You've been hearing tons of commentary about wanting to impeach Donald Trump. I know, so have I. A whole gallon of gasoline just got poured on to that fire courtesy of one Rep. Justin Amash (R). You've been hearing a lot from the younger members of the Democratic caucus wanting to push ahead, regardless of the caution that leadership members like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer have been espousing. I've heard that too.
Now, let me tell you why that would be a really, REALLY bad idea.
If you had wanted to impeach Trump, you had a razor thin window of time to do it. It still wouldn't have been your best move, but if you were going for the optics of change, you could have done this: use the period of time between the midterm elections and January to have your staffs draw up articles of impeachment and have them ready to go, and then bring it to a vote on the very first day you are in power. Hell, you should have brought it up as your first order of business.
My friends, that train has sailed.
The instant that the conventional wisdom became "Let's wait for the Mueller Report", the window for impeachment, even as a symbolic gesture, slammed shut. Now, it's way too late. Maybe, if the Mueller Report had come up with something like "When our third corroborating witness to what President Trump did to that sheep on top of the Resolute Desk provided us with 8x10 glossy photos, we knew we were on the right track...", you could have had something. No such luck. Barr got a chance to muddy the waters, the "big lie" of "No Collusion, No Obstruction" got a chance to take hold, and, and the most basic point of all, most people wouldn't understand the law if you hit them with it, fouled up everything Mueller was trying to do. The fact that there is all sorts of legal wrangling about the Mueller Report now, plus even more regarding the underlying evidence of the Report and the other records that the House Committees are trying to subpeona makes it, I'm sorry to say, almost useless for your purposes. But, like everything else in the universe, your biggest enemy was, and still is, Time.
It seems that every Democrat that got a whiff of their own musk and thought "My god, I smell positively Kennedy today!" is running to be the Democratic nominee for President. There are so many of them that the first debate is only a month away, almost a year and a half before election day. Necessary, of course, as the great majority of these folks are not going to get anywhere near shouting distance of making a serious, successful run and the dead weight needs to be winnowed down. But the first debate is important: we went through everybody's speeches and interviews and Joe Biden's "will he or won't he" phase, but when the first debate happens, it is officially GAME ON. When that happens, Donald Trump becomes not only President but also the Republican nominee-apparent for President. (I have no idea who Bill Weld thinks of when he smells his own musk, but more power to him.) If, after The Campaign has begun in earnest, the Democrats impeach him then, that will do more to energize that core group of lemmings that would follow Trump off the nearest cliff than a thousand Nuremburg rallies could dream of. Trump is never more dangerous than when he is being attacked and he can portray himself as The Innocent Victim to his base, and if you don't think he won't do that full throttle if the Democrats give him the opportunity, you haven't been paying attention.
Back to Justin Amash for a minute. (Warning: this is going to sound a tiny bit conspiracy theory; bear with me.) Who among us thinks that a Freedom Caucus, Tea Party Republican gives a damn what the liberal Left thinks or wants? Who thinks that, aside from wanting Trump impeached, that Justin Amash and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agree on ANYTHING? Right, exactly nobody. Now, Justin Amash easily could be simply a very honorable man and is willing to speak his beliefs, regardless of the censure it might bring from his party and the extreme difficulty it will introduce into any reelection campaign. Then I remembered he's Republican, so that can't possibly be his angle. So what is? Maybe, just maybe, he's got deep rooted Conservative cred coupled with being in a very safe red district that he can afford to go off the reservation for a good cause: that if he goes turncoat, maybe he can goad the Democrats into blindly rushing ahead with impeachment, yelling "The Republicans are cracking and turning against him! Now's our chance!" If they do it, he can help lead them into a Democratic Charge of the Light Brigade and give Trump just the opportunity he wants; if they don't fall for it, Amash has a year and a half for this small blip on the radar to drop out of the collective memory of his district.
So, what should the Democrats do, you ask? As much as it may pain you to hear, they're doing it now. Neal and Nadler are flinging subpoenas at Trump and his minions, they're hauling them to court, and Nancy Pelosi is talking around impeachment. Not talking about it, mind you, but around it. "We'll see what happens in the courts, nothing is off the table", etc. These kind of tactics are, mark my words, making Trump apoplectic. The potential threat of impeachment is way, way worse than having the punch actually land and dealing with it. You, I, and even he knows that he will never be convicted in the Senate. He wants to get it over with, and go into Victim Mode. He wants nothing more than to keep saying "No Collusion, No Obstruction" and, in the manner of "There's no place like home", have it be true. But it isn't, and he's dying the death of a thousand cuts because of it. Patience, dear readers.
A focused, under attack and fighting back Donald Trump will win reelection in 2020. A distracted, worried Donald Trump won't. And that's what will get him out of the White House.
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