Don't Expect the Impeachment Sideshow to Go Away After First Effort Fails
By Joseph diGenova
July 23, 2019
OCRegister.com
After over two years, the Democrats finally delivered on their threat to try to impeach President Trump. The only problem is, it was defeated with 137 Democrats voting against impeachment.
Of course, the Democrats may have rejected the first official effort to impeach President Trump, but that doesn’t mean this political sideshow is over. Why? Well, there’s just no such thing as a moderate Democrat anymore — those who voted against impeachment merely represent a more cautious brand of radicalism.
Democrat Representative Al Green used House rules to force a vote on an impeachment resolution against the wishes of the Democratic leadership. The vote to quash Green’s initiative took place, somewhat poetically, on the same day that Democrats had originally planned to hear testimony from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That hearing had already been pushed back by a week, but Green jumped the gun and brought his measure to the House floor.
The resolution was dramatically defeated, with 332 members voting to table it, including a solid majority of Democrats. Only 95 members supported impeachment, but 137 Democrats joined every single Republican — as well as ex-Republican Rep. Justin Amash, who abandoned the Party after coming out in favor of impeachment — in opposing the effort.
But as Byron York notes, the real significance of the impeachment vote is not that the measure was defeated, but that 95 members of Congress actually voted to impeach the president without any legitimate basis for their votes. Even though Green’s resolution was based on the flimsiest of pretexts — it calls for removing President Trump from office based on allegedly “racist comments,” but doesn’t accuse him of any actual crime — it still managed to secure nearly half of the 215 votes required for articles of impeachment to pass the House.
Rest assured, the Democrats will be back at the impeachment table before long.
The Democrats killed Green’s resolution for purely tactical reasons. They’re in broad agreement about their hatred for President Trump, but some Democrats question whether libelling the President is the most effective means of achieving their ultimate goal of impeachment.
“We’ll deal with Mr. Green’s resolution, but we do have a third path,” House Speaker Pelosi said during her weekly press briefing the day after Green filed his resolution. That third path, evidently, goes through the Special Counsel’s Office and Robert Mueller’s upcoming congressional testimony, because Pelosi made a point of mentioning that the Democrats already “have six committees working on following the facts in terms of any abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and the rest.”
Mueller’s testimony is just the newest centerpiece of the Democrats’ impeachment strategy. Mueller, they hope, will provide political cover for the their nakedly partisan motives — perhaps to atone for letting them down with his official report, which found no collusion and no obstruction. Without Mueller’s compliance, many Democrats are unwilling to endure the inevitable public backlash that will follow any attempt to remove the president from office without cause.
Representative Devin Nunes recently claimed that Democrats have even opened backchannels to Mueller in order to plant “helpful phrases” in his testimony. According to Nunes, Mueller only needs to mention a few key buzzwords because “90% of the media will take one little phrase and run with it and try to run towards impeachment.”
This shocking assertion clarifies the logic of the 137 Democrats who voted against the articles of impeachment: they recognize that Green’s impeachment case only appeals to far-left radicals in the party’s base while it alienates the moderate swing voters who will decide the outcome of the 2020 elections. Its anti-Trump animus is simply too transparent.
Pelosi’s “third path,” conversely, aims to launder the Democrats’ political motives through Robert Mueller. Knowing they can count on the complicit mainstream media to regurgitate their talking points as fact, the Democrats expect that they’ll be able to cover their dirty motives with a thin veneer of neutrality.
President Trump and congressional Republicans must brace themselves for the circus that will come to Capitol Hill when Mueller testifies before Congress on Wednesday, and they must be ready to expose the so-called “moderates” on the other side of the aisle for the radicals they really are.
President Trump came away with a major, lopsided victory following the Democrats’ first official attempt to impeach him, but this certainly won’t be the last we hear on this matter from Nancy Pelosi’s wayward band of extremists.
Joseph diGenova was US Attorney for the District of Columbia and an Independent Counsel. He is the founding partner of diGenova & Toensing, LLP.