Editorials of The Times

Robert Mueller, the special counsel, always knew he was running the Russia investigation on borrowed time. That time may have just run out on Wednesday afternoon, when President Donald Trump ousted his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, less than 24 hours after Republicans lost their eight-year lock on the House of Representatives.

So who’s going to protect Mueller now?

Until Wednesday, the job was being performed ably by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who assumed oversight of the Russia investigation when Sessions recused himself in March 2017.

Under Rosenstein’s leadership, the investigation Mueller took over has resulted in the felony conviction of the president’s former campaign chairman, guilty pleas from multiple other top Trump aides and associates and the indictments of dozens of Russian government operatives for interfering in the 2016 election. For more than a year, Rosenstein walked a political tightrope, guarding Mueller’s independence on the one hand while trying to appease Trump’s increasingly meddlesome demands on the other.

That task now falls to Sessions’ chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who on Wednesday became acting attorney general and, far more alarmingly, the man Mueller now reports to.

The good news is that no one, including Whitaker, can stop the multiple prosecutions or litigation already in progress — including the cooperation of Paul Manafort; the sentencing of Michael Flynn; or the continuing investigation of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, and the Trump Organization by federal prosecutors in New York. The courts will have the final say on what happens in each of those cases.

Democrats will also soon be running the House, returning it to its place as a coequal branch of government and holding Trump to account for the first time since he took office. “We are immediately issuing multiple letters to key officials demanding that they preserve all relevant documents related to this action to make sure that the investigation and any evidence remains safe from improper interference or destruction,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who is expected to soon head the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Wednesday.

The bad news is, well, pretty much everything else. Whitaker — who has been called the “eyes and ears” of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff — has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a “witch hunt” and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piece arguing that Mueller was coming “dangerously close” to crossing a “red line” by investigating the president’s finances. He has suggested there was nothing wrong in Trump’s 2017 firing of James Comey, the FBI director, and he has supported the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. In an interview last year he described “a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” In 2014, he headed the political campaign for Iowa state treasurer of Sam Clovis, who later became a Trump campaign aide and, more recently, a witness in the Russia investigation.

Conflicts of interest like this are what led Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. That was the ethical thing to do, even if it sent Trump into a spiral of rage.

Sessions, a veteran of the Senate, is an institutionalist at heart. “The Department of Justice,” he once said, “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” That sentiment was never going to survive long under Trump, for whom improper influence has been a central plank of governing philosophy. Ethics, not so much.

The irony is that Sessions was among the president’s most effective and loyal foot soldiers. Soon after becoming attorney general, he turned Trump’s cartoonish law-and-order campaign talk into reality by directing federal prosecutors to bring the harshest charges possible in all cases. He helped obliterate the legacy of President Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor and nemesis, by pushing to scale back or end policies that Obama had championed, including legal protections for the 700,000 young immigrants who came to the United States as children.

But personal loyalty is what Trump really cares about, and on that count Sessions failed spectacularly. If Whitaker has any concern for the independence of the department he is taking over — not to mention the rule of law in America — he will follow Sessions’ lead and hand the reins of the investigation to someone less evidently invested in destroying it.

It’s not even clear Whitaker may legally hold the post of acting attorney general, since he has never been confirmed by the Senate. But if so, he could do a lot of damage, much of it behind closed doors. For example, he could tip off the White House to what the special counsel’s office is up to, or he could block Mueller from taking significant investigatory steps, like bringing an indictment, without having to notify Congress or the public until the investigation is complete. And any report Mueller ultimately submits goes directly to the attorney general — who may decide whether or not to pass it along to Congress.

Trump has made clear that he thinks the attorney general should function as a president’s personal lawyer, protecting him from justice and persecuting his enemies. In the days before Sessions recused himself last year, Trump tried desperately to stop him, at one point complaining, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to the infamous mob lawyer and fixer who had mentored him as a young man before dying in 1986.

The president may believe that in Whitaker he’s found his Roy Cohn. He may also believe that the Republican majority in the Senate — increased on Tuesday with likely Trump loyalists — is prepared to embrace such a corrupted standard for American justice. So it’s a good moment to recall another figure from that era — Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, who said in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, “Whether we shall continue to be a government of laws, and not of men, is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”

With the House of Representatives in Democrats’ control, the next two years will give them the opportunity to show that there’s a better model of legislating, that Congress is capable of doing more for Americans than cutting taxes for the wealthy and menacing everyone else’s health care. Now and again Democratic leaders may need to play constitutional hardball — and they’ll have a chance to do it in a more constructive fashion than Mitch McConnell and his team, who have dominated Congress since 2014.

