The Democrats have really messed up this time. On Thursday, we witnessed the first major congressional test for this impeachment inquiry, and the House of Representatives did approve the formal rules that were being pushed by Nancy Pelosi and her cronies. But it was a major victory for President Trump, because not a single Republican voted for those rules. Not only that, a couple of Democrats actually voted with the Republicans. This was a significant embarrassment for Democratic leadership, and it likely foreshadows how the rest of this process is going to play out. Yes, the Democrats have the numbers to impeach Trump in the House, but without any Republican defections the effort to remove Trump from office will be completely dead once it gets to the Senate.
If even a handful of Republicans had defected on Thursday, that would have fueled speculation that there are divisions in the party.
But Republicans stood perfectly united behind the president, and even CNN is admitting that this is a huge victory for Trump…
Zero is the number of House Republicans who voted for the formal rules. Not a single one. Which is, plainly put, a win for President Donald Trump, who lobbied hard to keep his party in line on a much-watched vote, where even a a half-dozen GOP rebels could have fundamentally altered the storyline of the day on impeachment.
So unless something really dramatic happens, the Democrats in the House are going to be stuck playing out a losing hand, and that is going to be extremely demoralizing for many of them.
Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders needed to find and exploit some cracks among the Republicans and they completely failed. As U.S. Representative Doug Collins pointed out on Twitter, this was the first time in modern American history that an impeachment inquiry was “authorized by members of only one party”…
Fact: Pelosi’s inquiry is officially the first presidential impeachment inquiry in modern history authorized by members of only one party.
This impeachment process has been going on for over a month now, and the Democrats basically had two things that they needed to do.
First of all, they needed to win over a solid majority of the American public. The following commentary comes from David Brooks of the New York Times…
In the first place, Democrats have not won widespread public support. Nancy Pelosi always said impeachment works only if there’s a bipartisan groundswell, and so far there is not. Trump’s job approval numbers have been largely unaffected by the impeachment inquiry. Support for impeachment breaks down on conventional pro-Trump/anti-Trump lines. Roughly 90 percent of Republican voters oppose it. Republican senators will never vote to convict in the face of that.
The Democrats could have potentially won over more voters by putting the impeachment hearings on television from the very beginning, but instead they kept everything behind closed doors.
What a horrible, horrible strategic mistake on their part.
In particular, the Democrats are really failing to win over moderate voters in key swing states. Here is more from David Brooks…
Second, Democrats have not won over the most important voters — moderates in swing states. A New York Times/Siena College survey of voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin found that just 43 percent want to impeach and remove Trump from office, while 53 percent do not. Pushing impeachment makes Democrats vulnerable in precisely the states they cannot afford to lose in 2020.
Those numbers have got to make Democratic operatives cringe. If Trump ends up winning in November 2020, party leadership is going to deeply, deeply regret ever going down this road.
Secondly, the Democrats desperately needed to win over some Republicans in Congress in order to make this a bipartisan effort, but they just kept alienating Republicans at every turn.
For example, just consider the following tweet from U.S. Representative Debbie Lesko…
The House Rules Committee @RulesReps met to markup Nancy Pelosi’s “impeachment resolution” today.
After nearly 3.5 hours, ZERO of 17 Republican amendments were agreed to by committee Democrats.
And Democrats are claiming this resolution will provide the minority w/ rights…
Perhaps if the Democrats had been willing to compromise a little bit, they may have gotten somewhere with at least a few moderate Republicans.
But by acting like a bunch of childish brats, they completely undermined their own efforts.
So right now things are looking exceedingly good for President Trump, and Senator Lindsey Graham is even saying that there won’t be a single vote to remove Trump once a trial happens in the Senate…
“You have to accept that President Trump is president,” Graham said of House Democrats. “That’s the problem. They don’t accept that President Trump won the election, and America hates a sore loser as much as any country on the planet. This is an unfair process being driven by sore losers and there is not one vote in the United States Senate to impeach President Trump based on this phone call because he did nothing wrong.”
Needless to say, this entire affair is going to fire up Trump’s base in a major way, and that is something the Democrats did not want to see happen going into an election year.
Ultimately, this could end up being a big net positive for the president. Initially, it looked like the numbers favored the Democrats in 2020, but this colossal blunder could cost them everything.
If the Democrats had conducted a fair process from the very beginning and had put all of the hearings on television, perhaps things could have turned out differently.
But now a large percentage of the population considers what the Democrats are doing to be completely illegitimate. I think that Kayleigh McEnany summed things up very well when she posted the following on Twitter…
The Democrat impeachment inquiry resolution is a SHAM!
It’s the equivalent of raiding someone’s home, violating their rights, committing an unlawful search & seizure…
and then presenting a bogus warrant 34 days later!!!
The Democrat impeachment inquiry resolution is a SHAM!
It’s the equivalent of raiding someone’s home, violating their rights, committing an unlawful search & seizure…
and then presenting a bogus warrant 34 days later!!! pic.twitter.com/EPS7Js7k7a
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) October 31, 2019
Nancy Pelosi thought that she was going to be the one to take down Donald Trump, but in the end she may be the one taken down.
If this impeachment effort fails and Trump wins again in 2020, there is no way that she is going to remain Speaker of the House even if the Democrats keep control of that chamber.
Pelosi’s political career has never been more in danger than it is right now, and she only has herself to blame.
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