and now we need to walk the walk with real federal dollars. neither one of you brought up investigations of the president. how do your constituents, how do they view these potential wrongdoings by the president? how often did it come up? how much do you think congress should focus on this? protecting democracy is critically importance. article 1 the congress is a co-equal branch of government so oversight is critically important. the congressional republicans essentially refused to do so. so i think that there s certainly an interest to make sure that our critical pillars of democracy like free and fair elections can occur but that it s not our primary and chief priority. you heard congressman schiff, he admitted, yes, there s all these investigations and they can t cloud the big picture on substance. how concerned are you that it might
gone after one institution after the other, and you see that in this call of corruption in these elections, not to allow an election to be settled. and what i see is a president who really does feel that he is under threat. if you look at his response by firing sessions and appointing whitaker, who has made himself known to the president so that he could take advantage of that, and then you look at democrats response, i think it s going to be important to be really judicious about how they proceed. the whitaker appointment to me was reminiscent of the administration s policy on child separation, where it was something that the president thought about and wanted to do, put in an acting attorney general who could sit there for 210 days and who was skeptical of the mueller probe and yet you see the president skeptical of it and backing away because he didn t anticipate the blowback that he would get from democrats and republicans alike, and it really, i think, revealed how even the bes
president is a democrat or a republican. matt whitaker, david brooks, what do we make of him? the arguments that he s even constitutionally it s even a constitutional appointment? i think one of the i went to 23 states this election, and heard the word unraveling over and over again, that the country is unraveling. are we racially together? are we economically together? are we morally together? and are our institutions together? and donald trump threatens our institutions and personalizes power. you don t serve the institution, you serve donald trump. that s not how the attorney general s office is supposed to act. it s supposed to serve the constitution. so this is a threat to another institution and another one is the way we bark at the refs on the elections. when you accuse somebody of corruption without any evidence, you re destroying the social fabric to some degree. we ve seen a lot of that this week. so we re seeing institutional decay. what do you make of that? you
that s what we re going to get for the two years from here until 2020. and as david mentioned, that does get the president s base out, but it doesn t expand the electorate. now the question for democrats is can they put up a candidate going forward that expands theirs and eats into some of the obama/trump voters who turn out for the president and are proving extremely loyal to him and who he s very skilled at communicating with. donna, was this a referendum on the president? i think it was a rebuke of the president. i think we began the week on election night with a modest but significant victory for democrats. by the end of the week, it had really crested into a blue wave. and where i look at promises for the democrats going forward is in states like michigan and pennsylvania and wisconsin that were really significant victories and southern virginia. and that to me says where the democrats need to place their eggs in the 2020 basket.
matthew, what did you make of the president, it did seem as if he moved faster on jeff sessions than even jeff sessions was prepared for, to the point that sessions made it clear i was asked for this resignation, which is washington speak for you need to call it a firing. we ve seen this with donald trump since he descended down that escalator three years ago when he s hit with a setback, he immediately pivots and creates a new controversy where he may have more solid ground. so have things? of course they have changed. the democrats are going to be in charge of the united states house of representatives. that is a big deal. and so we ve already seen with chairman-designate schiff there will be investigations. the chance for conservative legislation, not that there was much passed this year anyway, but the chance going forward is greatly diminished. was it a referendum on trump? yes. what we ve seen again and again i think really since 1994 is that these midterm elections are refer