Even as Democratic House members are picking the confetti from their hair, one thought should be foremost in their minds: How do they avoid screwing things up?

For the midterms, Democrats adopted a trio of policy goals: lowering health care costs, creating jobs by investing in infrastructure, and cleaning up politics via a comprehensive reform package that would tighten ethics laws and shore up the integrity of our electoral system. These are popular causes with bipartisan appeal.

They are also causes for which the president has explicitly expressed his own enthusiasm, whether real or feigned. This gives Democrats the chance to press President Donald Trump about whether he is interested in making progress on his stated goals or is a hypocrite intent on waging partisan trench warfare for the remainder of his term.

First up on the Democrats’ agenda is expected to be the reform package. But they also plan to move quickly to address the plight of the Dreamers, some 700,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children and granted protection from deportation by President Barack Obama. Huge majorities of Americans support letting the Dreamers stay. Finding a compromise path with Trump would be good policy and good politics.

Of course, even if the president is interested in chalking up a few bipartisan wins, the Republican Senate is unlikely to play along. There’s nothing wrong with Democrats’ pursuing legislation, such as to raise the minimum wage, that fills out their governing priorities even if, for now, it does little more than clarify the contrasts between their priorities and their opposition’s.

Democrats will theoretically have the power to set the agenda, but they will still be contending with a Republican Senate leader who takes pride in obstructionism for partisan gain. (See: Merrick Garland.) Managing expectations will be vital, and scoring policy victories will require finding the right pressure points. If Democrats can find an issue or two — like spending to fix bridges and tunnels — that will put Republican lawmakers on the opposite side from the president, all the better. As Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor and a seasoned Democratic street fighter, observed, “Part of politics is unifying your team and dividing the other.”

Impeachment is neither a sensible nor a winning issue to open with. Even many Americans who dislike Trump will, absent overwhelming evidence of impeachable offenses, balk at efforts to remove a sitting president. (Polls show the percentage of support for impeachment ranging from the high 30s to the high 40s.) Just ask the former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, whose rabid push to bring down President Bill Clinton led to electoral disaster for the Republicans in the 1998 midterms, resulting in Gingrich being driven from leadership by his own members.

Democrats would do well to wait and see if the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, turns up high crimes and misdemeanors before deciding whether to pursue the painful and divisive path of impeachment. If so, they’ll want to bring along at least some of their Republican colleagues.

It has been a long two years for Democrats, watching Republicans fail to check Trumpian excesses. Which means the new majority might be tempted to overreach and, like Gingrich’s professed revolutionaries, wind up coming across as more partisan and prurient than public-spirited. Investigations should be strategic and methodical and clearly in the public interest — for instance, looking into corruption among Cabinet officials or the waste of taxpayer dollars, rather than targeting more lascivious matters, like hush-money payments to former mistresses.

The trick will be finding the right balance in both tone and topic. Many Trump-hating Democrats might be in the mood for payback, but most Americans could easily be turned off by overt political games. And, let’s not forget, this is ultimately not about scoring points — Americans deserve better from their government.

The topic of Trump’s tax returns will be especially ticklish. The president’s refusal to follow his predecessors’ example and release such basic information raises too many questions about conflicts of interest to ignore. But things could get ugly. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has the right to request a copy, at which point the White House must decide if it wants to mount a legal challenge. Democrats need to be ready to make a cogent case — persuasive to the public as well as the courts — for why Trump’s taxes are a matter of critical concern.

For now, Democratic representatives are making properly judicious noises about oversight. They are holding meetings among themselves to determine which issues should be priorities and how to avoid overlap among the committees. But once the new chairmen take over, the leadership will need a firm hand to minimize the wilding.

The widespread assumption in Democratic circles is that Nancy Pelosi will reclaim the speaker’s gavel. Practically speaking, this may be for the best, but even Pelosi has begun referring to herself as a “transitional” leader.

After 16 years as the House Democratic leader, Pelosi comes with a truckload of baggage, and a growing contingent within her own party feels it is time for a generational overhaul. But the reality is that she has no obvious successor. Her two deputies, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn, offer no fresher blood. Her presumed heir, Joseph Crowley, is on his way out the door, having lost his seat in the primary election. And while plenty of hungry younger members are eyeing the post, none is seen as having the mix of experience, savvy and grit needed to steer the caucus — which will feature a large, diverse freshman class — through what promises to be a wild two years.

