By Jim Geraghty
Friday, November 01, 2019
The majority of House Democrats may believe that the
outcome of the impeachment inquiry has been clear for a while: Trump will be
impeached on a largely party-line vote in the House, and acquitted on a largely
party-line vote in the Senate, and then everyone will focus their attention and
energies to the 2020 election. If everything is preordained to end up in the
same place, there’s not too much point in trying to alter the outcome, or
worrying about appearances along the way. Nothing matters, so members of
Congress should and do and vote what they want, because nothing they do will
change much anyway.
Maybe they’re right. But if they’re not right, they’ve
made a bunch of errors that have made impeachment look like a partisan
political exercise rather than an effort to rebuke an abuse of power.
In ideal circumstances, the Speaker of the House wouldn’t
choose to appear on Stephen Colbert right after the vote to start the inquiry,
and joke that she’ll schedule the hearings to best fit the timing for the
writers of Colbert’s nightly monologue. (You can actually see Pelosi start to
get uncomfortable when Colbert asks if she’s confronting Kevin McCarthy with
‘do you feel lucky, punk?”) Ideally,
Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t have asserted, “Nobody comes to Congress to impeach a
president.” Er, Rashida Tlaib announced specifically that with profane clarity.
Tlaib was selling T-shirts about it.
There was a time not so long ago when Pelosi and other
Democrats talked about the need for a simple and direct message to justify the
president’s impeachment: The president abused his power by threatening to
withhold aid to Ukraine, in an attempt to strong-arm a foreign government to
investigate the Bidens. Now other Democrats are thinking about adding
“obstruction of Congress” to the counts of impeachment. It is almost certain
that some House Democrats will want to bring up Trump’s actions during the
Mueller probe. Bit by bit, the impeachment argument will become less about a
particular presidential decision or action and more about Trump’s character and
approach to the job of president, and it will increasingly resemble the same
arguments from Democrats going back to the 2016 campaign: This guy doesn’t deserve to be president of the United States. Yes,
we know. We’ve heard it before, a lot. If a considerable number of Americans
who aren’t particular fans of Trump will recognize that if the Democrats
weren’t impeaching him over the aid to Ukraine, they would find some other
presidential action that they believed warranted impeachment. It is just one
more step in an endless re-litigation of the outcome of the 2016 election.
The newest ABC News poll finds Trump and Pelosi with the
same approval rating, a meager 38 percent. Impeachment isn’t likely to
strengthen either one of them. The polling splits on impeachment are similar to
the general overall divide in the electorate. Republicans still back him,
Democrats still loathe him, and independents are still split.
Democrats probably aren’t going to change many minds
about impeachment as this process wears on. But they don’t appear to be all
that interested in trying, either.
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