Don’t count on impeachment, at least not yet
The soap opera playing out on the news networks is worthy of Emmy Award consideration. Except, there will be no winners.
Nobody will be taking home a lovely statuette. Nobody will be celebrated on the cover of People magazine. And hopefully, the star will not be renewed for another season.
Although we can look forward to some windy speeches and gratuitous chest-thumping, nobody really wins. Nobody.
The current episode of “As The White House Churns” focuses on a not-so-subtle battle of wills. Only the characters are not following their expected story arcs.
On one side, we have Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi holding a tight rein on her fellow Democrats, who are champing at the bit to bring impeachment charges against the president of the United States. They want him and they want him badly, especially now that we know that the special counsel could find no evidence to exonerate him of obstruction of justice charges.
On the other side, we have the president himself, who seems intent on drawing Congress into an impeachment. His words, his actions, and his demeanor point to him crossing his fingers in hopes that the House files paperwork against him, believing he would hold onto party loyalty and escape the fray unscathed, screaming “No collusion! Witch hunt! Fake news!”
It’s a study of wills, actually.
You see, Pelosi knows she has the votes in the House to send the president before the Senate for an impeachment trial. The president, however, is banking on the hope that Senate numbers will prevent him from getting kicked to the curb.
So both the president and Speaker are engaged in a standoff that will do nothing but escalate as we crawl toward the election, which sits a full 17 agonizing months in the future.
Although there is much of substance to support impeachment, don’t hold your breath. This guy’s Teflon is still making things difficult to stick. He’s the master of obfuscation.
My suggestion? Change the channel, at least for awhile.
All we are going to hear over the next year and a half are charges and counter charges, accusations and denials, and hyperbole that is so grossly over the top, so vicious, and so disgusting we’ll be reaching for an ice pick to puncture our sullied eardrums.
There are indications that despite her public efforts to sit on impeachment efforts, Pelosi is carefully plotting a course in that direction.
“When we go through with our case it’s got to be ironclad,” she told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel last week. I would certainly hope so.
It would be a tragic miscarriage of justice and affront to the Constitution if impeachment became nothing more than a political tool to sway whoever happens to be sitting in the Oval Office.
But when you have a genuine tool sitting in the White House, impeachment might be the only workable solution.
The president tried his best to downplay the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller, who took the extraordinary step of offering a one-time public comment on his investigation into the president, collusion charges, obstruction concerns, and general misbehavior. The White House responded with its usual barrage of lies and misinformation.
“Robert Mueller would have brought charges, if he had anything, but there were no charges to bring!” the president said after Mueller’s press conference.
A lie. In his statement, Mueller made it unquestionably clear that bringing charges against the president was “not an option we could consider.” Justice Department guidelines do not allow for criminal charges to be filed against a sitting president.
In further comments, the president claimed that Russian interference in the 2016 election has fallen off the radar.
A lie. Mueller in fact, underscored that “there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. And that allegation deserves the attention of every American.”
The president claimed that the Mueller report did not find evidence of obstruction.
A lie. “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” the report said.
“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said. The inference here is that it is now the job of Congress to pursue that investigation.
Look, cyberspace is brimming with Trump lies and misinformation.
The point here is that although we understand that these lies are part of the fabric of our national conversation today, we cannot become inured by them. We must still be outraged by the lies, the deceit, the attacks on our sensibilities, and the assault on the Constitution, because as we plod evercloser to 2020, we cannot afford to shrug them off. A certain vigilance is necessary to make the system work.
What the administration is hoping for is that voters get so turned off by all of this wallowing in the sty that they throw their hands up in frustration and give up. That’s why we have this idiotic promise of outrageous tariffs on Mexico that will do nothing but lighten American wallets.
The Democrats in the House? Well, as we have seen, there is no shortage of outrage there, and the one certain bet is that whether through ignorance or malice, the acts of the White House will keep them focused on removing the president.
Will we ever see impeachment charges? Highly unlikely. This guy has endured liaisons with porn stars, snubs by foreign allies, and a false economy that has busted the working women and men while shoaling up the 1 percenters.
He remains president despite the lies and a lack of understanding the fundamentals of the government he was elected to lead.
Most importantly, and most disturbingly, he survives, even though he has transformed the culture of America from a unified, focused, purposeful nation to one filled with spite, anger, and derision.
The only sure way of removing him is by the Democrats coming to their senses and getting unanimously behind whoever their candidate is, whether Biden or Bernie, Kamala or Cory, Beto or Hickenlooper.
With 34 Senate seats up for grabs in 2020, it is possible for Democrats to gain four seats and take back a majority. While it certainly would make for a very bad day for the president, I’m not sure that a Democratic Senate would guarantee impeachment.
However, if properly played, the threat of impeachment could push the president beyond his usual state of incoherence and into a place where even diehard Republicans realize the danger to the country.
But don’t count on impeachment.
At least, not yet.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
How to submit an article, guest opinion piece, or letter to the editor to The Independent
Do you have something to say? Want your voice to be heard by thousands of readers? Send The Independent your letter to the editor or guest opinion piece. All submissions will be considered for publication by our editorial staff. If your letter or editorial is accepted, it will run on suindependent.com, and we’ll promote it through all of our social media channels. We may even decide to include it in our monthly print edition. Just follow our simple submission guidelines and make your voice heard:
—Submissions should be between 300 and 1,500 words.
—Submissions must be sent to editor@infowest.com as a .doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf file.
—The subject line of the email containing your submission should read “Letter to the editor.”
—Attach your name to both the email and the document file (we don’t run anonymous letters).
—If you have a photo or image you’d like us to use and it’s in .jpg format, at least 1200 X 754 pixels large, and your intellectual property (you own the copyright), feel free to attach it as well, though we reserve the right to choose a different image.
—If you are on Twitter and would like a shout-out when your piece or letter is published, include that in your correspondence and we’ll give you a mention at the time of publication.
