As the 2018 midterm elections draw nearer and Republicans grapple with the distinct possibility that, at the very least, they will no longer control the White House and both chambers of Congress come January, party elders have begun outlining the presumed parameters of their abeyant, likely forthcoming misery. They are doing so using the information-tracking tool preferred by everyone who manages large, unwieldy, ever-expanding data sets for a living: a spreadsheet.

According to Axios, the office of an unnamed senior House Republican has begun taking stock of Democratic requests for investigations over the past 19 months, all of which the GOP has ignored pursuant to its strategy of embracing a racist criminal in pursuit of tax cuts and a Supreme Court seat or two. Presumably, these are the issues on which a newly installed Democratic speaker would act the moment he or she takes the gavel. It is, to borrow a term from political science, some extremely good shit.

By conducting a perpetual Twitter war against Robert Mueller and the Fake Russia Witch Hunt, Donald Trump has succeeded in framing the special counsel as the primary check on his administration's authority. This is a great public-relations victory, because it allows Congress—the entity that is supposed to be responsible for holding the executive branch accountable—to avoid criticism for abandoning these basic oversight responsibilities, which are foundational to the separation-of-powers balance that makes American democracy function. Trump isn't a corrupt president in a vacuum. He is a corrupt president because Paul Ryan and his fellow supplicants have chosen to let him get away with it.

The other notable aspect of this list is the diversity of its subject matter. If given the opportunity, Democrats won't launch an all-out #Resistance Twitter assault on impeachment-adjacent topics to the exclusion of everything else. Republicans also expect them to investigate discrimination against minority groups, and gross misuses of taxpayer dollars, and the family-separation humanitarian crisis, and the shoddy response to the catastrophe in Puerto Rico, and ongoing efforts by hostile foreign governments to interfere in our elections. Whatever import you assign to Trump's penchant for obstructing justice, the rest of these are scandals that affect Americans' everyday lives—and that elected officials, on Ryan's watch, have purposely allowed to go unexamined. As pitches to voters go, Democrats could do a lot worse.

Axios says that the working draft of this spreadsheet has "churned Republicans' stomachs," and that they are "scrambling to prepare for the worst." These descriptors reveal a lot about the modern Republican Party: Nothing is more terrifying to them than the prospect of finally having to account for their betrayal of the public trust.

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