EDITORIAL: Trump economy generating jobs as Dems grumble

The oust-Trump train has fired up its engines and House Democrats are climbing on board. Freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., announced this week that she’ll introduce articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump later this month — without even knowing the results of Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Meanwhile, Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., have made it clear they’ll use their power to investigate everything and anything Trump. Rep. Nadler runs the House Judiciary Committee and this week made an amorphous demand for information from scores of people close to the president. Rep. Schiff, head of the House Intelligence Committee, is deep inside the Russian-collusion rathole and similarly bombarding the White House with document demands.

House Democrats carried the day in the 2018 election and have wide latitude to conduct business as they see fit. At this point, however, their efforts to drown the administration in subpoenas and paperwork appear grounded more in partisanship than substance — not to govern, but to distract independent voters from the very real successes of the Trump presidency.

Last weekend, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy report headlined “Inside the Hottest Job Market in Half a Century.” It chronicled how employment opportunities have exploded in the past few years, particularly for Hispanics and African-Americans. Even high-school dropouts have benefited: Just 5 percent of Americans without a diploma are unemployed.

“Racial minorities, those with less education and people working in the lowest-paying jobs are getting bigger pay raises and, in many cases, experiencing the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for their groups,” the Journal noted.

Nor is this a case of discouraged workers artificially lowering the jobless rate by dropping out of the workforce — as was the case under the Obama administration. The labor participation rate has been increasing consistently and is now more in line with historical norms.

Journal columnist Daniel Henninger called the Trump jobs boom “the story of the year,” arguing that it “requires a remarkable degree of obtuseness to stare at the policy successes of the past two years and pretend it hasn’t happened. Democrats are doing exactly that.”

Indeed, while Mr. Trump has delivered on tax reform and regulatory relief to the benefit of the U.S. economy, various Democrats — when they aren’t advocating impeachment — now propose confiscatory wealth taxes, free health care and college, a guaranteed income for the idle and a climate agenda that would destroy the nation’s prosperity and cost a quadrillion dollars.

Preaching division, malaise and doom is an odd strategy for a major political party. Especially as the Trump economy creates opportunity for so many Americans.