It’s no great surprise that the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Reform voted Wednesday to hold the Clintons in contempt of Congress for their refusal to be deposed about their relationship to the convicted sex offender and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump-dominated GOP routinely leverages government police powers to punish political enemies. In the previous Congress, the Republican House majority created a Select Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee “on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” and today’s Justice Department includes a “Weaponization Working Group” chaired by the MAGA hack Ed Martin. Martin is also in charge of the department’s less-than-scrupulous pardon review, which (according to NBC News) favors white-collar criminals convicted of money laundering, bank fraud, and wire fraud.

What’s surprising is that no fewer than nine committee Democrats supported the contempt resolution. They are: Representatives Maxwell Frost of Florida, Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Emily Randall of Washington, Lateefah Simon of California, Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Stephen Lynch and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. Two other Democrats, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Dave Min of California, voted “present.” Three of these nine—Lee, Stansbury, and Tlaib—also voted to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt, with Min again voting “present.” That’s 11 Democrats unwilling to oppose a contempt resolution that even the Wall Street Journal editorial page (which during Clinton’s time in office published no fewer than six volumes about the Whitewater scandal) says is not “a great use of Congress’s time.”

Look, I get it. These members, mostly younger and progressive, don’t want to make excuses for Clinton’s sexual relationship with a White House intern. As Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, told The Wall Street Journal: “I don’t think we are in a space as a party where there is any desire to do any coverup for the poor decisions of past generations.… Democrats have turned the page on folks who operated like that.”

But Hillary Clinton, who has no #MeToo scandals in her past, shouldn’t be dragged into this conversation at all. Yes, her husband behaved very badly with Monica Lewinsky. I called on him at the time to resign, in The New Republic (“Sweet Good-Bye,” September 1998). My late first wife, Marjorie Williams, published a Vanity Fair piece four months earlier calling out feminists for taking a dive on Monicagate.

These Democrats are welcome to critique their elders’ past sins. But their more urgent business is to examine seriously the Republican majority’s substantive rationale for holding the Clintons in contempt of........

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