Our real national emergency

Jonathan Chait in New York magazine:

...When observers express the possibility that Democrats could overreach and help Trump, they have in mind something like a replay of congressional Republican oversight. Republicans spent years barking at the moon on Benghazi in a failed attempt to substantiate a conspiracy theory to the point where the mainstream media stopped taking their efforts seriously. 

Notably, Republicans themselves did not deem this effort a failure: House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy credited the Benghazi probes with lowering Hillary Clinton’s approval rating in advance of the election.

But even if we concede that overreach would backfire, it is difficult to imagine how Democrats could overreach if they wanted to. The scale of illegality and corruption they’re exploring is orders of magnitude larger than anything in modern history. 

Enormous new scandals are popping up almost daily. In the last week alone, we’ve learned that President Trump overrode intelligence assessments and his own chief of staff to give high-level security clearances to his daughter and her husband, who have mingled public diplomacy with their own personal business dealings; that Trump tried repeatedly to direct the Justice Department to block a merger in order to punish CNN for independent reporting; that the Trump Organization is being investigated for insurance fraud; in addition to multiple allegations presented by Michael Cohen, many of them backed by contemporaneous evidence. 

For a normal presidency, any of these allegations would, on their own, present crisis-level scandals.

Overreach? It would take Congress decades just to keep pace with all the crimes...