“Lanny Davis Productions.” That should have been the credit on this week’s big Michael Cohen drama. It’s a better fit than “House Oversight Committee.”

Knowledge may be power, but electoral victory is subpoena power. That’s of more practical use when the objective, under all the chatter about “collusion” and impeachment, is to render Donald Trump unelectable. Expect another 18 months of this.

The Democrats are entitled to the spectacle orchestrated Wednesday by Chairman Elijah Cummings and Cohen lawyer (and, not coincidentally, sharp Democratic strategist) Lanny Davis. They won the midterm elections, not just fair and square but going away.

The spoils that go to the victor include the authority to compel the appearance of witnesses who will support the 2020 narrative: Trump as “racist, conman, and cheat,” the theme of Cohen’s opening statement – which we may suspect the rough-edged, ambulance-chaser-turned-wannabe-Trump-bullyboy had just a tad of Lanny’s help writing. Chairman Scorsese, um, I mean Cummings, gave Cohen an extraordinary half hour to read it to America without interruption.

Republicans are not nearly as good at this stuff, mainly for reasons beyond their control. While in the House majority, they tried their best to put the Obama-legacy Justice Department and FBI under the microscope for politicization and abuses of power in the investigations that bore on the 2016 election. But the anti-Trump press didn’t care, which meant the public never heard much about it.

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Then there’s the dirty little secret the GOP never mentions: The president could at any time have ordered investigative documents disclosed. He shrank from doing so, notwithstanding claims he and House Republicans made about how devastating the documents are.

That obviously suggests one or more of the following: (a) the documents are not devastating evidence of misconduct; (b) revelation of the documents would be as unflattering to Trump as to the investigators (think about it: the FBI and DOJ were proceeding on the theory that a compromised Trump could be blackmailed by Putin, so what do you figure they wrote in their classified reports and FISA applications?); or (c) there is in place an understanding, perhaps tacit: Mueller will not find criminal “collusion” (even if his report is damning on the matter of Trump’s judgment), the president will not disclose documents (which could damage relationships with foreign intelligence services that abetted the Trump-Russia probe), and everyone will call a truce and lick their wounds (while House Democrats use their subpoena power to keep the narrative chugging – with corruption substituted for collusion).

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