Love her or hate her, nobody herds the cats better than Pelosi.

That said, the Democratic leadership is staler than week-old toast. And while victory tends to cool intracaucus griping, if Pelosi becomes speaker, she owes it to the institution and her colleagues to set about raising a new generation of leaders, helping prepare such up-and-comers as Cheri Bustos, Hakeem Jeffries, Linda Sánchez, Ruben Gallego, Joseph Kennedy III, Ben Ray Luján, Eric Swalwell and Seth Moulton, among others.

Given the dismal example set so far by Trump, Democratic leaders have a political opportunity and also a heavy responsibility. Winning the House is one thing. Restoring some sanity to American politics and a sense of higher, common purpose to American governance is yet another.

Brent Taylor, the mayor of North Ogden, Utah, and a major in the National Guard, was killed in Afghanistan on Saturday on his fourth deployment to a war zone. As Americans headed to the polls early Tuesday, Jennie Taylor, his wife and the mother of his seven children, was at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet his remains. Their two oldest sons were by her side. “It seems only fitting that Brent, who in death now represents something so much greater than any of our own individual lives,” she said, “has come home to U.S. soil in a flag-draped casket on our Election Day.” Taylor, 39, had guided several large infrastructure improvements as mayor since 2013. In his final Facebook post, in late October, Taylor, a Republican, said that he hoped “everyone back home exercises their precious right to vote” and said that whether Republicans or Democrats win, “We all remember that we have far more as Americans that unites us than divides us.”

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Now that New York Democrats have regained control of the state Senate, while retaining control of the Assembly, they might want to take a look at how the election went down in New York City.

Across the five boroughs, voters endured lines of up to four hours. At some polling sites, all the ballot scanners broke, and voters — those who could manage to spare the time — had to stand around waiting for technicians to fix them.

After broken voting machines left James Yolles waiting 90 minutes at his polling site, in the building that houses PS 705 in Brooklyn, he finally had to go, infuriated, to meet his young son’s baby sitter. He said he hoped to return after work, but in the end he wasn’t able to.

The executive director of the city’s Board of Elections, Michael Ryan, blamed the rain, with people “having wet clothing and perhaps ballots getting wet,” and gumming up the scanners.

You might be thinking that, in the year 2018, New York’s voting should be proof against a little drizzle. No matter the precise reasons for this specific foul-up, the dysfunction in what residents like to think of as the most sophisticated city in the world was an example of the broader dysfunction of the state’s electoral system.

It is run by a calcified, partisan bureaucracy that is among the worst election agencies in the country. A Democratic Legislature could impose measures to make voting easier — reducing idiotically long lines on Election Day — and modernize the election system.

New York could have early voting, as do more than three dozen other states. And allowing residents to get absentee ballots without having to provide a reason would give voters more options and also ease Election Day lines.

The Legislature should professionalize the state’s election board system. Now, state law requires election boards to be made up of members selected by the two main political parties. Although the system is bipartisan, it emphasizes mere partisanship over actual qualification. It has also tended to create gridlock.

The New York City Board of Elections, for example, is made up of 10 commissioners, five chosen by the Democratic Party and five by the Republican Party, with members from each borough. The Legislature should change state election law to make the board more accountable to the city and its taxpayers, rather than party officials. That could mean remaking the board into a nonpartisan body or requiring by state law that anyone appointed to serve as an elections official have relevant experience and qualifications apart from membership in the Democratic or Republican Party.

While Tuesday’s voting might have made it seem that New York has no problem getting its residents out to vote, turnout in most elections in the city and the state is dismal. It would improve if the Legislature approved automatic voter registration, which puts people on the voting rolls when they interact with a state agency, like the Department of Motor Vehicles. Same-day registration would allow New Yorkers to register and vote on the same day.

After passing these urgent reforms, the Legislature should turn to the rest of its agenda.

At the top of the list is moving to fix the subway, protect women’s reproductive rights and pass other important legislation stymied by Republicans and others for too long.

By passing the Reproductive Health Act, the Legislature can codify the protections of Roe v. Wade in state law and modernize the state’s antiquated abortion statutes. Republicans in the state Senate held up passage of the bill, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said he wants to pass it in the first 30 days of the new legislative session.

The biggest challenge will be approving a congestion pricing plan to help pay for the overhaul of the New York City subway system. Cuomo, the soon-to-be Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie should get to work right away whipping up votes for such a plan.

Millions of New York voters braved long waits and cold rain Tuesday to make Albany work for them. Come January, Democrats have a chance to show them that they made the right choice.