What’s Behind the Democrats’ Impeachment Gambit?
Excerpt: Or you could insist that the 2016 election was illegitimate, not because of any real procedural questions but because of its outcome. And that, more or less, is what Democrats did. It is worth keeping in mind that the effort to impeach Donald Trump began before he was even sworn in, with Senator Elizabeth Warren et al. beginning to lay the legal groundwork in December of 2016. Since that time, there have been demands to impeach Trump over this or that real or imagined offense every few weeks. This is Red Queen politics: sentence first, trial later. The Democrats have a solution in mind — impeachment — and have been searching since Election Day 2016 for a problem to which to apply it. This week’s renewed enthusiasm for impeachment would be a great deal more persuasive if it were not No. 6,782 in a series. (...) The cynic in me guesses that the Ukrainian gambit serves a dual purpose: First: It provides a pretext for a pre-election impeachment inquiry against the incumbent president — which, given the current composition of the Senate, is unlikely to end in action before the election, or after that, either, unless there is a Democratic majority seated in the Senate. Second: The likely collateral damage to Joe Biden probably is not entirely unwelcome in some Democratic circles — he already is sliding vis-à-vis Senator Warren, and to many Democrats he already has the look of a likely loser should he be the nominee. If somebody has to be put on an ice floe, it’s going to be Joe Biden. There are many problems with this approach, one of which is this: Americans in possession of even a modest political memory must recall that not only did Democrats insist that the 2016 election was illegitimate, they also insisted that the last election that brought a Republican to the White House was illegitimate. [I really like Williamson. I think he’s right on the mark in this piece. Ron P.]
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